THE FORMER BRITISH POLICEMAN WHO IS THE FACE OF BOSNIA’S MISSING
MAIL ON SUNDAY MARCH 2002
From Kim Willsher in Sarajevo, Bosnia
(Pictures by Alastair Miller)
The bodies – what was left of them of them – were packed into 261 white plastic bags and laid out on the floor, on wooden shelves and even in the doorways.
When not a single inch of space was left they were simply dumped on top of each other. Room after room, pile after pile of corpses in anonymous plastic sheeting.
Even in sub-zero temperatures the makeshift morgue smelt of death, the musty reek of crumbling bones and decomposing flesh. Gordon Bacon, a former British detective, known here as the ‘Face of the Missing’, stopped and unzipped a body bag. Outside it was marked with the number SA92. Inside was an unrecognisable mass of what had once been a living, breathing human being.
“You can see what we’re up against,” he said plucking a large thigh bone from the mouldy remains. ”We don’t know if what is in this bag is a he or a she or several people. All we know is that this is from someone who was from the wrong ethnic group in the wrong place at the wrong time and who was taken off, brutally murdered and thrown into a mass grave.
“Our job is to find out who they are. To put names and faces to them and put their families out of the continuing misery of not knowing their fate. ”It’s a horrible job but there are people out there who have waited nearly ten years in the desperate hope that their missing loved ones will one day walk in the door. They deserve to know the truth.”
As the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for genocide and crimes against humanity continues at the Hague, the land over which he once ruled was still delivering up its dead. The gruesome reality of the legal process against the man nicknamed the Butcher of the Balkans and the architect of what became known as “ethnic cleansing”, which is expected to drag on for two years, is here on the ground in Bosnia.
As head of the International Commission on Missing Persons Gordon Bacon is the man in charge of the most complex investigation in human history. His task: to find and identify an estimated 40,000 people who disappeared off the face of the earth in a decade of bloody conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
For the last 18 months this softly-spoken Geordie has found his detective skills stretched to the limit in a region which has become one massive scene of crime. Scratch the surface of this beautiful but tragic land with its snow capped mountains and lush valleys and another horror comes to light.
Bacon and his team of investigators have waded through stinking pits, mines, quarries, caves and rivers to uncover the remains of at least some of the tens of thousands of men, women and children slaughtered in the worst atrocities in Europe since the second world war.
Unlike the Nazis, the murderers here did not keep records of who they killed and where. In fact they went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their crimes. Even in death their victims often had no single resting place but were tossed into mass graves which were later escavated with bulldozers and the bodies dispersed far and wide.
Bacon is not a man who is easily shocked. During 24 years as a police officer in the north of England and Hong Kong the 59-year-old grandfather thought he had witnessed the full gamut of man’s capacity for inhumanity. He still remembers investigating the particularly brutal double murder of two young girls who were battered to death with a car jack on the outskirts of Sunderland in the early 1970′s.
But twenty years later the former Durham CID officer arrived in the war-torn Balkans and discovered savagery and human misery on a scale he scarcely believed possible. ”As a detective I thought I’d witnessed the very worst of human nature. To be honest I thought I’d seen everything but in truth I’d seen nothing before I came here,” he said.
“Tens of thousands of people were brutally murdered during the war. They are dead, the war is over, but the suffering just goes on and on. My police background helps but this is like an enormous jigsaw where you first have to find the pieces before you can even begin to put them together.”
“Having been out here for nearly ten years and having seen the scale of suffering. I feel I have to do everything humanly possible to help these people. ”The misery is never ending for the families of those who are missing. One day their loved ones just disappeared and never seen again. For years they have lived with the grief of not knowing what happened to them or whether they are still alive.
“They are almost certainly dead, but we have to try to find them and identify their remains so that their relatives can give them a dignified burial and go through what we would call closure. ”Until we do that they cannot move forward and get on with their lives. “
To that end for the first time in his life, and against his natural policeman’s instinct, Bacon has found himself negotiating with suspected killers in order to glean vital information about their victims in the almost certain knowledge that the perpetrators will never be brought to justice.
“It’s hard because I’m well aware that I’m dealing with people who may be responsible for some terrible crimes. But it is not my job to point the finger,” he said. ”That is for someone else to decide. I’m just interested in finding out where the bodies are buried.”
While the vast majority – up to 70 per cent – of the those missing are Bosnian Muslims, now called Bosniacs, Bacon’s task is also to identify those from other ethnic groups including Catholic Croatians, Albanians from neighbouring Kosovo and the Serbian civilians in whose name Milosevic claimed to be purifying the land but who were also slaughtered in the rampaging violence he unleashed.
“No ethnic group emerged from the war without blood on their hands although when you take the number of Bosniacs killed it wouldn’t be fair to say that they were all as bad as each other,” he said. ”But a murder victim is a murder victim no matter where they came from.”
Even after the bodies, or parts of bodies, are dug up, the identification process is painfully slow. But ICMP investigators are now pioneering new methods of extracting a DNA genetic fingerprint from the mass of bones and matching them to a database of blood samples given by relatives. The organisation’s staff are now such experts in this grim field of work that a team of specialists was sent from Bosnia to New York to help identify the victims of the September 11 terror attacks.
The commission relies on funding from outside countries – Britain is currently the third largest donor after the US and the Netherlands – but Bacon says many governments are reluctant to contribute. ”We haven’t persuaded one single Islamic country to give us money which is surprising as most the victims were Muslims. I’ve asked and asked but I honestly don’t know why they won’t contribute.”
At the ICMP’s identification centre in Tuzla, central Bosnia, a forensic pathologist, criminologist and anthropologist are among those concentrating on identifying bodies from the worst single massacre of the conflict at Srebrenica.
In 1995 United Nations troops abandoned the Muslim enclave which they had declared a so-called “safe haven” and left the population at the mercy of beseigning Serb forces. As the town fell in full view of the world an estimated 7,000 people, mostly men and boys – some as young as 14 – disappeared.
This is the biggest morgue in the world: a total of 4,408 body bags stacked on 867 stainless steel trays in a vast 300 square metre purpose-built refrigerator all waiting to be identified. Hundreds of paper bags and boxes contain clothes and personal belongings found with them, underpants, socks, a tattered pinstriped shirt, cigarette packets, a bone-shanked pipe, an orange plastic lighter – mundane artifacts of everyday life. Every item, however seemingly insignificant, has been photographed and catalogued in the hope that it might jog someone’s memory and lead to a positive identification.
The report this week by a Dutch investigating team which appeared to clear Milosevic was seemingly cleared of directly ordering the Srebrenica massacre is viewed as a “whitewash” by families of the victims. But while they are delighted to see Milosevic answering for his crimes at the Hague it is a bitter sweet justice while those with their fingers on the trigger – often former neighbours and friends – are still at liberty.
Mother of two Samija Lokvancic has had no news of her 45-year-old husband Ahmed since he was taken away from their home in the mainly Muslim town of Hadzici, just north of Sarajevo, by Serb paramilitaries in 1992.
In all 225 civilians including 35 women disappeared from the Hadzici. So far only 69 bodies have been found and all but five identified, but for the families of the 156 still missing the agonising wait goes on.
“Personally I would like to see Milosevic hung for a week and even that would be too good for him,” said Samija.
“But that would not help us. We know the people responsible for taking our men. Many of them were our neighbours, people we went to school with, worked with, invited to our homes for dinner. “We know they know what happened, but what’s the point of punishing them if we don’t find out the truth. It’s no good killing them or putting them in prison if it doesn’t put us out of our misery.
“For me the most important thing is to know what happened to my husband and to be able to give him a decent burial. I cannot rest until I’m able to do that.” Advija Ziga agrees. The oldest of four children from a close-knit family driven from their home in a wave of Serbian “ethnic cleansing” in the town of Visegrad in north east Bosnia in 1992, she lost two of her brothers. One was killed and is buried in a graveyard in Sarajevo, the other disappeared. Clutching a photograph showing a picture of her missing brother Midhat Kasapovic and his son Neriman who was just two years old when he lost his father, 44-year-old Advija is still crying ten years on.
“My war goes on, day after day. My brother who was killed is buried over there. I know where he is and I go and lay flowers on his grave and pray for him,” she said pointing to the cemetary opposite.
“For me it is no comfort to see Milosevic at the Hague while my other brother is still missing. They could shoot him and cut him into little pieces and it would make no difference. ”What I want, all I want, is the truth. I now believe Midhat is probably dead but our mother who is 64 still clings to the hope that he is alive and being held as a prisoner somewhere. The ICMP is our only hope of finding the truth and making sure that my brother and the many others who are missing are not forgotten.”
But Bacon fears that many bodies, perhaps even those of Ahmed Lokvancic and Midhat Kasapovic, may never be found let alone identified. ”There are bodies are anywhere and everywhere,” he said. ”The figures are sketchy but we think that in Bosnia alone there are up to 23,000 of them out there somewhere and I don’t have a magic wand to find them. But we have to try. Their families deserve answers.”
Whatever happens to Milosevic in the Hague, the sad truth is that until body number SA92 and the tens of thousands more like it are identified as human beings rather than bags of bones then neither the dead nor the living can rest in peace.
