Bodies unearthed at Bosnian pit

KALIMANICI, Bosnia -- The remains of 56 people, believed to be Bosnian Muslim villagers, have been exhumed from a mass grave in Bosnian Serb-controlled territory.

The bodies were found in a 65-foot-deep pit near the village of Kalimanici, about 30 miles east of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

Investigators believe the bodies are those of Bosnian Muslims from the eastern town of Visegrad, brought to the pit by bus and executed by Serb soldiers at the beginning of the 1992-1995 war.

Amor Masovic, head of the Muslim Commission for Missing Persons, said on Tuesday that the site was strewn with evidence of a massacre,

Amongst the remains were the identification documents of several Muslim civilians who disappeared from the eastern town of Rogatica in June of 1992, when the town near the pit, Paklenik, fell to the Serbs.

Masovic said the dead included people of all ages.

"Autopsies will show what the cause of death of these victims was but we can already say that among them were disabled people, children as well as elderly people," Masovic said.

"We suppose that the number of victims could reach more than 100," he said.

The corpses had been covered with soil, rubbish and animal bones when investigators unearthed the site, after receiving a tip-off from a survivor of a mass execution at the pit.

About 200,000 people were killed and more than 20,000 people are still missing as a result of the war in Bosnia.

The missing persons commission has so far completed exhumations in about 10 pits more than 20 metres deep. The remains of more than 10,000 people have been exhumed, or which 6,000 have been identified.

When the first bodies were exhumed from the pit, Masovic said: "This reminds us of the need to bring the perpetrators to justice, ... particularly the big leaders Karadzic, Mladic, and Milosevic."

War commander Ratko Mladic has, along with Karadzic, been indicted by the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia for their actions in the Bosnian war. The tribunal has indicted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for crimes committed against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Karadzic is suspected to be in hiding in eastern Bosnia, while Mladic reportedly lives in Belgrade.

Eastern Bosnia, including Visegrad, was captured at the beginning of the war by the Bosnian Serb forces who expelled thousands of the region's non-Serb population as part of its notorious ethnic cleansing campaign.

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BosNet
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United States Institute of Peace Library

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