In 2013, the largest mass grave site in Europe since World War II was discovered on the outskirts of Prijedor in northwest Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
Over a period of 70 days, an area of 10,000 meters was excavated which revealed the remains of over 435 people. Only 274 individuals were able to be identified due to multiple instances of interference with the previously buried bodies (Balkan Insight, 2020). The discovery and subsequent exhumation of the mass grave was crucial in the prosecution and conviction of Ratko Mladić, Chief of the General Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). These legal proceedings only concluded in 2021 after a trial period that lasted 9 years. Despite this, the grave site today remains a space of contested memory with a stark lack of commemoration, memorialization, or signage to identify its location and the war crimes committed there.
Prior to the outbreak of the war in Bosnia in 1992, the site of the Tomašica mass grave was the location of an iron mine, used by the Ljubija mining company. The waste from this mine was used in an attempt to cover up war crimes committed in Prijedor; 9 meters of clay and rock concealed the hundreds of individuals who were buried at Tomašica until 2013. There were suspicions that a mass grave existed in the area before this, and though searches were conducted in both 2004 and 2006, only 34 bodies were revealed (Balkan Insight, 2020).
These excavations continued after multiple indicators pointed to the presence of a larger mass grave in the area. Locals living near the site collected water from a nearby lake, and noticed the water was becoming polluted. It was unclear to them how, or why, a foul smell was emanating from a body of water which was over 40 meters in depth. Local Bosnian Serbs were questioned about mass killings and potential locations where the missing persons could be, although those questioned denied the fact that these mass killings had taken place. Officials still believed there was a mass grave near the Tomašica mine because, on the condition of anonymity, Bosnian Croats living in the outer regions of the Prijedor municipality reported they had heard rumors of mass killings and graves from the war (Balkan Transitional Justice, 2014).
This suspicion was confirmed when a former Bosnian Serb soldier who participated in the cover-up of the killings revealed the location of the Tomašica mass grave to the Bosnian Missing Persons Institute. Although he came forward voluntarily in 2011, two years of negotiations ensued to find the exact location of the grave. He remains anonymous to this day to protect his own identity (Balkan Transitional Justice, 2014).
There is evidence that points to civilian involvement and complicity in the creation and cover-up of the Tomašica mass grave. The width and depth of the grave indicated that heavy machinery was used to create a pit of this magnitude, suggesting that a large operation involving a number of individuals would have been required to systematically perpetrate these crimes (Fournet, 2020). Locals in the area only lived 300 meters from the site of the mass grave, yet still claimed to know nothing about its existence. In an article published by the Balkan Transitional Justice in 2014, when asked, not a single Serb civilian from the area was willing to comment on the discovery of the Tomašica mass grave. Silence on such a topic has not been uncommon since the end of the war in Bosnia – a feature which has complicated efforts at acknowledgement and reconciliation. In the war’s aftermath, witnesses to crimes were reportedly intimidated into silence or even killed for revealing information. Moreover, as Mujo Begić, Professor of History and Victimology at the University of Bihać, told Balkan Transitional Justice, “no one wants to be a traitor to one’s nation,” (Balkan Transitional Justice, 2014).
After the location of Tomašica was finally discovered, it was initially expected that it would contain over 1,000 individuals – this figure was widely reported in the international media, but only 435 were recovered after the full exhumation (BBC, 2013). This overestimation did not take into account the fact that during the 1990s, again in an attempt by the perpetrators to cover up their war crimes, more than 350 bodies were dug up from Tomašica and reburied in secondary graves such as Jakarina Kosa (Balkan Insight, 2014). The majority of bodies in the grave were dismembered, and different levels of decomposition all pointed to the fact that systematic grave-robbing had been carried out. In other words, we know that Serb(ian) perpetrators of war crimes dug up their victims and scattered their body parts in various secondary and tertiary mass graves. These circumstances have made it incredibly difficult for families to identify loved ones, with many having to rely on personal objects on the victim’s person as a way to recognize family members. Nonetheless, the ICTY was able to use this evidence to prosecute Ratko Mladić on 10 separate charges, which included crimes against humanity.
The examination of the Tomašica mass grave revealed disturbing facts about the VRS perpetrators who committed the murders of hundreds of non-Serb Bosnians. Forensic scientists were able to prove that bodies were removed from Tomašica and transported to a secondary mass grave site after they had originally been buried. It was confirmed that secondary graves were purposefully located in areas where armed conflict had occurred, in an attempt to mask the dead as soldiers instead of civilians. This once again indicates actions were taken as part of an elaborate cover-up (The Guardian, 2016). The truncation of bodies in both mass graves proves that heavy machinery was once again used to remove bodies from the primary grave who were systematically transported, not moved individually. Added together, the bodies from Tomašica and Jakarina Fosa amount to 604 individuals (Fournet, 2020).
Forensic analysis was crucial in establishing the civilian identity of the victims found in Tomašica and the surrounding secondary graves, owing much to technological advances in forensic techniques in the early 2000s. Ratko Mladić’s counsel during his trial at the ICTY used the claim that victims in mass graves were combat victims as their central defense argument. This was refuted when Dr. John Clark, a forensic pathologist, testified during the trial that the main cause of death of victims was by shooting with high-velocity weapons. He reported to the Trial Chamber that “97% of the 293 full or largely complete bodies had gunshot injuries”. He noted a crucial point that 45% of all shots were to the back of the head, and a further 27% were either to the top or the side of the head. This would be an “unusual feature” for combat victims and strongly indicated that the victims had not been killed in combat, but rather in a mass execution (Mladić Transcripts, 24 June 2015).
Over 95% of these victims at Tomašica were Bosniaks (Mladić Transcripts, 25 June 2015). The ICTY used personal items gathered from the grave to establish the ethnicity and backgrounds of these victims. Many of these personal items included official papers from the Islamic Community of Sarajevo, as well as items such as hamajlijas, muskas, prayer beads, and copies of verses from the Qu’ran (Jugo, 2017). The presence of these personal items, alongside the evidence which established the manner in which these individuals were executed, were critical points in the prosecution’s argument.
Reconciliation and Commemoration
The question then arises: how does a community rebuild itself after such violent crimes were proven to have taken place? Lina Strupinksiene, Professor of Political Behavior and Institutions and International Relations at Vilnius University, conducted a study from 2013-2014 entitled, “‘What is Reconciliation and are we there yet?’ Different Types and Levels of Reconciliation: A Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In this article, she focused specifically on obtaining a holistic view of reconciliation in Prijedor in the aftermath of the war in Bosnia. She was particularly engaged with “community-level experiences” and carried out 64 interviews as the basis of her study (Strupinskiene, 2016). Of the interviewees, 39 were men and 25 were women; roughly 60% were Bosnian Serbs, 35% were Bosnian Muslims, and 5% Bosnian Croats. Strupinksienes’ research was conducted at an essential time, as she happened to hold her interviews in the immediate months preceding and following the discovery of the Tomašica mass grave (Strupinskiene, 2016).
In terms of what reconciliation actually looks like, most respondents answered along the lines of “being a good neighbor” to their fellow community members and “attempting to live normal lives side by side” (Strupinskiene, 2016). In order to achieve this idea of reconciliation, respondents indicated that functioning state institutions and a strong rule of law are essential. They were specifically concerned about the protection of human rights and upholding equality, nondiscrimination, and tolerance. The dismantling of nationalistic political rhetoric was also indicated as critical for the reconciliation process (Strupinskiene, 2016).
Interestingly, responses to some interview questions were split along ethnic lines. When asked if Prijedor has come to terms with its recent past, a majority of Bosnian Serb respondents answered affirmatively, while around two thirds of non-Serb respondents responded negatively (Strupinskiene, 2016). Furthermore, when asked about how coming to terms with the past and recognition of the “truth” contributed to reconciliation, people who survived human rights abuses or had lost family members during the war were more likely to indicate that these were essential parts of reconciliation than those who did not meet this criteria. This was especially true of Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat respondents (Strupinskiene, 2016).
Memorialization, and its lack thereof, has also been a prominent part of post-war Bosnian society. Especially in the Republika Srpska entity, there has been a lack of memorials at sites of crimes against humanity. Tomašica is evidence of this. The place where the largest mass grave in BiH was discovered in 2013 is now overgrown with foliage and without so much as a plaque to remember the hundreds of dead. In the wake of this lack of state commemoration and memorialization of those murdered, civil society has tried to enact remembrance practices of its own. For example, in Kozarac, one of the towns from which a number of victims found in Tomašica originated, there is an annual mass funeral. During this ceremony, citizens can collectively mourn their murdered loved ones. A central part of this ceremony is reading the names of the victims so that, in the absence of state commemoration of these lost lives, citizens can come together to create their own “public as well as private memory of their experience” (Sivac-Bryant, 2016).
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also established their own attempt at memorialization, in the absence of state-led efforts. The Youth Initiative for Human Rights in BiH (YIHR BiH) has held day camps for young people to learn about the atrocities of WWII and the war in Bosnia, in order to foster reconciliation within Bosnian society and to educate the youth (YIHR BiH, Camp Kozarac).
Although non-governmental actors have carried out memorialization and commemoration efforts in BiH, these efforts are not always focused in ways that memorialize specific events or locations, such as the site of the Tomašica mass grave. As we know from Strupinskiene’s study, recognition of past atrocities are essential for survivors to feel reconciled in the present day.
Tomašica’s legacy remains complex to this day. Although the discovery and exhumation of the mass grave had a pivotal role in the prosecution of Ratko Mladić, the contested space of the site itself and the opposing narratives surrounding it continues to impede the reconciliation process. Despite the final conclusion of the criminal proceedings against Mladić in 2021, almost 30 years after the crimes were perpetrated, the process of commemoration and reconciliation has stalled. This is largely a result of the Republika Srpska authorities’ rejection of the verdict, their refusal to commemorate the victims, and the continuing denial and glorification of these crimes.
—————-
This text was created with the support of the “SMART Balkans – Civil Society for Shared Society in the Western Balkans” regional project implemented by the Center for the Promotion of Civil Society (CPCD), Center for Research and Policy Making (CRPM) and Institute for Democracy and Mediation (IDM) and financially supported by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NMFA). The content of the publication is the sole responsibility of the project implementers and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (NMFA) or SMART Balkans consortium partners.
