By Matt Sepic, KWMU
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kwmu/local-kwmu-692429.mp3
St. Louis – Kemal Ceric came close to surviving the Bosnian war. He was a microbiologist and a secular Muslim in the city of Prijedor.
In 1992, when Bosnian Serbs began persecuting non-Serbs there, he was fired from his job and shipped off to work in a Serb-controlled part of Croatia. Three years later, Ceric came home, thinking things had calmed down. But a few days after he returned, two men who identified themselves as police came for him in an unmarked green Mercedes.
"The green Mercedes drove off, and that is the last time anything was heard about my father," son Jasmin Ceric said in 2005.
That year a team from the International Commission on Missing Persons visited St. Louis to collect DNA samples from the many Bosnian refugees who've settled here.
At the time, Jasmin held out little hope of ever learning what happened to his father. But the next year, he got the grim news he'd sought for more than a decade.
"We got a phone call from a cousin, and he said [my father] was found," Ceric said.
Kemal's body had been dumped in a village well outside Prijedor. His remains were first discovered in the well in 2000, along with his brown sweater and leather boots. There was a bullet hole in the back of his skull.
The unidentified bones were buried. Then in 2005 they were exhumed, but it took another year for the ICMP to make a conclusive DNA match.
Investigating crime scenes is painstaking work under the best of circumstances. But journalist Ed Vulliamy said the ICMP faces additional hurdles in the Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia because those in power there don't like to talk about the past.
"If I had murdered someone and buried them in my garden, I would not be helping the police to come and dig up my garden," Vulliamy said in an interview from his office in London.
Vulliamy reported for the British Guardian newspaper during the war, and has since become an advocate for Bosnian genocide survivors.
He said denial of the mass killings is commonplace in the former Yugoslavia, and the Serbs who still control parts of Bosnia have hampered efforts to identify victims such as Kemal Ceric.
"On and on the obfuscation goes," Vulliamy said. "And Jasmin needs, wants and deserves justice and an admission of what was done to his father. And so do all the others, every single one of them."
Jasmin returned to Prijedor to bury his father and pursue some justice. He won a small bureaucratic victory when he pressured a local records clerk to list his father's cause of death as homicide. But Jasmin wants more. He wants someone to be held accountable.
"I will sue them for everything when I have time, just for justification, because my father didn't do anything to anyone," Ceric said.
But legal action could prove difficult. Jasmin still does not know who pulled the trigger, or who helped cover up the crime. And last year the United Nations' highest court cleared Serbia of direct responsibility for genocide.
For now, the sweater and boots Kemal Ceric was wearing when he was killed are in a glass case at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum. They're a stark reminder that thousands of survivors like Jasmin Ceric are still awaiting justice.