UNEARTHING EVIL

PERCHED ON THE NORTHEASTern edge of Bosnia, Brcko was once among the Ottoman Empire's farthest outposts. As one of the River Sava's largest ports, it was a fief of ferrymen who plied their craft from the south bank to Hapsburg-ruled Slavonia on the other side. The two empires are nearly 80 years in their graves now, and Brcko recently seems to have been the haunt of a more spectral ferryman: Charon, transporting the souls of thousands of murdered civilians across the Styx.

Telling evidence of mass graves around Brcko, and near the infamously conquered city of Srebrenica to the southeast, came to light last week as TIME correspondents explored parts of Bosnia under Serb control. What becomes evident from talking with people and surveying the landscape near Brcko is that at least 3,000 civilians--Muslims and Croats--disappeared at a time of vicious torture and secret nighttime excavations. The town has long been famous for its meat, mostly marketed under the Bimeks trade name. In a savage twist on that reputation, eyewitness accounts speak of a 1992 Serb campaign of systematic murders that allegedly culminated in the destruction of bodies at a former Bimeks animal-feed plant.

So far, only indirect corroboration has emerged for stories about corpses that were trucked to the plant to be cremated or minced into livestock feed, all for the purpose of destroying evidence of massacres. Several Brcko inhabitants say they have watched an amateur videotape that followed some of the process: refrigerated trucks delivering their loads. A Serb militiaman from the district who was captured by Bosnian government forces last year corroborates many rumors that the feed plant played host to some terrible deeds. On a videotape made available to TIME, the pow testifies that truck-driver friends of his told tales in great detail of transporting as many as 3,000 bodies to the factory from mass graves.

Bearing mute testimony to some strenuous level of secret activity is a patch of ground outside Brcko. Set in a depression near the entrance to a livestock farm, the ground is strangely level, rectangular and replanted with grass. Woods and other wild terrain surround it. By the accounts of at least three former Brcko residents, this land looking like a soccer field in the middle of nowhere was one of several burial places for thousands of murdered civilians.

When Bosnian Serb forces rose in rebellion against the Muslim-led government in April 1992, Brcko was one of the first places to come in for the euphemistically labeled task of ethnic cleansing. Serb militiamen who seized the town with a bang on April 30, blowing up two bridges across the Sava, proceeded to harass more and more of Brcko's Muslims and Croats, who made up more than two-thirds of the population. As May passed, legions of locals filled makeshift detention camps in a sports hall, a pig farm and other available compounds--including the notorious Luka camp, in abandoned warehouses on the river. Stories of atrocities in Luka and other camps abounded over the months that followed as survivors escaped into exile.