Bosnians reunited with dead relatives excavated from mass grave

SEJKOVACA, Bosnia-Herzegovina — Denisa Hegic pulled her scarf around her nose to guard against the stench and drew back the plastic shroud. Shaking, she touched her mother’s skull.

The last time she touched her mother had been when her mother was bleeding on the floor of the family home, slain by Bosnian Serb soldiers storming their tiny village in northwestern Bosnia.

On Wednesday, mother and daughter were reunited in a cavernous building used to house the remains of victims newly excavated from the mass grave in Tomasica, 125 miles northwest of Sarajevo.

“I found her body,” Hegic said.

Hegic’s experience is being repeated this week by many survivors of Bosnia’s 1992-1995 war, as experts begin allowing families to view the remains pulled from the earth and identified through DNA analysis. Hundreds of families are expected to make the sad pilgrimage to see the dead.

So far, 430 victims have been found in the Tomasica grave, a vast pit about 30 feet deep and covering 54,000 square feet. The pit contains victims of Bosnian Serb military units who killed Muslim Bosniaks and Roman Catholic Croats in hopes of creating an ethnically pure region.

Many think more people originally were buried there. Diaries confiscated from former Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic suggest that some of the bodies in the Tomasica pit were dug up and moved, which complicates efforts to identify the dead.

Some progress has been made. Family members coming to view remains are offering statements to local prosecutors to assist in efforts to prosecute Mladic, who is being tried on war crimes charges at the U.N. tribunal in the Netherlands.

On July 20, 1992, when Hegic was 8, people in the tiny village of Biscani heard the Bosnian Serbs were coming. Her parents hid their only child in the basement. When the soldiers came, they shot her mother, her father, her grandparents, her three uncles and her three cousins.

An aunt pulled her away from mother’s bloody body. “My aunt was there with my mother, but she managed to escape and took me with her,” said Hegic, who eventually settled in Germany and married a boy from her village whom she knew as a child.

At the Sejkovaca Identification Center, they bring the families in one at a time.
Most people spend only a short amount of time with the dead. Hegic was no exception. She could bear only a few minutes and buried her face in tissue after she said goodbye to her mother, for a second time.