GRAVE OF THE BLUE BUTTERFLIES
Every month a new mass grave site is being excavated in Bosnia. When more than 50 percent of a body is found, the survivors can bury their dead.
text: Henrik Pryser Libell
photos: Thomas Haugersveen
Srebrenica, in the mountains.
The bobcat has come across something. Archaeologist Igor Vaduveskovic stakes an orange flag in the ground, waves the machine away, and begins digging by hand. A short while later, his team finds what they feared: a pair of children’s shoes and a woman’s dress. More orange flags are staked. They indicate the extra-light color soil becomes when it is mixed with organic matter. A body. And so the first bones begin emerging: a spine and an arm.
“We have a site" says Vaduveskovic.
Strenuous job
The young archaeologist from Beograd is one of the few in his profession that has excavated war-crime victims in Yugoslavia since 2001. Due to the scarcity of archaeologists, the others in the expert team come from varied backgrounds; there are so few archaeologists willing to do the strenuous job, performed by the International Committee for Missing Persons (ICMP), that the remainder of workers in the expert team are biologists.
A man who is all willing to do this job, on the other hand, is Amor Masovic. As president of the Federal Commission for Missing Persons in Bosnia, he leads Bosnia’s mass-grave search and has dug burial sites for nearly a decade. For his contributions, Masovic is widely respected throughout Bosnia. At police checkpoints they wave him by. On the street people spontaneously greet him and give thanks.
Never-ending job
“I only regret that I can’t find them al, despite how long we search" Masovic says.
15 years after the bloody ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, only half of the missing have been found. The remainder are still resting in unknown graves in the Bosnian forests and mountains.
Masovic and his expert team comb each square-meter in the countryside, on a hunt for small tufts of grass that are a bit too light or unfittingly raised in elevation, characteristics which local farmers can’t remember from before.
“Some of the farmers say that they can find the places by searching for a special species of blue butterfly, but I rely on the scientific method" says the ex-lawyer. During the war he lived in Sarajevo and remained in charge, on the Bosnian side, on extraditing war prisoners from the Serbs. Then, the goal was to save as many lives as possible. Now, the goal is to recover as many of the dead as possible.
Bodies all over
Since his work began in 1996, Amor Masovic’s commisson has excavated 370 mass-graves and around four-thousand victims that could be named, while the largest grave covered 1153 corpses. A trip with Masovic through the region Republika Srpska is like a bizarre tour-guide in war-crimes and mass-murder.
“To the right 38 bodies were found" says Masovic. “Behind that house there, there were four brothers, on that hilltop eighteen more".
In Focca, thanks to an eye-witness story, they discovered a 52-person grave. The victims had been bound together into units of two and shot on the edge of a cliff, over which they were pushed down into a natural cave. They were then hidden when the cave was covered in debris. In the collapsed cave, Masovic found nearly all 52 victims alike.
“But one laid along side the others, in a crack he must have crawled into. He died with his hand on his stomach and his arm extended. He must have survived the shooting and a 42-meter fall. Then he died from hunger. A death more horrible, I can hardly imagine" says Masovic.
Good Serb friends
In spite of all the human-rights violations he has seen remains of, and a two-years’ besiege on Sarajevo, Masovic doesn’t hate Bosnian Serbs as a whole.
“I have good friends that are Serbs, and Serbs even in my own family. No group in itself is evil. The blame must be put on the individuals responsible, and the people that knew, but didn’t stand up to it, and on the institutions that stood back, on Bosnian-Serbian and Serbian police, and on military and political leaders" emphasizes Masovic.
In reality, his goal is to recover Republica Srepska, which the 1995 Dayton Agreement partitioned among bosnians and serbs. The agreement divided Bosnia into three levels: the state, the entities, and the district Brcko. While one entity is bosnian-controlled, the other is serb-controlled: Republica Srepska.
Uncovered and Reburied countless times
Many Bosnians feel that the Serbs were given Republika Srepska for reasons of being the sole ethnic group in a zone where there were once two, before the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian muslims in 1992 and 1995; this results in being an especially heated topic within the U.N. zone Srberenica. There, between the 4th and 15 of July, 1995, more than eight-thousand Bosnian muslims were killed. Afterwards, explains Masovic, Serbian forces concealed the victims’ remains in different mass-graves. They re-dug the previously made graves, dividing the remains and re-burying them into new graves in different locations, in order for the trails of the evil deeds to remain undiscovered.
“Even Hitler himself wasn’t so brutal"says Masovic, seriously, “each time we open a grave we find a hand, a bone, or maybe even a head of a person we have found parts of before"
The rule of thumb is that a victim can be buried when over 50% of their remains are found. The pieces are put together and placed in coffins, which are interred in the memorial center dedicated to the dead of Srbrenica each 11th of July, in remembrance of the massacre.
