Nine plywood coffins lay in a neat row against the mosque's shell, bathed in sunshine flowing through blown out windows.
Across a patch of matted grass infested with weeds, nine skeletons in blue prison uniforms lay side by side in a shallow pit, their skulls pointing toward the coffins.A Bosnian coroner's team on Monday began unearthing the remains of victims of Bosnian Serb forces who occupied the village of Svrake, 10 miles north of Sarajevo, from 1992 until early this year.
Their work was overshadowed by this week's effort to uncover what are thought to be the Bosnian war's most notorious mass graves at Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, where Serb forces may have killed up to 7,000 Muslim civilians a year ago this week.
But there are 250,000 people dead or missing from the 31/2-year war. And families travel to small sites such as this one - a tiny graveyard in a country village - to search for answers to nagging questions.
Witnesses say the Bosnian Serb forces committed their crimes with an eye toward hampering evidence gathering later on.
"They were clever in hiding their crimes," said Eset Muracovic, who returned to the village cemetery where years earlier he had helped bury the dead.
"We know who those nine are," said chief investigator Izet Bazdaravic, sipping dark Turkish coffee at a picnic table set up in the graveyard and nodding at the diggers. "The others have to be identified."
There were two other sections roped off with police tape where digging had not yet begun in the backyard-size cemetery nestled among red-roofed houses.
The nine bodies were identified principally because of one witness, Hamid Music. He traveled the 20 miles north from Hadzici on Monday to help with the dig.
Music and other male residents of Hadzici were taken prisoner by Serb forces sweeping through the villages south of Sarajevo in July 1992. The Hadzici prisoners were brought to Svrake to dig trenches for the Serbs on the front line.
On Dec. 12, Music said, a Serb soldier heard that his brother had been killed. He and a friend rounded up nine prisoners and drove them to a spot about two miles away, Music said.
A while later, they returned and told prisoners to unload nine bodies from a truck and bury them, he said.
"Their arms and legs were broken, their skulls were smashed and they had been shot to death," recalled Music.
He knew all nine prisoners, fellow Hadzici villagers - including his brother, Saban, older by three years, dead at 46.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Party may be banned
The United Nations in Sarajevo on Tuesday implicitly endorsed a plan to disqualify the leading Serb nationalist party from Bosnia's September elections unless it dumps war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic as chairman.
Karadzic, the separatist Serbs' political leader, was last week re-elected chairman of the Serb Democratic Union, one of Bosnia's three main political parties.
He retains the title Bosnian Serb president, although he has handed over his executive power to his deputy.
The head of the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe mission in Bosnia on Monday announced he would ban the SDS party from elections unless Karadzic, twice indicted for war crimes, was removed as chairman.
U.N. spokesman Alex Ivanko said in Sarajevo: "The position of the United Nations is that no indicted war criminal, including Radovan Karadzic, can play any role whatsoever in the forthcoming elections."
"The reality is that the position of SDS chairman is a position of power that may influence the elections in the Bosnian Serb republic."