Srebrenica’s Bone-Hunter Maintains His One-Man Search

“I walk every day… Whenever I am free and have no work to do at home, I walk.”

Ramiz Nukic, who comes from the village of Buljim, near Bratunac, says he still finds at least one human bone every day, even though 21 years have now passed since the Srebrenica genocide.

“Sometimes I walk 30 or 40 kilometres a day until I find something. I never get tired when it comes to this,” Nukic told BIRN.

His relentless search is inspired by his own loss – his father and two brothers were among more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys from Srebrenica who were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995.

When Serb troops attacked Srebrenica, a column of several thousand men fled through the woods, trying to reach safety in territory under the control of the Bosnian Army. Nukic, his father and brothers were among them.

But when the column of Srebrenica residents was shelled and the men scattered in panic, Nukic parted ways with his brothers and father and has never seen them since.

‘Three skeletons were beneath my feet’

Four years later, Nukic returned to his home village and began searching for the remains of his father and brothers. He said that what he found on the hill where they had been killed “froze the blood” in his veins.

“When I saw clothes and shoes scattered there, something died inside me. Three complete skeletons were beneath my feet. I was a bit scared too, because I did not know where the landmines were, but I overcame the fears. After that, something attracted me to those bones,” Nukic recalled.

The first bones he found did not belong to his relatives. Neither did the hundreds of bones and other remains he has found since then.

Nukic’s father and brothers were found in the Zvornik are last year, twenty years after the genocide. They were buried in the Muslim cemetery in Potocari near Srebrenica.

He said that because he felt so happy when he found them, he will never stop searching for bones so each family can live to experience the same feeling.

“I collect even the smallest bones… It does not matter whether they will be buried in a collective grave or not, the most important thing is to collect them,” he explained.

Some have expressed incredulity at Nukic’s self-imposed, solo mission.

“My closest neighbours told me: ‘You are a fool. Why are you walking around? For who?’” he said.

“Yes, but I cannot just let these bones decay at the bottom of some stream, while someone’s mother or sister is crying, searching… Everyone is glad to find their people, just like I was glad to find my brothers and father,” he added.

‘This is a thigh, these are ribs’

Nowadays he finds most of the bones around streams deep in the forest. Thanks to his efforts and persistence, the Institute for Missing Persons of Bosnia and Herzegovina has managed to identify the remains of more than 200 Srebrenica victims.

Hiking through thorn bushes, shrubs and forest, Nukic, who carries a stick in his hand, marks each location at which he has found bones on the surface and puts the human remains in a pile.

Showing one of those piles to a BIRN journalist, he said he has already learned to recognise parts of bones.

“Look here, this is a leg, a thigh. These are arm bones. This is a part of a skull. These are ribs and vertebrae. These are feet I found together in socks,” he explained.

“When I have no container, I put them in my pockets. I collect them and carry them with me,” he added.

He said that failing to find a single bone after an all-day search is the hardest thing for him.

“If I fail to find at least one bone, when I come home I feel as if I have been slapped, beaten up. I am that sad. But when I find a bone, I am happy the whole day. Even if it is just one bone, at least I have found it,” he said.

Nukic lives in poverty in Buljim; he has no job and provides for his family by growing strawberries. But his search for bones will continue.

“I shall search for as long as there are bones out there. They [the Institute for Missing Persons] wanted to close this location the year before last. They said there were no more bones,” he recalled.

“I said: no closure. As long as I am here to collect those bones, you will not close this location. When I stop collecting them, you will know there are no more left,” he said.

Twenty-one years on, more than 7,000 Srebrenica victims have been found in the soil of Bratunac, Zvornik and Srebrenica.

The search for more than 1,000 more continues.