Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, December 2, 1993 TAG: 9312020011
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
But such an effort would be costly and time-consuming, and Pentagon spokesman Maj. Steve Little said Wednesday that no decision has been made to go forward.
Not a single set of remains returned from Korea in the past 39 years has been identified, and a study done for the Pentagon this year warned that the Army's main forensic laboratory may become "an expensive warehouse for the bones of the unknown."
About 8,140 American servicemen are listed by the U.S. government as unaccounted for from the 1950-53 Korean war. That includes 866 bodies returned in 1954 but never identified. Those bodies were buried in Hawaii.
After 1954, no remains were returned, until five were handed over by the North Koreans in 1990. Since then, an additional 91 have been returned, but none of the 96 has been identified. U.S. scientists doubt many of them are bodies of Americans.
The identification problem is the dark side of a gradually improving picture on repatriation of U.S. and allied servicemen who fought on the South Korean side against the Soviet- and Chinese-backed communist North Koreans.
On Tuesday, North Korean soldiers handed over 33 coffins with what they said were the remains of United Nations servicemen. It was the second repatriation this year, and North Korea said it would return more in December.
The main identification problems, officials say, are the damaged condition of the remains, the North's mixing of bones from multiple sets of remains in each coffin and a shortage of detail from personnel files for U.S. Korean War casualties.
At least a partial answer to the identification problem may lie in the use of mitochondrial-DNA analysis, a relatively new forensic technique in which a DNA molecule taken from bone samples can be compared with blood donated by a maternal-line relative. It has been used to identify some U.S. remains from the Vietnam War.
In a recent Rand Corp. study for the Pentagon, Thomas Holland, a forensic anthropologist at the Army's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, called mitochondrial-DNA analysis "perhaps the most promising" technique available.
The Pentagon never publicly announced that it is considering a DNA program for Korean War remains, but officials who have commented on it recently stressed that it would be a financial burden in a time of tightening defense budgets.
Edward Ross, the head of the Pentagon's POW-MIA office, wrote in an Oct. 8 letter to the Korean-Cold War Association of the Missing that, in view of an "expected influx of Korean War remains," Defense Secretary Les Aspin would have to decide the DNA issue "fully aware of the impact on limited resources."
Little said he knew of no estimate of how much the DNA effort would cost.
North Korea has never said how many war remains it holds, but the number may be in the thousands. There is no official U.S. count of recoverable remains.
The Clinton administration last August adopted an agreement with North Korea to cooperate in finding, exhuming and repatriating remains of U.S. and allied servicemen. A joint "working group" was to be formed to coordinate the process, but so far the group has held no meetings and none is scheduled.
In announcing the August agreement, the Pentagon stated that even using state-of-the-art American recovery techniques and with full cooperation by the North Koreans, chances of identifying remains "will be minimal at best."
In his study, Holland said the U.S. government must insist on having the Army's Central Identification Laboratory (CILHI) in Hawaii participate directly in on-site recovery of the remains or train the North Koreans in U.S. techniques.
Holland concluded, "Without these changes in collection and custody practices, CILHI will become an expensive warehouse for the bones of the unknown."
by CNB