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 It coincided with Kathryne Bomberger's rise to head of the
Bosnian-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP),
created in 1996 on the initiative of Bill Clinton to unearth the
secrets of gruesome death pits strewn across the Bosnian countryside
following its 1992-95 war.
The ICMP sent a handful of staff to Thailand to set up a laboratory
to collect blood samples from relatives of some of the 230,000
people who perished when a giant wave struck in December 2004,
matching them with DNA from bone samples of the victims sent to
Bosnia. It helped identify some 800.
"That was really a huge learning experience for us," Bomberger told
Reuters in an interview.
A decade later, what started as an ad hoc body devoted to the former
Yugoslavia has become the world's leading authority on missing
people, a status enshrined last month in a treaty signed by five
European governments – Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg
and Sweden – that will see the organization move its headquarters
this year from Sarajevo to The Hague and become a permanent global
body.
 The move is recognition of the ICMP's success not just in the
ex-Yugoslavia, but in Thailand, the Philippines, Chile, South
Africa, the United States, Iraq, Libya, Colombia and others, where
its unique DNA-identification techniques have helped identify
victims of natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, of political
repression, drug crime, apartheid and war.
Mexico is next, Bomberger says, while Syria - with tens of thousands
missing - represents a looming challenge. The ICMP says it has
proposed working with Syrian refugees to collect data on missing
relatives, and has met with opposition figures.
"Rarely in life can you change the world, and I think this treaty is
something that does change the world," Bomberger said, adding that
other states were expected to sign up.
"CAN'T DO IT ALONE"
An American, Bomberger joined the ICMP two years after its creation,
since when it has helped identify 70 percent of 40,000 missing
people from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, including many of the
more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys killed when the U.N.
'safe haven' of Srebrenica fell to Bosnian Serb forces in 1995.
Mass graves are still being unearthed in Bosnia, but the ICMP has
effectively outgrown the former Yugoslav republic, a success-story
hard to match in a country otherwise still coming to terms with the
war's legacy, deeply divided and dysfunctional. Most of ICMP's 140
staff are Bosnians.
The ICMP owes its success to the DNA identification process it
developed to tackle Srebrenica, where most victims were found in
secondary graves, dug up from the pits they were first tossed into
and moved to others in an attempt to conceal the crime, scattering
remains, belongings and evidence.
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"It was absolutely impossible to identify these mortal remains
through any other means," said Bomberger. DNA analysis has yielded
the names of 98 percent of 6,900 Srebrenica victims identified so
far. Crucially, the organization lobbied for and helped craft a
legal framework and institutions in Bosnia to deal with an issue
that frequently becomes politicized in the aftermath of war or the
fall of a regime, left to the efforts of civil society and human
rights groups to press a state into action.
"We look at DNA technology, but that technology does not work until
a state makes a decision to search for persons missing regardless of
their ethnic, religious or national origin, in a non-discriminatory
fashion," Bomberger said.
Nura Beganovic is still searching for her only brother believed
killed in Srebrenica.
"It means a lot to us when there is such an international
organization capable of helping us. We can't do it alone," she said
adding that she was worried the ICMP's move might affect efforts to
find the last of Bosnia's dead.
Evidence collected at the ICMP's identification center in the city
of Tuzla, housed in a sport center, has been used in hundreds of
criminal cases since the war.
Staff in masks work in sterile, white rooms, divided by glass walls.
Blood and bone samples are stored in huge refrigerators, and data
collected from every case the ICMP has ever handled is stored in a
vast and growing online database.
Hajra Catic is a frequent visitor, searching for the remains of her
son.
"I can't sleep at night, hoping I'll be able to identify him," said
Catic, who lost her husband and 20 other relatives in Srebrenica,
the worst massacre on European soil since the World War Two. "I wish
just to have a little finger of his, so I can bury him."
(Additional reporting by Maja Zuvela; Editing by Matt Robinson and
Anna Willard)
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