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BULLDOZERS TO START WORK AT BOSNIA MASSACRE SITE.


Byline: Patrick Quinn

For other people named Patrick Quinn, see Patrick Quinn (disambiguation).


Patrick Dominic Quinn (b. February 12 1950, Philadelphia – September 24 2006, Bushkill, Pennsylvania) was an American actor and a former president of the
 Associated Press Associated Press: see news agency.
Associated Press (AP)

Cooperative news agency, the oldest and largest in the U.S. and long the largest in the world.
 

The killing fields near Srebrenica will rumble with earth-moving equipment today as war-crimes investigators begin uncovering the victims of the Bosnian war's worst massacres.

On Saturday, the Bosnian Serbs blocked a separate group of forensic experts who in the past week had been gathering up the remains of unburied victims in the Srebrenica area.

Exhuming the mass graves A mass grave is a grave containing multiple, usually unidentified human corpses. There is no strict definition of the minimum number of bodies required to constitute a mass grave.  containing thousands of bodies is part of an effort by war-crimes prosecutors to build cases against genocide genocide, in international law, the intentional and systematic destruction, wholly or in part, by a government of a national, racial, religious, or ethnic group.  suspects including Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Gen. Ratko Mladic.

The three-month effort aims to ``expose the entire grave,'' said John Gerns, an American forensic specialist and spokesman for the war-crimes investigators.

Government-held Srebrenica was overrun 1. overrun - A frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, especially in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if a silo can hold only two characters and the machine takes  by Bosnian Serbs on July 11, 1995, and more than 7,000 Muslim men who escaped were never heard from again. They are listed as missing, but survivors say they were massacred by the Serbs.

In previous exhumations in the Serb-held Srebrenica region, war-crimes investigators have found the remains of what is believed to be only a tiny fraction of the total number of massacre victims.

Last week, Finnish forensic experts were picking up exposed remains of people mowed down in the hills near Srebrenica and taking them to a hospital in government-held Tuzla for identification and eventual burial.

Bosnian Serb authorities ordered the Finns to stop Saturday and to send a representative to Pale, the Serbs' self-styled capital. A United Nations spokesman said the Serbs would demand that Bosnian Serb officials accompany the team.

``They will not be picking up any more bodies until this is resolved,'' U.N. spokesman Andrea Angeli said of the Finns.

The exhumations starting today are intended to reveal the scope of the massacres. Some of the graves, located within nine miles Nine Miles is a reggae "band" started by Yoshiaki Manabe (真鍋吉明) of The Pillows. The name Nine Miles comes from the name of the town in which Bob Marley grew up in Jamaica.
  • Yoshiaki Manabe is the only member of the "band.
 of Srebrenica and about 28 miles southeast of Tuzla, are thought to contain as many as 2,700 people.

Exhumations also will take place at sites of other suspected massacres in Bosnia and in Croatia.

The war-crimes investigators will receive full ground and air protection from the heavily armed NATO-led peace force as they dig with bulldozers and other machinery.

``We will be using heavy equipment, laborers, forensic scientists and anthropologists,'' Gerns said. ``Our excavation will last three months and we will concentrate on previously visited sites.''

One of those sites is at Nova Kasaba, where investigators last month uncovered the bodies of six civilians executed and dumped in a field that U.S. officials believe contains one of the largest mass graves. The six bodies already uncovered were in various stages of decomposition decomposition /de·com·po·si·tion/ (de-kom?pah-zish´un) the separation of compound bodies into their constituent principles.

de·com·po·si·tion
n.
1.
.

The current team expects not only to uncover many more bodies in a mass grave, but also to try to determine how long the bodies have been buried.

``I expect the bodies to be beginning to skeletonize skeletonize Surgery A popular term for the stripping of serosal tissues from certain structures–eg, the round ligament, fallopian tube, to facilitate clamping or excision and minimize bleeding ; the hands and feet are usually the first,'' said Dr. William D. Haglund, a Boston-based forensic anthropologist who is leading the digging operation.

He said the operation would be conducted in two parts: exhumation and numbering, then removal of the bodies for examination.

``We'll expose the bodies and document any evidence that we find,'' Haglund said.

The U.N. war-crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, will use the evidence to try to convict To adjudge an accused person guilty of a crime at the conclusion of a criminal prosecution, or after the entry of a plea of guilty or a plea of nolo contendere. An individual who has been found guilty of a crime and, as a result, is serving a sentence as punishment for the act;  Karadzic and Mladic, both indicted INDICTED, practice. When a man is accused by a bill of indictment preferred by a grand jury, he is said to be indicted.  on counts of genocide and crimes against humanity for their role in the 3-1/2-year war, and other war-crimes suspects.

Karadzic and Mladic remain in Bosnian Serb-held territory despite international pressure for them to surrender. They are considered major obstacles to the Bosnia peace process.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Daily News
No portion of this article can be reproduced without the express written permission from the copyright holder.
Copyright 1996, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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Publication:Daily News (Los Angeles, CA)
Article Type:Statistical Data Included
Date:Jul 7, 1996
Words:592
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