Moses Schanfield is just back from the grim business of identifying mass grave remains in Bosnia and Croatia.
He visited two grave sites filled with Croats who had been butchered by Serbs. Croat government officials told him there were 50 more grave sites in their republic, containing as many as 2,800 bodies.But the Muslims and Serbs have even more mass graves. All three sides practice "ethnic cleansing," which has left more than 200,000 dead or missing and created up to 3 million refugees in the 31/2-year war.
"There are a lot of victims and not many good guys," said Schanfield.
A geneticist and anthropologist, Schanfield is laboratory director of the Analytical Genetic Testing Center in Denver. He was one of five forensic scientists flown to the war zone by AmeriCares, a Connecticut-based charity, to advise Croatian pathologists on DNA identification techniques.
Schanfield's lab is one of the few in the United States that does forensic parentage testing. That means identifying bodies by comparing their DNA to that of living maternal relatives, as was done with the Russian czar's family 77 years after they were killed by the Bolsheviks.
In the former Yugoslavia, said Schanfield, "the only way to identify the dead is with relatives - either visually, if the bodies aren't too badly decomposed, or with DNA. The reality is that in Bosnia only 30 percent of the population has dental records and most of them have been destroyed. Medical records, such things as X-rays, are even tougher to find."
For example, one of the mass graves Schanfield visited was in Kupres, a Bosnian Croat town occupied by Serb forces in 1992. The hospital there had been destroyed and the bodies were beyond recognition. But the Croats had a list of everyone with a missing relative, so it was relatively easy to obtain DNA samples.
Nevertheless, says Schanfield, it will take years to account for all the dead, just as it will take years to rebuild the shattered lives of the living.
Although a cease-fire of sorts is in effect, refugee columns are still wandering the Bosnian countryside, sometimes passing each other on the roads as each ethnic group tries to reach territory held by its own forces.
Peace talks are due to begin Oct. 31 in Dayton, Ohio, but the threat of renewed fighting remains.
If and when the talks result in a final settlement, NATO is supposed to deploy a 60,000-man "peace implementation force" to help police it. But Congress is not at all sure it wants to honor President Clinton's pledge of up to 25,000 American troops for such a force.
The one thing Congress fears most is Americans coming home in body bags. And Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman John Shalikashvili conceded that "casualties are very likely."
Schanfield, who's seen plenty of body bags, thinks it is worth risking American lives to end the worst conflict Europe has seen since World War II. But not the way the United Nations did it.
"The U.N. was a disaster," he said. "The only way to make it work is to go in heavily armed with the right to use maximum force. Otherwise we're going to have U.S. troops dying for nothing."