25 years on, victims of Bosnian massacre being identified and buried
team of specialists – including neurosurgeons, anaesthesiologists, neuroradiologists, plastic surgeons, engineers, and physiotherapists – was the shared network of blood vessels bringing blood from the girls’ brains to their hearts, the hospital said.
The procedure required “three very delicate operations to progressively reconstruct two independent venous systems”, it said.
The final surgery, which took 18 hours and involved 30 doctors and nurses, took place on June 5 when the bones of the shared skull were divided.
Surgeons reconstructed the membrane covering the two brains and recreated the skin lining over the new skulls.
“A month after the final separation, the twins are fine,” said the hospital.
Dr Carlo Marras, chief of paediatric neurosurgery, who led the team that worked for nearly two years planning and executing the separation, said the sisters would be able to lead a normal.
Before the separation surgery, members of the Vatican hospital’s staff gave the girls mirrors so they could see one another.
The twins’ mother, Ermine Nzotto, said: “It’s a joy, that I can see my girls run and play like other children.
“May they tomorrow study and learn to become doctors to save the other children of this world.”
She thanked Marras, the hospital president and Pope Francis, who visited CAR’s capital of Bangui in 2015 and has since strongly supported Bambino Gesu’s collaboration with the paediatric hospital there.
A QUARTER of a century after they were killed in Europe’s worst massacre since World War II, eight Bosnian men and boys will be laid to rest in a cemetery just outside Srebrenica tomorrow – their marble gravestones joining thousands more, each with the same month and year of death.
More than 8 000 Bosnian Muslims died in 10 days of slaughter after the town was overrun by Bosnian Serb forces in the closing months of the country’s 1992 to 1995 fratricidal war.
Their executioners tried to ensure they would never get the sort of memorial Srebrenica holds every year. Their bodies were ploughed into hastily made mass graves and then later dug up with bulldozers and scattered among other burial sites to hide the evidence of the crime.
But, since 1996, Bosnian and international scientists have slowly unlocked what was once described as the “biggest forensic puzzle anywhere in the world”, unearthing the bones from the gruesome death pits and connecting them to the names of the people they belonged to.
When the remains are identified, they are returned to their relatives and reburied in the Potocari memorial cemetery. And each year on July 11, the anniversary of the day the killing began in 1995, relatives gather for a funeral of the recently identified. Most of the dead were men and boys.
Typically, thousands of visitors from various countries attend the July 11 service, but this year, because of the coronavirus pandemic, only a small number of survivors will be allowed.
Many speakers will attend “virtually”, said Emir Suljagic, the director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center at Potocari.
That the massacre survivors are able to visit their dead at all is a testament to the forensic scientists at the International Commission on Missing Persons.
Set up in 1996 at the urging of then-US president Bill Clinton, the commission designed a DNA system to find and identify the remains of some 40 000 people, most of them from Bosnia, who had been reported as missing as a result of the 1990s conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
In 2014, the commission became a permanent global body, expanded its mission to other conflicts and natural disasters, and moved its headquarters to The Hague. But not before helping to identify more than 70% of all the missing victims of the 1990s Balkan wars, including close to 7 000 of those killed in Srebrenica.