Personal Effects by Robert A. Jensen

Author:Robert A. Jensen [Jensen, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub

13. Mass Graves and Conflict Zones

There were hundreds of bodies lined up on racks in the abandoned salt mines just outside Tuzla. Some were in body bags, some just wrapped up in plastic. It was cold, the winter of 1995, and that helped keep the smell of decay to a minimum. Not like Haiti, where you could find the morgue just by closing your eyes and following your nose.

One of the Bosnian policemen who had accompanied me on my trip to the mine pointed at the rows of the dead, arranged on wooden shelves that had been lined up against the hewn walls of the ancient tunnels, many without a name attached to them or anything that might indicate how they had ended up there. At the time I was the commander of the 54th Quartermaster Company (MA) assigned to establish a Mortuary Affairs Collection Point for the US Army in Tuzla, where the US forces were establishing their bases. “When are you going to help us out with this?” the police officer asked. I looked at him and could only shrug. “Sorry, it’s not our business,” was all I could say.

Tuzla, like much of the region, had taken a beating; people were tired. The peacekeeping missions had largely failed, not because of the peacekeepers but because of the politics, and the dead from bombings, and mass executions—murders really—had started to pile up. This time around, unlike Haiti, the 54th had been sent into the Balkans well ahead of the main units shortly after NATO had agreed to forces on the ground. The Dayton Accords had been signed just before Thanksgiving 1995. My soldiers were told the holidays were canceled and we shipped off at a few hours’ notice, first to Germany with all our morgue equipment, then straight to Tuzla, the third largest city in Bosnia, famous for its ancient salt mines and still recovering when we arrived from heavy bombardment by the Serbs. My Mortuary Affairs unit arrived to a base still occupied by Swedish and other Scandinavian troops who had been part of the failed UN peacekeeping mission.

From the start, it was clear that NATO was there to ensure that the deaths stopped—a hugely important and at times a difficult task. Rebuilding the country and creating a lasting peace was going to be someone else’s job.

No one in the alliance’s command structure had given much—if any—thought to what they should do with the human debris of the worst conflict on European soil since the Second World War. My instructions were simple: identify and repatriate any NATO service members who died carrying out their duties enforcing the Dayton Accords, and do the same for the occasional foreign aid worker who died in a country bereft of any medical official who could legally write up a death certificate or evacuate a body back home. (Even repatriating the bodies of non-NATO personnel often got me grief from my chain of command, such is the rigidity of the military.)

My concern was that lasting peace in the Balkans had always proven elusive.

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