Legacy of a Cover-Up

Mapping the Hidden Gravesites of the Yugoslav Wars

Many of the largest mass graves of the 1990s wars now stand neglected and unmarked, while many of those responsible for massive cover-up operations to conceal thousands of victims’ corpses remain unpunished, new research by BIRN shows.

Marija Ristic, Nejra Mulaomerovic

On August 21, 1992, Husein Jakupovic was one of a large group of civilian detainees from the Trnopolje prison camp who were being transported by Bosnian Serb forces towards the town of Travnik, where they believed that they were going to be released as part of a prisoner exchange.

When the convoy reached Mount Vlasic in central Bosnia, around 200 prisoners were taken out of the vehicles and made to stand by a ravine that was 300 to 400 metres deep, close to the road – a place known as the Koricani Cliffs.

“They ordered us to kneel by the edge of the ravine. We knelt for a couple of minutes before they started shooting. People started falling,” Jakupovic recalled.

Jakupovic somehow managed to avoid the bullets but had to watch as bodies fell into the ravine in front of him and the soldiers tried to finish off anyone who was still alive. “The Serb soldiers, most of whom were dressed in camouflage uniforms, threw grenades down there and opened fire from the edge of the ravine,” he told the Bosnian state court many years afterwards.

Jakupovic managed to climb down into the ravine and find cover in some bushes: “I moved from the bushes into the water. I stood behind a rock… The following morning, the Serb soldiers came again and approached the bodies. They piled them up. I saw smoke and sensed a smell.”

After the soldiers had left again, Jakupovic managed to escape through the woods to safety – one of just 12 men who survived the shootings at Koricani Cliffs.

As the ravine is so deep, it was very difficult for investigators to exhume the bodies, and only parts of many of the victims have been found. So far, the remains of 177 people, mostly Bosniaks and Croats, have been identified in four exhumations carried out at Koricani Cliffs between 2003 and 2017.

Since the Bosnian war ended, there have been several attempts to mark the location of the Koricani Cliffs mass grave by families of the victims, but their memorial signs have always been removed afterwards. Each year, the families commemorate their dead by throwing roses into the ravine.

The Koricani Cliffs site is one of the 42 largest mass graves from the wars in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2000.

BIRN’s research into forensic evidence, court documents, witness testimonies and field research shows that the remains of 9,708 individuals were found at these 42 gravesites that contain more than 100 victims.

Of these 42 sites, only 12 are marked with signs that say what happened there during wartime. At the other 30 locations, the gravesites are hidden, the land ploughed for agricultural use or sold off as a site to build new houses or business premises.

At many if not most of these locations, war victims’ families are not even allowed to visit once a year to hold commemorations. Many of them see this as a continuation of war by other means – an attempt to deny what happened and erase the crimes from the collective memory.

These 42 gravesites where more than 100 victims’ bodies were buried are just the largest in the former Yugoslavia; there are hundreds more, smaller burial sites. Around 1,600 clandestine war graves have been found so far – most of them in Bosnia and Herzegovina, followed by Croatia, Kosovo and Serbia – and the search for more continues, as over 12,000 people who disappeared during the conflicts remain missing.

Meanwhile, many of those who were involved in attempted cover-ups of wartime killings – burying the victims in clandestine graves and then sometimes digging their bodies up again and reburying them elsewhere at secondary gravesites to further conceal the traces of crimes – are yet to be prosecuted.

The Tomasica mass grave was discovered by the Bosnian authorities in September 2013, close to a large mining complex, approximately 15 to 20 kilometres south-east of the city of Prijedor. The remains of 435 people were found; 274 were identified. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Tomasica mass grave, one of the largest one in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The location of the mass grave remains unmarked, even though it lies in a populated area, some 15 minutes’ drive from Prijedor. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Zeleni Jadar is an area some 20 kilometres south of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia where at least seven clandestine gravesites were found, all of them secondary mass graves. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Mass grave called Zeleni Jadar 5, was found in 1998, yielded the remains of people killed during the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Jakarina Kosa is a secondary mass grave, located in the Ljubija iron ore mining complex, 18 kilometres from the city of Prijedor. In total, remains belonging to 311 individuals have been identified at the Jakarina Kosa gravesite. DNA analysis showed that remains from the same individuals were found at both Tomasica and Jakarina Kosa. Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

The Cancari Road 2 site, like all the other Cancari Road graves, is a secondary mass grave. War victims were reburied here in the autumn of 1995 in an attempt to cover up the killings of Bosniak men and boys in the Srebrenica genocide. Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

On July 14, 1995, Bosnian Serb Army and police personnel transported approximately 1,000 Bosniak men from Srebrenica from detention sites in and around Bratunac to a school at Petkovci, ten kilometres from Zvornik. On July 14, 1995 and in the early morning hours of July 15, Bosnian Serb troops and police assaulted and shot men being detained at the school. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Hundreds of bodies were removed from primary site at Petkovci Dam and re-burried in the village of Liplje, 20 kilometers away. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

The remains of 238 people who died in the 1990s wars have been identified in Lake Perucac, after being killed either by the Bosnian Serb Army or the Yugoslav Army and police. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

River Drina, considered to be one of the largest mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

‘Clearing up the terrain’

The cover-ups are among the most documented crimes of the Yugoslav wars – thousands of people were involved, orders were given in writing, there are receipts for the fuel that was used during the operations, additional vehicles were deployed, and public utility services were engaged to remove thousands of bodies. Some of these operations were carried out by night, but many by day, before the eyes of locals who were shocked by the sight and smell of the decomposed bodies but chose to remain silent.

At least 20 men who directly participated in ‘clearing up the terrain’, which was an official term used in many army and police documents, decided to testify about the secret operations in which they participated, most of them in trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY.

Among the reasons they cited for testifying were remorse, shame and guilt. Those in senior positions received amnesties in return for their testimonies; some who revealed locations of mass graves got lower sentences, and some did it anonymously. There have also been examples of people asking victims’ families for money for information about where their loved ones are buried – around 50 euros per grave site.

The cases heard by the ICTY revealed the mechanisms behind cover-ups of large-scale crimes committed in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Domestic courts often shied away from such prosecutions due to the nature of the crimes – they were systematic and often involved orders from the highest places. In Serbia, the Defence Ministry even imposed stricter confidentiality restrictions on files related to units allegedly involved in cover-ups.

BIRN’s research for this article shows there was a pattern across the former Yugoslavia in which military and police forces would capture large groups of people, transport them in buses or trucks to killing sites, where murder squads would be waiting to execute them. Lower-lever units and loyal public utility service workers would then transport the bodies in trucks to burial sites – pits, mine complexes, mountain peaks, fields in forests and along obscure roads.

One of the first large-scale cover-ups of the Yugoslav wars took place in Croatia in November 1991 after the Yugoslav People’s Army occupied the town of Vukovar and brought some 250 prisoners of war to the nearby Ovcara Farm.

Aerial image of Ovcara mass grave site. Photo: ICTY.

The prisoners of war were stripped of their personal valuables, identity documents and other personal belongings then had to pass between two rows of soldiers who beat them severely as they passed by using sticks, rifle-butts, poles, chains and even crutches. They were imprisoned in a hangar where the beatings continued.

In parallel, soldiers ordered farm workers to find a place near the woods and dig a hole. The worker who dug the hole using a mechanical excavator said it was about 10 metres long and three metres wide and between one-and-a-half to two metres deep. On November 20, 1991, the prisoners of war were taken in groups of ten to 20 from the hangar to the site where the hole had been dug. There, members of the Vukovar Territorial Defence force and paramilitary fighters executed at least 194 of them. The killings started after 9pm and continued until well after midnight and the bodies were buried in the pre-dug mass grave, where they remained undiscovered until several years later.

Not even a year later, Serb forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina used the same operational methods around the north-western city of Prijedor. Prisoners of the Omarska, Trnopolje, Keraterm and Manjaca detention camps were executed and their bodies concealed during summer and autumn of 1992 at the Tomasica and Jakarina Kosa mine complexes and dozens of smaller locations in the area.

Exhumation of the Tomasica mass grave. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic.

But the largest cover-up, both in terms of the numbers of people killed and secretly buried, took place in July 1995, after Bosnian Serb forces captured the town of Srebrenica. In the days that followed more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys were massacred in the areas around the towns of Srebrenica, Bratunac and Zvornik. Almost 80 graves were dug to bury the bodies, the largest at Branjevo, Orahovac, Glogova, Kozluk and the Petkovci Dam.

Exhumation of Cerska mass grave. Photo: REUTERS.

But later that summer, the order came to dig up these graves and rebury corpses in secondary graves in an attempt to conceal them more thoroughly. At the time, the Bosnian Serbs were claiming they did not know what happened to the Bosniak men after the fall of Srebrenica and were worried that the huge number of bodies meant they would be discovered.

The reburial operation was classified ‘asanacija’ in Serbian, meaning hygiene and sanitation measures. It was supposed to be covert but was carried out publicly and required the involvement of a lot of people, resources, assets and vehicles. The civilian police were involved as well. An excavator loader and a backhoe excavator were used for the digging and trucks were used to transport the bodies. The Bosnian Serb Army’s Main Staff sent an urgent order, approved by its commander Ratko Mladic, requisitioning dozens of tonnes of diesel for ‘engineering work’.

The trucks carrying the corpses passed through Zvornik leaving an unbearable stench and upsetting local residents. “It was unbearable. The [excavator drivers] would abandon their vehicles in order to get some air. They couldn’t stand it,” said Damnjan Lazarevic, who drove one of the trucks.

The cover-up operations were even more elaborate during the Kosovo conflict in 1999, when Serbian forces moved ethnic Albanian victims’ bodies almost 500 kilometres from killing sites. Corpses were frequently transported from where they were killed in Kosovo, temporarily hidden in nearby graves, then disinterred and transported to large mass grave sites in Serbia, reburied or burned. After mass killings in April and May 1999 in almost all the larger municipalities in Kosovo, Serbian forces engaged local public utility workers to either collect bodies from the killing sites or dig them out of temporary grave sites for reburial elsewhere.

One of the first to speak out was Ali Djogaj, a worker from the municipal refuse collection service in the Kosovo town of Prizren. Djogaj said his boss visited him one evening and drove him and some other employees to a nearby firing range, where he saw a group of uniformed police officers, two excavators and three trucks.

Under cover of darkness, the excavators dug up the bodies and his boss told the men to load them onto the waiting trucks. “The excavator would use its scoop to grab several bodies, two or three of them. It would unload the bodies next to the door of the trucks and the four of us would then throw each of the bodies individually to the refrigerator trucks,” Djogaj told Serbian prosecutors in 2005.

Djogaj said that the bodies looked like they had been decomposing for several weeks in the ground. After they were put in the trucks, the police officers locked the doors and took them away.

More than 1,000 bodies of Kosovo Albanians, most of them civilians, including women and children, have been found so far in four locations in Serbia: at police centres in Batajnica and Petrovo Selo, at Lake Perucac, and at mines in Kizevak and Rudnica.

The mass grave in Batajnica is believed to be the largest in the former Yugoslavia – 744 individuals who were buried in eight pits at a training ground at the police centre have been identified so far. At least seven trucks arrived there in April and May 1999, bringing bodies from Kosovo.

Exhumation and identification process at Batajnica. Photo: EPA/Valdrin Xhemaj.

“As soon as the truck with the bodies came, a hole was dug by an excavator, petrol was poured on [the bodies], they were covered with tyres and set on fire, and after they burned, two or three hours later, the pits were covered up,” a member of the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit who was involved in the reburial, Dusko Nenadovic, told the Serbian police working group that investigated the cover-up in early 2000s.

“I knew that everything was a ‘state secret’ and if anybody opened his mouth, you would lose your head,” he said.

Ravnice is a primary mass grave, located 20 kilometres north-west of the town of Srebrenica. It is six kilometres from an agricultural warehouse in Kravica where more than 1,300 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were executed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Zeleni Jadar is an area some 20 kilometres south of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia where at least seven clandestine gravesites were found, all of them secondary mass graves connected with the attempted cover-up of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacres. The Zeleni Jadar 6 mass grave was discovered in 2001 and the remains of 135 people were exhumed. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

From Srebrenica, it is a half-hour drive to the hills of Zeleni Jadar, where unmarked gravesites lie on both the left and right sides of the road, in forests and fields. The first one discovered, known as Zeleni Jadar 5, was found in 1998, yielded the remains of people killed during the Srebrenica genocide in July 1995. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Cancari Road 10 (also known as Kamenica 10) is a secondary mass grave, located in the village of Kamenica, 50 kilometres from the town of Srebrenica. There are 13 secondary mass graves in the Kamenica area containing the remains of victims of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacres by Bosnian Serb forces. Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

The gravesites in Kamenica were discovered either in the courtyards of houses which belonged to the Bosniaks, or in meadows next to the road. The site remains unmarked. However, locals in Kamenica have marked several of the other gravesites in the area with memorial plaques honouring Srebrenica victims. Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

The ICTY’s investigation also showed DNA connections between the Cancari Road 10 site and seven more gravesites in the same area. This indicates that as part of an attempted cover-up by Bosnian Serb forces, remains were dug up from the primary mass grave at Branjevo and moved to the village of Kamenica, 45 kilometres away. Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

Cancari Road 12 is a secondary mass grave, located in the village of Kamenica, it was exhumed in May 1998 by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ICTY. The remains of 174 people were found; 149 were identified. Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

Secret cover-ups leave paper trail

Although the forces involved were different, similar methods and procedures were used to hide bodies during the various wars in the former Yugoslavia. The initial decisions always came from the top leadership – usually involving state, army and police officials – and were followed by written orders that set out the logistics and the personnel. Civilians involved in operations received additional money for helping and staying silent.

These procedures were well-documented at trials conducted by the ICTY in The Hague, where many insiders who either took part or were aware of the operations revealed the details behind the hundreds of documents describing exactly how to ‘clean up the terrain’.

In Croatia, the Yugoslav People’s Army, JNA led and oversaw operations to remove victims’ bodies, although in many cases paramilitary units and local Territorial Defence forces took part in the killings. In a document from November 22, 1991 that was initially sealed as a military secret, the 80th Motorised Brigade of the JNA was tasked with clearing away the bodies from Ovcara and the Vukovar area. The document used the word ‘asanacija’ for the first time, a description later used by the Bosnian Serb Army in Bosnia and Serbian police in Kosovo.

Serbian courts convicted some of the direct perpetrators – paramilitaries and locals involved in the killings at Ovcara – while the ICTY convicted two middle-ranking JNA officers. But many commanders whose names were listed in the documents or named by witnesses avoided prosecution.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, rumours of the mass executions of Bosniaks from Srebrenica in July 1995 began to be verified the month afterwards. First satellite imagery of mass graves appeared, survivors of the shootings reached refugee camps and then the first reports about massacre allegations and discoveries of recent digging and victims’ discarded belongings were published in the international press.

Satellite image of Cerska valley showing buses used to transfer the Bosniak men to execution sites. Photo: ICTY.

Decades later, in trials at the ICTY, it was proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Bosnian Serb Army’s Main Staff ordered the killings and the subsequent burial and reburial of bodies. Orders signed by Ratko Mladic ensured the provision of fuel, trucks and bulldozers for the operations intended to conceal the crime.

For these and other crimes related to the killings in Srebrenica, the ICTY and domestic courts in the Balkans have sentenced a total of 47 people to more than 700 years in prison, plus four life sentences. But many more took part in the largest cover-up operation of the Yugoslav war – and some have continued to live their lives at liberty in the areas where the mass graves were found.

Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Yugoslavia who died during his war crime trial in The Hague, was aware of the cover-ups in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. But in Kosovo, he commissioned the covert operation to hide the victims’ bodies, an investigation by the Serbian police showed.

“The first meeting in relation to this was held in the office of the then president, Mr. Milosevic. It was held in the month of March 1999,” police officer Dragan Karleusa testified at Milosevic’s trial.

The police investigation revealed the names of more than 20 people involved in the cover-up – both low-ranking and senior officials, many of whom still hold powerful posts today. Most of them have insisted that they are innocent.

The paper trail they left showed otherwise. Dragan Ilic, who was the head of Serbia’s criminal investigation unit, requested 10,000 Yugoslav dinars (about $900 at the time) for “operational expenses” for the operation, while the refuse collection workers involved were also paid, and police kept the receipts.

In one diary entry cited at the ICTY, recounting a meeting with Milosevic about what to do with the corpses of ethnic Albanians killed in Kosovo, police general Obrad Stevanovic wrote: “No body, no crime.” Stevanovic now teaches at the Serbian police academy and he denies any wrongdoing.

Two bones. I buried those two bones. I wanted to take my child into my arms one more time. I gave birth to a whole child and now I am collecting his parts.

As soon as the truck with the bodies came, a hole was dug by an excavator, petrol was poured on [the bodies], they were covered with tires and set on fire, and after they burned, two or three hours later, the pits were covered up. I knew that everything was a ‘state secret’ and if anybody opened his mouth, you would lose your head.

The excavator would use its scoop to grab several bodies, two or three of them. It would unload the bodies next to the door of the trucks and the four of us would then throw each of the bodies individually to the refrigerator trucks.

I moved from the bushes into the water. I stood behind a rock... The following morning, the Serb soldiers came again and approached the bodies. They piled them up. I saw smoke and sensed a smell.

Gravesites used as rubbish dumps

BIRN visited and filmed all the 42 largest mass graves in the former Yugoslavia in the autumn of 2020 and early 2021 and established that only 12 had some kind of plaque or memorial marking the site as a place where people were buried during wartime.

The graves are usually only marked in areas where the people living nearby belong to the same ethnic group as those who were buried there. In areas in which the majority of the local population is from the same ethnic group as the killers, any attempt to create a memorial is denied. At some of them, even annual commemorations are not allowed.

Most mass grave sites now serve as rubbish dumps. In some places, new buildings have been constructed at the sites, sometimes churches.

Photo taken at Crni Vrh, 16 kilometres south-west of the city of Zvornik, where one of the largest mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina was discovered. Photo: BIRN/Denis Ruvic.

Croatia is the only country that has memorials near its two largest mass graves, Ovcara and the Vukovar New Cemetery. Commemorating the Ovcara killings and the fall of Vukovar to forces under Belgrade’s control has become a state-building project in post-war Croatia, and the anniversary is marked by senior officials each year.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the situation is far more complex. The highest number of mass graves are in Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated part of the country, most of them the result of killings organised by the Bosnian Serb Army. The country has a missing persons law that enables the memorialisation of mass graves, but it is poorly implemented.

In the vicinity of the town of Zvornik in Republika Srpska, the authorities tore down the Branjevo Military Farm, where a mass shooting of Bosniaks from Srebrenica took place in July 1995 and a mass grave was dug. A new neighbourhood has been built at the site with a church, private homes, shops and other buildings. Internally displaced people from other areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina have moved into the new houses. Bosniak communities are allowed to visit the mass grave site once per year, and usually arrive in buses to pay tribute to their loved ones.

Satellite image of Branjevo primary mass grave. Photo: ICTY.

Another killing site in the same area, the Pilica Cultural Centre, has been left untouched since 500 Bosniaks from Srebrenica were killed there in 1995. The walls are still pockmarked with bullet holes, the floor is covered with debris and the stage in the hall is spattered with stains.

Pilica Cultural Center where around 500 Bosniaks were executed and later buried at Branjevo Military Farm. Photo: BIRN/Armin Graca.

Most of the mass graves of Srebrenica victims that have been marked are along the so-called Cancari Road in the village of Kamenica. After Bosniaks displaced by the war returned to their homes, investigators started finding gravesites in people’s yards. After the bodies were exhumed, some of the returnees installed small memorials commemorating the victims.

In Serbia, the largest mass grave is at the police centre in Batajnica. The police centre is still in use and members of the public cannot enter. BIRN filed several requests to the Interior Ministry to allow its photographers to document the gravesite, but received no response.

Civil society organisations have campaigned for years for a memorial at the police centre. Instead, the Serbian authorities built an Orthodox church there, which many Kosovo Albanians found offensive.

Photo taken in the Belgrade suburb Batajnica. Photo: BIRN/Marko Risovic.

Attempts by victims’ relatives and campaign groups to put up their own memorial plaques at unmarked graves across the region have also run into problems. Every year in August, a group of families of victims of the Koricani Cliffs massacre come to mark the anniversary, and several times they have tried to mark the location with a sign on an almost abandoned road nearby.

But even though the area is uninhabited, the memorial was removed each time by unknown people. Now the families throw 200 roses into the ravine each year – one for each person who was shot.

Naila Bajric’s husband Serif and 21-year-old son Zafir were among those who were killed at Koricani Cliffs. Zafir’s body was broken up and only parts of his remains were found during exhumations at the site.

“Two bones. I buried those two bones,” Bajric said at a mass funeral in 2019 of victims found during the most recent exhumation.

Her words conveyed the enduring grief of families whose loved ones’ bodies were dismembered and then scattered about among primary and secondary graves as the killers sought to conceal the atrocities they had committed.

“I wanted to take my child into my arms one more time,” she said. “I gave birth to a whole child and now I am collecting his parts.”

There are

mass graves that contained

more than 100 bodies

in the former Yugoslavia

The largest mass grave is in the Serbian capital Belgrade

where 744 people were buried

94 gravesites

are linked with the Srebrenica genocide

Only 12

mass graves are marked

456 people

exhumed from war graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina were children

9,708 individuals

were identified

in the 42 largest mass graves

Methodology

There is no international definition of a mass grave nor there is a legal consensus on a mass grave’s characteristics, including the number of buried bodies required to merit classification as a mass grave.

Forensic experts define a mass grave as a “burial site containing the remains, often commingled, of numerous persons” taking “the forms of a trench, pit, well organised or sectioned and with variable body densities”, according to a report by the United Nations.

The definition of a mass grave has also been contested by various states and domestic and international institutions working on this issue in the countries of former Yugoslavia.

For the purpose of this database, BIRN used the definition of the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, which says that a mass grave is a burial site where the “circumstances surrounding the death and/or the body-disposal method warrant an investigation as to their lawfulness”.

BIRN also used the terms ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ mass grave – a primary grave being the first grave in which remains are buried after death, and a secondary grave being a grave to which remains are transferred to after initially being buried in a primary grave. As the term mass grave itself is contested, the way the remains are counted depends on the institution involved in doing an exhumation and the methodology that it used.

BIRN relied upon and cross-referenced data from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Commission on Missing Persons, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina and other organisations that were involved in the process. BIRN particularly wants to thank the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina for its valuable insights, assistance and partnership throughout the whole project.

The BIRN database currently includes the 42 largest mass graves in the former Yugoslavia that yielded more than 100 bodies. In the second phase, BIRN will map graves containing between 50 and 100 bodies, while the third phase will map the remaining sites. It is estimated that around 1,600 such gravesites exist in the region.

BIRN’s approach to the database was multidisciplinary, with the aim of providing a more comprehensive look at the killings and subsequent cover-up of crimes that took place in the last decade of the 21st Century in the Balkan region. Taken cumulatively, this was the largest such cover-up operation in Europe since World War Two. The database includes material on the layout, location and surroundings of the gravesites, judicial evidence, open-source investigations, witness testimonies, forensic evidence, videos, drone footage, animations and 3D modelling. It also reflects on the memory culture associated with the clandestine gravesites.

Each mass grave entry contains a photo gallery and video footage of the current condition of the gravesite, the number of identified individuals exhumed from the grave, the timeframe of the exhumations, the location coordinates, archive images, a description, and links to resources relevant to the investigation and to BIRN reports, investigations, analyses and visual material.

This website was created and maintained with the financial support of The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Kingdom of Netherland’s Matra Rule of Law Programme and the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of BIRN and do not necessarily reflect the views of the donors.