Radovan Karadzic, former leader of the Bosnian Serbs is beginning a 40-year sentence after during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. It marks the end of a trial that began in 2010 at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
Prominent among Karadzic鈥檚 offences during the conflict was his role in the Srebrenica genocide, in which 8000 Muslim men and boys were executed over four days in July 1995.
Identifying victims was a crucial part of ensuring justice was done. Forensic work connected with this conflict became the largest DNA identification project the world had seen, carried out by the (ICMP) the organisation I work for.
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Profiling techniques were advancing to the extent that they could be used to account for tens of thousands of persons missing as a result of the Bosnian conflict. ICMP invited families of the missing to provide blood samples. DNA from relatives was recorded in a database and compared with DNA recovered from human remains buried in clandestine graves.
This restarted an identification process that had reached its limit using traditional means, such as skeletal anthropology, clothing and dental records. And what the ICMP found could then be used as evidence.
Exponential rise
It resulted in an exponential rise in the number of people identified, and produced scientific data that could withstand the rigours of the courtroom. It turned out to be the largest inclusion of DNA evidence in a war crimes case ever.
Today, more than 70 per cent of the 40,000 people who were missing at the end of the conflict have been accounted for, including 7000 of the 8000 killed in the Srebrenica massacre.
The use of DNA was particularly important in regard to Srebrenica because the perpetrators returned in late 1995 and tried to hide the evidence by moving bodies from primary mass graves to secondary and tertiary graves. Human remains were broken up by mechanical diggers and scattered across sites up to 50 kilometres apart, making identification through traditional means almost impossible.
DNA provided the prosecution with incontrovertible evidence that thousands of men and boys, now named as individuals, were murdered after the fall of Srebrenica. Moreover, the pattern of DNA-linkages within and between primary and secondary graves informed the court of systematic activities associated with the crime and later attempts to conceal the bodies.
DNA-based identification methods have permitted thousands of families in the Western Balkans to recover the remains of their loved ones. The programme has also allowed many of them to secure their right to justice.
While the level of identification achievable by DNA rarely by itself decides guilt or innocence, its application in a criminal case, as in that of Karadzic, establishes an objective framework of fact that can stand as a powerful antidote to politicised and tendentious narratives of conflict or events.
War criminals such as Karadzic now can now be tried in courts that have at their disposal rigorous scientific methods applied on a vast scale to establish a factual bedrock upon which to pursue justice.
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