Late in the afternoon of July11, 1995, the Bosnian Serb army, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, seized the northeastern Bosnia town of Srebrenica. Declared a "safe area" by the United Nations two years earlier, the predominately Muslim community had swollen from a prewar population of 9,000 to over 40,000, many of whom had been "cleansed" from elsewhere in Bosnia. As Mladic's troops swarmed over the town, the women, children, elderly, and many of the men took refuge two kilometers away in the United Nation's Srebrenica headquarters, staffed by a Dutch battalion, in the village of Potocari. Meanwhile, the remaining Srebrenica men and boys- some 10,000 to 15,000- fled through the woods on foot, trying to reach Muslim-controlled territory, nearly 40 miles away.

Over the next three days, as the United Nation's response shifted from miscalculation to military blunder, leaving the Srebrenica population and the Dutch battalion in an indefensible position, General Mladic's army carried out the worst war crimes committed on European soil since World War II. Intent on cleansing the world's first "safe area" of all the Muslims, his army began in Potocari by separating the women and children, who were herded onto buses for a harrowing journey to Muslim-controlled territory, from the men, who were never seen by their families again. Thousands of other men and boys, who had fled on foot, were attacked or captured and executed by the Bosnian Serb Army. By July 13, 1995, thirty-six hours after the siege of Srebrenica began, the Bosnian Serb Army had "cleansed" all 40,000 Bosnian Muslims from the United Nations's "safe area."

Most women and children made it to Bosnian Muslim-controlled territory outside the town of Tuzla. From collective centers and hastily erected tents, they began the wait for their missing loved ones. Today, nearly six years later, the missing from Srebrenica have returned only in body bags. After one of the largest, most extensive, and historically unprecedented forensic investigations, over 4,000 body bags have been recovered from the fall of Srebrenica. However, despite a huge forensic operation, only 100 have been identified, and families continue to be torn between the hope that their missing are alive and the ever-increasing fear that they are dead.

The overwhelmingly undressed need of the families to learn the fate of their loved ones stems from several legal, scientific, political, and institutional factors. Taken together, these interrelated pediments point to the need for national and international institutions to respond to the surviving victims of genocide and other forms of mass murder more effectively in the future.

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In July 1996, a year after the siege of Srebrenica, foresenic scientists exhumed the bodies of 146 men from a mass grave on the grounds of the Pilica farm in northeastern Bosnia.