Burying a Child One Bone at a Time

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Bosnian mothers in agony as experts piece together jigsaw puzzles of loved ones' bones. How many times can you bury your child without going mad?

It's a question that has haunted hundreds of Bosnian mothers facing an agonizing dilemma: As researchers identify remains scattered around mass graves from the Srebrenica massacre, do they bury the first few bones or wait potentially years for a skeleton to come together?

Many choose to bury whatever fragments turn up first. Then another bone is found and they have to reopen the grave. Months later researchers find another piece, and then another — and each time, the women say, it feels like another funeral.

The identification mission being carried out by the International Commission of Missing Persons is a monumental task: More than 8,100 men and boys were killed over five days when Bosnian Serb forces overran a U.N.-protected enclave during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

Newly identified Srebrenica remains are usually buried at a memorial center each year on the July 11 anniversary of the start of the 1995 massacre, Europe's worst slaughter of civilians since World War II. After the bloodshed — classified by the U.N. as a genocide — troops led by Gen. Ratko Mladic scattered the bodies in dozens of mass graves that still turn up today.

Ten years after a DNA lab took a drop of blood from Habiba Masic, researchers called her to say they had made a positive identification.

It reopened a new cycle of anguish.

The man at the lab said they had found 90 percent of her husband's body. His bones had been dispersed among four different mass graves.

"And the children?" Masic recalled asking. "The man went silent, and I knew something was wrong."

She was told there was no trace of one of her boys but a small part of the other had been found. The problem was DNA analysis could not determine which one he was.

"I couldn't breathe," she said. "I couldn't speak."

Now, she cannot bury the precious fragment, for what would the gravestone say: Sadem Masic, 1976-1995? or Sadmir Masic, 1977-1995?

http://abcnews.go.com/International/WireStory?id=8047376&page=1

The horror...the horror....