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The Bones tell a Story
| Date: |
08 May 2005 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Diana Lucas
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Clea Koff (Forensic anthropologist): 'There are people out there who have killed others, believe that they have silenced them forever, that they've gotten away with it - and then the body comes back to point the finger.'
Ruda Landman (Carte Blanche presenter): 'Hundreds of people taking refuge in a small church in Rwanda are hacked to death. Patients and staff from a hospital in Croatia are lined up at the edge of a rubbish pit and shot. 8000 men and boys in Bosnia flee from an invading army - and are never seen again. In each case, the killers believed they had silenced these people forever. What they didn't know was that bones can speak.'
Clea: 'Bones are wonderful things. In the human skeleton you have essentially a record of someone's life.'
Clea Koff is a forensic anthropologist. In 1996, at age 23, she went to war-torn Rwanda as the youngest member of the first United Nations Forensic Team to exhume a mass grave. Their mission: to corroborate eyewitness accounts of the 1994 genocide in face of the official denials.
Clea: 'When it comes to exhuming bodies, I believe personally, that you must have a very good reason to bring a body out of the earth. But in the case of people who have been murdered, or have died accidentally and are unidentified, you need to return their identity to them - in part for their own dignity, because this is one of the few things that we have in our lives is our identity, but also so that you can return them to their families or whoever it is out there who cares about them.'
Their first job was to retrieve and analyse unburied skeletons in and around the Kibuye Church. Here alone 4000 people had been attacked and killed, not only outside the church but those taking refuge inside.
Ruda: 'If you think back to the first experience in Kibuye, what was it like?'
Clea: 'When we were actually there amongst the bodies I felt a type of happiness that came from below, somewhere around my tummy and it worked its way up into this smile because, even though I was amongst all of this death, I knew that we were going to help, and I knew that I was where I'd hoped to be. At the same time, I was seeing the reality of this crime and these bodies around Kibuye church showed the signs of people who had tried to flee something dangerous. Some of them had cuts on the backs of their heels, which corroborated with witness testimony of the killers trying to stop people from running away, so that, when they came back from dinner, they could finish them off.'
Once decomposing bodies have been found, the anthropologists will match bones with skulls. Later, in a makeshift lab they will reassemble the skeleton and together with pathologists determine the cause of death.
Clea: 'So the anthropologists actually glue skulls and other bones back together and in this way they actually find where bullets went in and went out because the people were shot in the back of the head, the people were shot at close range - these are the types of things that go towards proving what types of crime took place, because there is legitimate killing within a lawful war, so war crimes...you have to be able to differentiate.'
Ruda: 'What are the physical conditions? How do you do it?'
Clea: 'Physically this work is difficult because, of course, you're having to lift soil, remove soil, but at the same time not actually stand on what's beneath. So you're in the situation where you are approaching a grassy field, you don't know where the grave is; there's just an allegation of a grave. You begin probing with a metal stick - gently. Then you sniff the tip of this metal probe to see if you can smell the scent of decomposition. You have to know where you can dig, and you dig by hand, so you work with picks, shovels, trowels, chopsticks, spoons...'
Ruda: 'And for you yourself standing there, what do you smell in the first place?'
Clea: 'When you begin to expose human remains to the air again you have decomposition which begins again; people's intestines are beginning to decompose. You have a lot of sharp ammonia-like smells and then some sweeter, more pungent smells. It's very strong and you give in to it.'
As a forensic scientist objectivity is key. Their job is to work with the dead, but here on the killing fields of Rwanda, confronted by the thousands of corpses, Clea was hit by a more personal response.
Clea: 'So often of course the people in the graves had with them items they'd brought from home, such as the deeds to their houses; they've got their house keys; people brought pacifiers and dummies for their babies; people had pins and other things hidden in the lapels of their coats. Those sorts of things, to find them in the grave, to see that people expected to survive...'
The personal belongings helped with identification. Clea organised a day when massacre survivors who had lost family came to identify them through their clothing.
Clea: 'In one case there was a woman who was the niece of the priest of the Kibuye Catholic Church. We had found a skeleton wearing a priest's robe. She collapsed upon seeing that. It led for me to a greater understanding for people's need for bodies; the need to know what happened, even if they pretty well know. I mean these are people who survived the genocide, yet they still need the bodies.'
Rwanda was only the first of Clea's missions. Within months she was invited on the next UN mission in Bosnia. This time they stayed on a NATO military base and were investigating mass graves suspected of holding thousands missing from the small town of Srebrenica.
Ruda: 'Why did you agree, to want to go on another mission so quickly?'
Clea: 'I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do more than to continue doing this work. It was so fulfilling, it was as good as I had ever felt in my life and also I felt more than ever that I was doing what I was meant to be doing. What really has stayed with me most from Bosnia was that the bodies from the graves in Bosnia - which was supposed to have experienced a very different conflict from what happened in Rwanda - were telling the same stories as those in Rwanda... not ones of spontaneous hatred between neighbours because the wind changed direction and they just couldn't stand them any more. It was about organisation, it was about equipment being brought, wire to bind these men's wrists - around Srebrenica, a lot of wire, a lot of cloth for blindfolds four years after the war began. Seeing the graves is to see how individual murders make up mass graves.'
Next was Croatia, then Kosovo. From 1996 to 2000 Clea served on seven UN scientific missions that uncovered, catalogued and identified the evidence of the worst crimes of this age. But the places where the crimes were committed were the most beautiful, the most secluded
Ruda: 'This sense of double vision became part of Clea's life; the present normality against a backdrop of knowledge of what happened before.'
And while the land looked benign, the buildings told a different story. The survivors had often witnessed the deaths of their own families. Sometimes relatives would point out their graves and sometimes they watched the exhumations... like the Albanian from Kosovo who had buried his grandson.
Clea: 'Just as we lifted this body out of the grave - it was wrapped in a sheet - the grandfather came and looked down and I caught his eye as he turned away. He spoke Albanian and I wanted to say, 'I'm sorry'. What I was sorry about was the whole situation and for me it's a very unusual emotion to have as a forensic scientist because we always work after people have died. As a human being, of course, I was having another emotion which is, 'I wish we could bring your grandson back'. So for me while I do this work, I have this dual situation of great fulfilment because we are uncovering these crimes, and great sadness for people that we can never undo what has been done.'
Ruda: 'It's hard to imagine the conditions Clea and her team have to work under: the all pervading stench, the backbreaking physical work, the total lack of privacy, the intermittent availability of food and water and only the most basic of bathrooms.'
Clea: 'When you're in a situation where there is no privacy, there's nowhere you can go. I mean, we often... in fact, all the time, we're being guarded by soldiers and certainly when you're with the American military, it was a point of pride for them that we would never know where the soldiers were; you couldn't see them. It's different for men - they can kind of turn their back and just hope that they're not exposing themselves. But women... you know your rear end is going to be out there at some point. But in Rwanda, in the very first mission, the toilets did finally arrive. But when they arrived my team leader Bill realised that these toilets were the only things we had that had locks on them because they were these great Italian prefab toilets, right. They had a lock, nothing else had a lock and you couldn't get a lock anywhere in this town. So he said, 'We don't need these toilets, let's use them as evidence cabinets', and you saw the women's faces looking like [grimace].'
In Croatia Clea encountered something unforeseen. They had come to excavate a rubbish pit that, they were told, contained patients and staff from the Vukovar Hospital. The deceased had been beaten, herded onto trucks and driven to the pit where they were then shot by the Yugoslav army. One man escaped; he was the only witness. But the mothers of these people protested. They did not want this pit exhumed. Their last surviving shred of hope was that their loved ones were still alive somewhere in Serbia.
Clea: 'To have the families say 'no' was one of the worst feelings in my life. I felt betrayal. I felt that we were betraying them - we were betraying their desires, their interests. The only thing that got me through this was, within two to three days of this exhumation carrying on, despite the mothers' protests, we began to see signs that these were indeed the men from the hospital. People were wearing casts still on their arms, people were in their pyjamas, people had catheters, the more I saw these signs that these were the men, the more I knew it was crucial that we do this.'
Ruda: 'Clea, what happens in your mind when you start figuring out what happened there?'
Clea: 'I try very hard while working not to imagine what happened because it takes me to, you know, a dark place, but I never ever pretend that I don't have the emotions.'
The evidence the forensic scientists unearthed on these missions were largely responsible for bringing the mass murderers of Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo and Rwanda to justice, to be prosecuted in the International Courts.
Ruda: 'So when you hear on the news that someone has been found guilty in the Hague, do you feel, 'I had something to do with this'?'
Clea: 'The most kind of heart warming moment, I think, is when the accused are first in court and that was the last place they expected to be. I appreciate that a lot. I didn't realise that I had a mission before, you know, when I was doing this work I was following my heart; it's not a job. If I was just interested in the bones it would be my job and it would be a great job. In my case, I really do hope that we can help the bones to make a difference for all of us.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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