As part of the Podrinje identification project in Tuzla, the remains of 6,823 victims of the Srebrenica genocide have been officially identified so far. However, almost 100 more murdered people, whose remains were found at various execution sites, have been waiting for years for their names to be returned and for them to finally find their peace.
Most of the remains of the victims of the genocide in Srebrenica, which are currently in the cold storage of the Commemorative Center in Tuzla, do not yet have their names and surnames. Although their DNA bone samples were successfully isolated, there is still no match with DNA from the blood of relatives of the missing persons. This may mean that they have no living relatives, but also that family members did not donate blood or did not provide a reference sample, on the basis of which identification could be made, or that the statistics are not high enough.
As Dragana Vučetić, senior forensic anthropologist of ICMP’s Tuzla office, explains, it is necessary that the match between the DNA isolated from the bones of the missing person and the DNA isolated from the blood of relatives be 99.95%: “If distant relatives give a blood sample, that the stats can’t be that high. I assume that in most cases this is the reason why the statistics are somewhat lower, so we cannot complete the official identification”.
“The DNA analysis itself is progressing, so we hope – we had experience in previous years, if the DNA of some relatives could be used, maybe in some cases we would be able to get a DNA report that way. In general, we continue to appeal to the families – those who did not give blood samples, it is very important to give a sample, in order to identify these victims as well”, said Nedim Duraković, investigator of the Institute for Missing Persons – Tuzla regional office.
In recent years, as part of the Podrinje identification project in Tuzla, the number of persons whose remains cannot be identified has been reduced from 130 to 95. However, despite all efforts, it is unlikely that most of them will be identified in the near future.
“They may be buried at some point, but the families need to know that the DNA lives forever in our lab, so those cases, regardless of where they end up – in the morgue or buried – they won’t be closed forever. So, they are still open in case an identity matching with the family appears – in that case, they would be exhumed and returned to the families who could decide to bury the remains,” says Vučetić.
Also, the reference blood samples of the families of the missing persons, who identified their relatives through the classic method of identification, which was exclusively used until the introduction of the DNA method in 2001, could also lead to the identification of victims whose remains have been kept for years as N.N., Federalna writes.
