Background: ‘Kill them all, god damn it. Not a single one can live’

IN taped phone conversations on unsecured lines in the days following the fall of the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia on 11 June 1995, the security chief of the Bosnian Serb forces, Ljubisa Beara, referred to Bosnian Muslim prisoners as “parcels” that had to be “distributed”, his code for executions.

A week after the enclave fell, on 19 July, Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic, later to be sentenced to 35 years by The Hague Tribunal for aiding and abetting genocide at Srebrenica, had another taped phone conversation with a deputy, general Dragan Obrenovic.

In it, Krstic instructed Obrenovic on the treatment to be meted out to Bosnian Muslim prisoners.

“Kill them all, god damn it. Not a single one must be left alive.”

More than 16 years after the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, in which an estimated 8,100 people were killed, the hills, pine forests and rolling fields of eastern Bosnia are still yielding up the dismembered corpses of the victims.

After being machine-gunned in groups hundreds strong in the days following the fall of the enclave, the dead were bulldozed into mass graves. Later, they were dug up with excavators and hauled away in trucks so the evidence could be hidden from the world, then buried in dozens of remote “secondary” mass graves.

The dismembered and smashed-up remains of one victim were found in four different mass graves several miles apart.

The Sarajevo-based organisation, The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), was established to support the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Forensic teams from the group are tasked with assisting the government of Bosnia and Herzegovina to find and identify the human remains of all the estimated 30,000 people who went missing during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. So far the ICMP has identified 16,289 of them.