Book review: Bosnia’s million bones: solving the world’s greatest forensic puzzle by Christian Jennings

摘要

What it would be like to be tasked with finding, exhuming from dozens of mass graves, and then identifying the body-parts of an estimated 8,100 victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in eastern Bosnia? In 1999 one DNA laboratory, run by the International Commission on Missing Persons in Sarajevo, decided to try and solve “the world’s greatest forensic puzzle’. In this book Christian Jennings aims to describe how this was done, and how these new forensic techniques are now being used identify the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean tsunami. Julia Himmrich finds that although this book may disappoint academics, it does deliver some informed insights on different aspects of the conflict for new readers.