Evil lives on in Bosnia's fields of death

There could be more than mere catharsis behind the exhumation of mass graves, writes Robert Fisk

Behind Mjilko Maric, a Serb woman is sticking snapshots of dead men and women into a scrapbook. Officially listed as "missing", the cruel lie with which thousands of Bosnian, Serb and Croat mothers have found cruel comfort since 1992, they are the faces of the corpses in Bosnia's mass graves.

The offices of the exchange commission are informal places. As Serbs wait for clearance to exhume their dead from Bravnica, their opposite numbers in the Bosnian government commission want to dig at Srebrenica, Brod, Posavina and Derventer. Unlike the mass- grave exhumers of the Hague War Crimes Tribunal, these men will hack through the ice and permafrost of mid-winter to find their bodies.

"We had to go to Ozren three times to get our dead," Mr Maric said. "The first time, the Muslims had not been informed by the Nato armies that we were coming. The second time, we reached the place and walked for hours up ...Mount Paljanik. And on the top, we found 22 of our men on the very peak. They were all soldiers and all had died in their trenches. They were still there, exactly where they had been killed. Animals had eaten parts of them but we examined them technically and put 17 of the remains that we had finished with in black body- bags with numbers attached."

At 37, Mr Maric is the senior Serb police forensic scientist in northern Bosnia, a thoughtful man who married the week the Bosnian war started and who lets you know he neither participated in nor approved of the dreadful deeds done to the Muslims and Croats by Serb militias. Not that he has much time for the men on the other side of the old front lines which he crosses in the company of the international peace-keeping (I-For) forces. His second visit to the dead of Mount Paljanik was brought to a sudden halt.

"I-For told us that Muslims in a nearby village were blocking the road and were going to cause trouble. We had to leave the bodies there and walk the six kilometres back down the mountain. The Swedish I-For troops took us back to Banja Luka on a different road. There were then high-level negotiations between the two sides for a month. At last, they let us go back again. We never expected what we would find. When we got to the top of the mountain, the site was horrible. The bodies we had examined had been taken out of the body-bags and scattered all over the top of the mountain. A number had been burned. Our experts saw ... that the remains of one body, still lying on a stretcher, had been booby-trapped. A fuse from an anti-tank mine had been connected to it. If we had lifted the stretcher, we would all have been killed. It was getting dark and we abandoned everything."

Mr Maric and his men returned the following day, only to find the corpses had been further disturbed. For fear of more booby-traps, they were forced to drag each body across the mountain with hooks. Many were in pieces. "We defused the mine but then we found other bodies had been heaped together and burned. The skulls had been destroyed, so we could not use dental records or identify the dead. There were six bodies burned beyond recognition. Now we are asking for the exhumation of 48 more sites. At this rate, it will take months, years."

When Mr Maric exhumed a mass grave at Glamoc, he found 108 bodies - one of them, of a Serb colonel, was stolen by Croats on the night after the first exhumation, he says. "They obviously want an exchange with some of their dead who were senior men, so they have taken that corpse hostage. But I was very shocked when I found that of the remaining 107 remains, several were of women ... What were these old women doing in a mass grave with dead soldiers? Why had most of them been shot at close range?"

Forensic papers say that most - though not all - of the Glamoc bodies had their skulls smashed in with a blunt object. If this is true, it was yet another war crime - and one for which the Croats will surely not be held to account; it was they who buried the Serb dead of Glamoc in an area they had captured. So how can Mr Maric tolerate the thought that so much wickedness created his grisly work?

"In the war, there was complete madness. People were uncontrollable. We don't have anybody to blame." It was sincerely meant, though one had to dispute the issue of "blame". There was blame and evil and the men who did the Devil's work still live, in Bosnia, in the Serb Republic, in Banja Luka, only a few hundred metres, in one case, from the office in which Mr Maric is talking to me.

And what, one wondered, did the eternal exhumations of Bosnia prove? True, relatives could grieve over real bodies, though only after learning of the foul nature of their death. But was there a political purpose behind the exhumations? The truth must be revealed and acknowledged. The Bosnians must not forget. But I remembered a Serb woman who recalled the mass graves of the Second World War which the Serbs had opened not long before the recent war began in ex-Yugoslavia. "I used to ask my family why the Serbs were opening up these old mass graves back then," she said. "Was it to prove the Croats were bad? Or the Muslims? ...And I remember telling my family just before this war: `They are opening up these old graves so that they can pour more blood into them'."