UNEARTHING EVIL

By JAMES WALSH

PERCHED ON THE NORTHEASTern edge of Bosnia, Brcko was once among the Ottoman Empire's farthest outposts. As one of the River Sava's largest ports, it was a fief of ferrymen who plied their craft from the south bank to Hapsburg-ruled Slavonia on the other side. The two empires are nearly 80 years in their graves now, and Brcko recently seems to have been the haunt of a more spectral ferryman: Charon, transporting the souls of thousands of murdered civilians across the Styx.

Telling evidence of mass graves around Brcko, and near the infamously conquered city of Srebrenica to the southeast, came to light last week as TIME correspondents explored parts of Bosnia under Serb control. What becomes evident from talking with people and surveying the landscape near Brcko is that at least 3,000 civilians--Muslims and Croats--disappeared at a time of vicious torture and secret nighttime excavations. The town has long been famous for its meat, mostly marketed under the Bimeks trade name. In a savage twist on that reputation, eyewitness accounts speak of a 1992 Serb campaign of systematic murders that allegedly culminated in the destruction of bodies at a former Bimeks animal-feed plant.

So far, only indirect corroboration has emerged for stories about corpses that were trucked to the plant to be cremated or minced into livestock feed, all for the purpose of destroying evidence of massacres. Several Brcko inhabitants say they have watched an amateur videotape that followed some of the process: refrigerated trucks delivering their loads. A Serb militiaman from the district who was captured by Bosnian government forces last year corroborates many rumors that the feed plant played host to some terrible deeds. On a videotape made available to TIME, the pow testifies that truck-driver friends of his told tales in great detail of transporting as many as 3,000 bodies to the factory from mass graves.

Bearing mute testimony to some strenuous level of secret activity is a patch of ground outside Brcko. Set in a depression near the entrance to a livestock farm, the ground is strangely level, rectangular and replanted with grass. Woods and other wild terrain surround it. By the accounts of at least three former Brcko residents, this land looking like a soccer field in the middle of nowhere was one of several burial places for thousands of murdered civilians.

When Bosnian Serb forces rose in rebellion against the Muslim-led government in April 1992, Brcko was one of the first places to come in for the euphemistically labeled task of ethnic cleansing. Serb militiamen who seized the town with a bang on April 30, blowing up two bridges across the Sava, proceeded to harass more and more of Brcko's Muslims and Croats, who made up more than two-thirds of the population. As May passed, legions of locals filled makeshift detention camps in a sports hall, a pig farm and other available compounds--including the notorious Luka camp, in abandoned warehouses on the river. Stories of atrocities in Luka and other camps abounded over the months that followed as survivors escaped into exile.

Seeing a disposal site for inmates who disappeared, and whose murders were described by fellow prisoners, came as a shock to a 58-year-old Croat electrical engineer, who told his story last week. The skilled workman had been spared internment because he was needed to help maintain power lines. One morning in June 1992, he says, his crew was checking a line near the livestock farm when they abruptly halted. Off the road, where the oddly green patch now sits, was a large excavation with parts of clothed corpses protruding, and with a yellow bulldozer parked nearby.

The crew, which included Serb overseers, froze in place and then left at once, he says. "We pretended that we had not seen anything," he explains, because Serb authorities "could have killed us for that." Even later, and among themselves, the men who were under forced labor carefully avoided mention of the sighting. "You never knew if one of the others would tell it to the Serbs," the engineer remarks. "We were all paralyzed by fear." But the witness insists, "It's a fact that they were burying people there." The multicolored clothes suggested dead civilians.

A 50-year-old Muslim who worked at the livestock farm near the pit recalls his own jolt one morning, after one of the rare nights in early June when he was not forced to sleep on the premises. On previous occasions, the former truck driver reports, he could hear the sound of the bulldozer working late at night, but he had thought nothing much of it. On the morning in question, he was returning to the job from home and stumbled across a pool of blood on the entrance road.

The puddle contained bits of what he feels certain was brain tissue, and leading from it to the excavation was the unmistakable trail of a human body that had been dragged. The ribbon of blood and brain bits petered out. "It was a terrible recognition," he says. "I was shaking, and I lost myself for a few moments. But I had to go on and pretend everything was usual." As he tells it, later "the mountain of earth grew," and "then one day at the end of June or early July, it was flattened and apparently sown, because after a while it looked like a green soccer field."

A 1994 report by the U.N. identified no fewer than 187 suspected mass-grave sites in the former Yugoslavia, most of them in Bosnia. Thirteen supposedly had "500 bodies or more," and some as many as 5,000. The report came out a year before the fall of Srebrenica to Serb forces last July, following which up to 8,000 Muslim men, women and children vanished--either taken captive by the Serbs, killed on sight by them, or gone missing from an enormous, frequently attacked column of military-age men fleeing across Serb territory. Just how difficult it remains to investigate alleged grave sites near Srebrenica became clear last week when local Serb police detained TIME correspondent Massimo Calabresi and USA Today reporter Tom Squitieri for two hours, then expelled them.

The arrests came after a return visit by the journalists to spots of clayey earth outside the village of Glogova, in a valley near Srebrenica. One site showed shattered human remains: a splintered femur amid rubber boots, a broken skull, and a jawbone with nine teeth attached. The other revealed fresher evidence of mayhem: stained bandages, a split limb with flesh still clinging to it, and the fetid smell of decay. What appeared to be recent tracks of earth-moving equipment at one of the graded patches reinforced Western suspicions, aroused by U.S. aerial photos taken last October, that some mass graves near Srebrenica were being re-excavated for cover-up purposes. The charred, bullet-riddled facade of a factory warehouse in the village of Kravica also supported accounts that Glogova's suspected graves were filled with men who had been killed with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire in the building.

All that happened in Bosnia is documented mostly so far by the say-so of people who escaped. In the testimony of survivors, death in the Luka and other Brcko holding tanks was never so industrialized as at a Nazi death camp. But refugee stories tell of murder with wild abandon. According to a U.S. State Department report issued in September 1992, at least 3,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in Brcko's camps and streets that year. Traffic engineer Alija Lujinovic, a Muslim and 53 at the time, told of how Serb guards shot inmates, slit throats and disemboweled them--orgies of carnage that were especially gruesome after the guards had been on drinking bouts and had swallowed unidentified green pills.

"In one case," says the report, "the guards broke a prisoner's head with gun butts to spill the brains. Then they called dogs to eat the brains." The document adduces much other grim testimony, including the account of a citizen who had visited a cattle slaughterhouse and heard screams and shots: the final moments of what reputedly was the killing of 100 to 300 people that night. In another story, camp guards indulged in the macabre game of forcing two prisoners to slap each other; the weaker slapper was usually killed on the spot.

Whether bodies ended up in vats at the feed factory remains an open question; the U.S. State Department cited stories that corpses were cremated in the plant's furnaces. At all events, a U.N. panel is eager to know much more. In the Hague, the International War Crimes Tribunal, which is charged with adjudicating war crimes in Bosnia, has asked for NATO peace enforcers to protect investigators searching for graves, to guard grave sites against tampering and to help in the arrest of accused war criminals. But at a meeting in Brussels last week, NATO officials evaded such requests, emphasizing NATO's need to concentrate on broad security.

U.S. Secretary of Defense William Perry has offered to help investigators, but only if it does not interfere with his troops' main mission--and only after all U.S. forces are in place, which will not be for another month. Right now, the peace enforcers' primary job is to create and maintain a "zone of separation" between the belligerents, a task nearly completed last week. Lieut. General Michael Walker, commander of NATO ground troops in Bosnia, declared, "We would be running around like rabbits if we went rushing after every single mass-grave allegation." NATO, though, also seems to be shying away from the vast atrocity specter for fear that too much digging will blow up the peace. Too little has dangers as well. Already, prisoner exchanges have faltered, in part because of Bosnia's insistence on an accounting for its missing. Such efforts do not seem likely to increase soon. Brcko and Srebrenica are in the U.S. sector, and for now the evidence of atrocities there will remain unexamined and unprotected.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi/Glogova, Alexandra Stiglmayer/Brcko and Mark Thompson/Washington

With reporting by MASSIMO CALABRESI/GLOGOVA, ALEXANDRA STIGLMAYER/BRCKO AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON