Tuzla, June 13: The ICMP center is situated at the Tuzla city morgue, which beckons us with a sweetish odor that is barely discernible as we start to climb the street. By the time we arrive, it has become a stench that seems to cling to our clothes and assault our senses.

The ICMP center is a squat, functional building of offices and forensic laboratories. It also houses a massive freezer with 3,500 body bags of human remains. One of the laboratories contains a huge boiler which removes any remaining flesh from bones. Zlatan Sabanovic, the ICMP program manager, explains that bones yield up the all-important secrets through DNA tests, and that flesh (which he says “resembles soap”) is no longer “useful.” Given that even this “soap” was once part of a human being, I wonder whether it doesn’t deserve more reverential treatment. (Incidentally, the existence of flesh indicates that a body was buried in thick wet soil and was not exposed to air, which would have caused it to decompose.)

The ICMP is trying to solve a giant scientific puzzle. The goal, in Zlatan’s words, is to provide “99.99% confirmation” for the surviving relatives. This is done by collecting DNA samples from all relatives of those who died and comparing the results with DNA tests from these remains. Any traditional forensic material, in the form of clothing and other personal belongings, help to firm up a successful match.

Before DNA became available in 2001, the Commission was entirely dependent on the forensic material, which was meticulously photographed and inspected by relatives. But this produced very few matches, because with the exception of documents and photos, very few personal belongings were demonstrably unique. Only seven victims were identified in 1997. Four years later, in 2001, the figure had barely risen, to 52.

Some of the belongings are on view here, and both Pia and I find them deeply disturbing. They remind me of the prison of Tuol Sileng in Cambodia, which I visited in 1980, shortly after the Vietnamese liberated the country. The Khmer Rouge took photos of prisoners at Tuol Sileng before they were tortured to death. During that same trip I watched the killing fields being dug up in Cambodia. In a way the photos of Tuol Sileng had more of an impact because they showed real people, with fear in their eyes. It was harder to picture the remains as human beings. At least that is how I recall it from a distance. Perhaps I will feel different after today.

Among the body bags: Zlatan Sabanovic from the ICMP.

Here in Tuzla we look at photos, clocks, shoes, letters, a pair of glasses, and even a hand-written selection from the Koran. I also carry small personal mementos (photos and a small bible) whenever I travel. I find the glasses particularly poignant. Is this because I’m always misplacing my own reading glasses? Or am I thinking of those deeply disturbing images from the Holocaust – of shoes, human hair, gold from teeth, suitcases, and glasses – which had more value to the killers than people? This center forces you to ask such questions.

The number of identifications shot up from 51 in 2001 to 518 in 2002, when the ICMP started DNA testing. (The ICMP has DNA facilities in Banja Luka, Belgrade, Sarajevo and Tuzla). But identifications fell again to 490 in 2003, as the ICMP scientists began to run out of whole skeletons and had to work more with body parts.

Zlatan Sabanovic expects this trend to continue. As of March 31, 1,042 cases had been definitively resolved through DNA. But a frustratingly large number – 849 – are still under investigation, and proving more difficult by the day.

The reason, again, lies in the nature of the Srebrenica massacre. DNA testing is easiest when the victim’s parents are both alive and can provide samples. That provides a 100% match. But many of the victims were fathers – which instantly cuts the odds that their own murdered sons can be identified. In principle, old men were allowed to leave, and their survival has made it easier to identify their sons who were killed. But in many cases, all of the male members of entire families were killed.

At this point, the puzzle spins off in many different directions. The victims were overwhelmingly male, but a wife’s DNA cannot identify a dead husband, and a living daughter cannot identify a dead father. A sister cannot identify a dead brother. The further away one gets from the central relationship of both parents to the child, the more collaborative evidence is required. Even the identification of a leg is not enough to confirm a death, because the person might have lost a leg and survived. If two twins were killed, and both parents survived, their DNA alone will not tell which twin was which.

About a boy: One of Srebrenica’s teenage victims.

The science is so fascinating and difficult that I begin to understand how it allows for darker thoughts to be put to one side, although this must be harder for Zlatan, a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim), than for his foreign colleagues. In one room, we find a Canadian forensic scientist making sense of a jumble of bones, which lie scattered on a steel table like the pieces of a jigsaw. I can identify a skull, which is almost complete, but little else. She, however, moves tiny bones around with brisk confidence, and within minutes a skeleton emerges in front of our eyes. She tells us that this was once a teenage boy.

Does such work affect her? Not really, she says. If it did, she probably could not do her job. I imagine that anyone who deals with the dead would say the same, but right now my own imagination is going at top speed and this pile of bones is suddenly very human. It has become a terrified boy early in July 1995. Perhaps he is in the woods above Srebrenica, separated from his father. Perhaps he’s been thrust into that rusty old farming cooperative in Kravica, staring at the steaming bodies and a Serb soldier with a smile on his face and a long curved knife in his hand.….