© Adam Jones The skull of a victim of the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica. This photo was taken in 2007 at a mass grave exhumed outside of the village of Potocari in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The victims of the mid-1990s genocide in Bosnia were allowed to suffer long before Bosnian Serb forces began their massacres, according to a new study of bones from mass graves in the region.
The bones of the victims are scarred with telltale signs of chronic disease and birth defects, suggesting that this population of Bosnian Muslims endured a lack of health care long before the Bosnian conflict turned violent.
"They had been marginalized for a long time," study researcher Ann Ross, an anthropologist at North Carolina State University, told LiveScience. "They had very poor health care. For example, there were a couple of individuals that had significant ear infections that had produced even the breakdown of bone. ... Obviously, that was telling me they didn't even have access to antibiotics that could have dealt with that issue."
Ross said that the research could help policymakers identify marginalized populations who are at risk of having their countrymen turn against them.
"This is the first time that the actual health of a population has been measured in victims of genocide," Ross said, pointing out that known risk factors for genocide are often anecdotal.
The study will appear in the fall issue of the journal Forensic Science Policy and Management.
