Four-wheel-drive vehicles and U.S. Army Humvees snaked through the green hills of eastern Bosnia on Sunday to an embankment littered with shell casings: the presumed site of a mass grave holding victims of the worst known massacres of the Bosnian war.
There, German shepherds sniffed for land mines, surveyors used measuring tapes to map the area and local Serbs contracted to help recover the bodies rolled in wheelbarrows filled with pick-axes and shovels.A year after Bosnian Serb forces overran the eastern Muslim enclave of Srebrenica, investigators from the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, arrived in this presumed killing field to start the first comprehensive exhumation of a mass grave in Bosnia.
The evidence the team unearths over the next three months will be used to build a case against suspects indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal, including Bosnian Serb commander Gen. Ratko Mladic.
Mladic has been singled out as the man who orchestrated the massacres in Srebrenica, described in his tribunal indictment as "the most horrendous, unimaginable war crimes committed in Europe since the end of World War II."
He and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic have been indicted on charges of complicity in all the major atrocities carried out by rebel Serb forces in the 43-month Bosnian conflict.
The first grave site to be excavated is about 13 miles northeast of Mladic's military compound, Han Pijesak.
As the convoy left a U.S. base in Vlasenica, a town in the Serbian half of Bosnia about 20 miles northwest of Srebrenica, some residents watched and waved from the roadside.
The 15 investigators' white trucks, a backhoe and four Humvees outfitted with 50-caliber machine guns and anti-tank rockets traveled slowly through rolling hills believed to hold corpses of more than 7,000 Muslims.
Some were buried after mass executions; others were left where they fell in ambushes. Decomposing remains - piles of bones and tattered clothing - still can be seen scattered across the land.
The convoy stopped near Cerska, 17 miles northwest of Srebrenica, for the first excavation. The team followed a dusty track upward between two hills, stopping at a remote site in a valley with a brook bubbling through it.
Just off the track, investigators found four bodies in May - one with a bullet-sized hole in the back of the skull. More are believed buried here: Investigators think people were lined up on the road and shot, their bodies pushed over the embankment and buried.
On Sunday, Norwegian specialists using German shepherds were the first to enter the area, looking for land mines. They were followed by team members carrying metal detectors to help pinpoint evidence and measuring tapes to map the site.
The seven-ton backhoe will be used to remove the top layer of earth. Local laborers have been contracted to do the more delicate digging and removal of bodies. Four Serbs pushed brand-new wheelbarrows, filled with shovels and pick-axes, up the road to the site.
Twenty U.S. soldiers, dressed in full battle gear, were stationed around their site. Some walked around with their M-16s at the ready. One carried a sniper rifle. Others stayed inside their Humvees.
Back down on the main road, at least four Bradley Fighting Vehicles stood guard.
"We're kind of a 911 here," said Maj. Daniel Zajac, of Buffalo, N.Y., the officer in charge of security for the excavation site. In addition to his men, he said he could call on other nearby U.S. forces, bringing in Kiowa attack helicopters equipped with tank-killing missiles, Stinger missiles and 50-caliber machine guns.
The investigation will be conducted in two parts: exhumation and numbering of remains at the site, then their removal in refrigerated trucks for examination at a morgue.
In previous exhumations in the Srebrenica region, war crimes investigators have found remains of what is believed to be only a tiny fraction of the massacre victims.
The excavations starting Sunday are intended to reveal the scope of the slaughter. Some of the graves, located as close as nine miles to Srebrenica, are thought to contain as many as 2,700 people.