Families Seek Answers Second Day Of Protests Over Thousands Of Missing Muslims

Hundreds of refugees from the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica demanded Tuesday that the world find out what happened to thousands of Muslims who vanished in eastern Bosnia.

On Monday, the protesters attacked Red Cross and U.N. offices in Tuzla. Tuesday’s protests were less violent but just as bitter.

“If our husbands, sons and brothers are alive tell us, so we can hope. If they are dead tell us, so we can pray for them,” said one woman in a crowd of mostly women in front of Red Cross headquarters in Tuzla.

The Bosnian government is demanding information on some 20,000 Muslims, many of them presumed dead.

In another grim legacy of the war, a U.N. investigator reported progress Tuesday in talks with Serb leaders on his efforts to trace missing Croats, but said his team could not unearth mass graves before spring.

“We have to open the mass graves,” investigator Manfred Novak told journalists before driving with U.N. soldiers to a snowy, windswept pig farm where about 200 Croats reportedly were shot by the Serb-led Yugoslav army in 1991.

The bodies, partially uncovered in 1992, have been guarded since then by a handful of Russian troops attached to the United Nations. However, Serb authorities, who still control the eastern swath of Croatia, have blocked repeated efforts to photograph or film the site.