Ten war victims found in mass grave at Croatian landfill, more expected – Euractiv

Excavators sifted through piles of waste at a landfill surrounded by sunflower fields in Croatia on Thursday (27 June), searching for the bodies of war victims who lost their lives more than 30 years ago, after the remains of 10 people were found earlier this month.

The mass grave was discovered after two years of intensive searching at the Petrovacka Dola garbage dump near Vukovar. Investigators expect to find more remains, said Ivona Paltrinieri, head of the missing persons department at the Ministry of War Veterans Affairs.

Croatia is still trying to clarify the fate of 1,797 missing people from the war of independence from what was then Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995. They include 500 missing people from the Vukovar-Srijem County, Paltrinieri said.

Investigators believe the victims found at the dump this month were initially buried elsewhere and then reburied there because they were covered in soil and mud that was unusual for the site.

Paltrinieri said the remains were probably dumped in January 1992, after the temporary occupation of Vukovar, which was reduced to rubble in late 1991 during a three-month siege by the Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitary forces.

“In all these decades of searching, this site in Petrovacka Dola is the largest, most extensive and most complex,” she said. “Until now, we have never had such a landfill, where we dug 14 meters deep and unearthed over 90,000 cubic meters of waste.”

“It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, combing through the mountains of rubbish to find the remains – I find it incredible.”

The next step is to identify the remains using DNA analysis. This involves comparing the DNA with that of around 10,000 people who are searching for their missing relatives.

A total of 150 mass graves and a large number of individual graves have been discovered in Croatia since the war.

According to the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), 11,600 people are still missing from the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, which erupted when Yugoslavia broke up into several sub-regions. Most of them live in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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