I am very interested in the various organizations that came into the country to help the recovery and documentation efforts under the premise of international supervision. It is very interesting to me that the largest donor to the ICMP program is the US government, yet most of us are not aware that our money is going to this cause. I also find it amazing that they were able to identify mortal remains at all. Especially given that a lot of them had been moved to a secondary gravesite.
I also was intrigued by the "sources of knowledge" that a lot of the victims' families used to help give them closure/find the remains of their family member. For instance, a lot of the women went to village fortune-tellers (or witch doctors, depending on translation) to find clues about their loved ones. Especially right after the massacres there was a desperate need for knowledge. We tend to think that beliefs such as these and belief in the effectiveness of DNA technology are mutually exclusive but in fact these people were willing to put stock in multiple types of knowledge in order to try and verify their beliefs. The author points out that even one of the directors of the program had gone to a local fortune teller for help finding her missing family members.
I think it would be very interesting to look at the United States' efforts to identify victims of 911 compared with these efforts. The last chapter in the book makes the comparison and it would be an interesting contrast to the situation found in Bosnia.
I was also particularly interested in the sources of knowledge victims' families used to find any piece of help or guidance about their missing loved ones. In connection with mutual exclusivity, I wonder if there was a great sense of anxiety in members of the community trusting in this DNA technology in a similar way at least I personally would feel consulting in a witch doctor, something in my culture completely foreign to me. It seems like a weird dichotomy to me to trust in widely verified sources of knowledge but then again, there is a factor of ignorance on my part. In addition, I wonder whether, in times of extreme grief, the dichotomy would exist at all or I would seek any and every source of comfort, relief, knowledge, etc. even regardless of my current mistrust in certain sources of information.
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