No project is as essential to reconciliation and peace as this one, which can bring closure to thousands of families who have been locked in the torment of the past

Ex-US Senator Bob Dole

Large numbers of bodies have been exhumed from mass graves around the country, but they have been hard to identify because so many are severely decomposed.

Correspondents say that the issue of finding, identifying and burying the bodies is an important part of the reconciliation process, as thousands of families feel unable to resume normal life until they know the fate of their loved ones.

Massacre

The institute was opened by the former American Senator, Bob Dole, who chairs the International Commission on Missing Persons for the former Yugoslavia.

The ceremony was attended by the mayor of Srebrenica, scene of Europe's worst massacre since World War II, and several representatives of the families of the missing.

More than 7,000 men are missing, presumed dead, from the Srebrenica massacre alone.

Mr Dole said that DNA technology in the new institute would cut the time needed to identify all those listed as missing from the Bosnian war to at most a decade.

Under traditional identification process, it could have taken as long as 100 years.

Answers during their lifetime

"This means that the living relatives would have no hope of learning the fate of their loved ones in their lifetimes," Mr Dole said.

Forensic experts investigate a mass grave near Sarajevo

Mr Dole said the new institute was the fulfilment of a promise to the families of the missing.

He drew a comparison with the American experience after the Vietnam war, saying that families needed to be able to identify and bury their missing relatives.

"No project is as essential to reconciliation and peace as this one, which can bring closure to thousands of families who have been locked in the torment of the past and unable to move towards the promise of the future," he said.

The new institute will collect blood samples from victims' relatives and try to match them with DNA data obtained from the bones or teeth of exhumed bodies.

Obstruction

Its opening was marked by official statements of good will.

However a BBC correspondent at the ceremony, Alix Kroeger, says that relatives face continuing obstruction from the wartime nationalist governments who still hold power in Bosnia.

Many of those indicted for the war crimes in which they died are still free.

The Bosnian Serb minister of justice called for all levels of government to work together. But there is still mistrust between them.

Our correspondent says that getting the authorities to co-operate in practice may be the institute's most difficult task, but one that is vital if the families of the missing are ever to have any answers.