As the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was reaching its conclusion in 1995, I was working with refugees in Melbourne, including young men around the same age as me, who had fled their homes in Bosnia.
They described their homeland’s descent into unimaginable brutality, where friends and neighbours became lethal enemies.
20 years later, I am travelling to Bosnia with Damir Mitric filming 'Bosnia's Code of Silence' for Dateline.
He wants to know what happened to his two cousins who disappeared without trace as the conflict escalated. He is also an activist for truth and justice in his homeland.
Damir fled Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, as a nine-year-old and resettled in Australia as a teenager with his family – via Slovakia and Germany. Now he has his own family.
I’d met him at a dinner for academics and activists working on refugee issues. A historian, he had spent years researching the war he’d fled. 
I was intrigued by Damir’s struggle to make sense of Bosnia’s disintegration and its impact on his life.
Damir and his family ultimately settled in Melbourne after fleeing the war in Bosnia. Source: SBS Dateline
He spoke warmly of his early years, about a life in which ethnicity and religion weren’t an issue, where neighbours lived together in an easy coexistence.
He sees himself as a product of the multiculturalism of the former Yugoslavia of which Bosnia was part. His father is Serbian, his mother a Bosnian Muslim.
Over several months, I became interested in his take on contemporary Bosnia. After being torn apart along ethnic and religious lines, how was the country rebuilding two decades after the end of the war?
As we travel across Bosnia, Damir and I witness the scars of war still present: mushroom craters on footpaths in Sarajevo, the legacy of exploding mortars; bullet holes and patched-up cavities in residential buildings, reminders of the four-year-long siege of the capital.
Damir and David on their train journey through Bosnia. Source: SBS Dateline
Beyond Sarajevo, stone cottages in empty or near-empty villages remain in ruins, memorials to ‘ethnic cleansing’ – whole populations murdered or deported from their homes on the basis of their ethnicity and religion.
I also discover that the process of reconciliation between divided communities is limited and halting. Some people we spoke with, including Damir’s friends and relatives, have decided bravely to return to live in areas where massacres and ethnic cleansing occurred.
There is no discussion with their neighbours about the past. Suspicion and even fear of neighbours persist in many parts of the country.
We meet Sudbin Music, a friend of Damir’s who survived a massacre. Damir had not seen him for two decades and Sudbin wants to take us to two places where the sheer brutality of the conflict hits home.
At Jakarina Kosa in the north of the country, even the soil continues to give up gruesome souvenirs of war and genocide.
Sudbin and Damir at the Jakarina Kosa mass grave, which is being excavated for the third time. Source: SBS Dateline
We visit an old mine site, the location of a mass grave where we witness human remains – bones, hair, clothing, watches – being unearthed and carefully catalogued.
In 2001, investigators found the remains of 373 people – not all complete bodies – buried by Serbian forces here. Some of the remains had been reburied after being removed from another site called Tomasica.
Now, as part of ongoing investigations into war crimes, the heavy machinery is for the third time growling at Jakarina Kosa.
Eventually, we make our way to Tomasica itself, the largest mass grave discovered in Europe since World War Two.
This is not some hidden place. It is so close to Serbian villages that we can hear a rooster crowing.
Only a couple of years ago Tomasica too was an excavation site. In 2013, 401 ‘groups’ of remains were found there, including 275 complete bodies, 102 body parts and 24 bags of remains.
The site is now being reclaimed by nature and there is a terrible beauty to its onward march. But it is also disconcerting that there is no memorial to mark Tomasica’s wicked significance.
Sadly, humanity seems adept at repeating the crimes of history, and that may be even more likely if we fail to acknowledge the past.
Damir and David in Melbourne looking through photos from Damir's childhood in Bosnia. Source: SBS Dateline
Finally, we travel to Mostar, the historic city which was subject to a relentless bombardment during the war. There, on a hill overlooking the city, we meet a man who says he has the answers to the mystery of what happened to Damir’s cousins.
It is a sad moment, but Damir remains determined to pursue his cause of truth, justice and reconciliation for Bosnia.
Dr David Corlett is an expert on refugees and asylum seekers, who presents SBS’s Go Back To Where You Came From.
