Crimes of War

A seminar for editors sponsored by The Crimes of War Project and The Freedom Forum

Day Two, Panel Three: The Scientific Investigation of War Crimes

Moderator: Eric Stover, Director, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley, and Vice President, Crimes of War Project Introduction

c) From Rwanda to East Timor: Collecting Physical Evidence of War Crimes
William D. Haglund, Director, International Forensic Program, Physicians for Human Rights

BILL HAGLUND: In moving right along, I apologize for standing in the back and I also apologize for perhaps maybe anticipating, and not with glee or anything, that I may assault some people’s senses. I'm going to show dead bodies. I don't know how to talk about death without showing you some dead bodies. And I'll talk mostly about mass graves. And the reason we talk about mass graves in international forensic investigations is because we don't have access to the scene. So oftentimes, the scenes are destroyed. It took 25 years to get to Cyprus where I'm presently working on a project. It took 12 years to get to Honduras. It took 22 months to get to Rwanda. It took one year to the date to get to Bosnia and the forensic community was chomping at the bit over the forensic frenzy on the borders of Kosovo. We are -- the hope is that we are increasing our response time but we may not have it.

Unlike Rwanda, which was upside, and the scenes months later were still there but not accessible to forensic investigators. But they were accessible to the media. And oftentimes scenes like this -- a mass grave in the making photographed by a Serb journalist passing an industrial complex in Krotchko in 1994 was photographed here. It's a spectacular documentary evidence we seldom see. That grave has since been dug. But most likely oftentimes when we don't have direct access to scenes, the scenes are destroyed. They can be destroyed by the well-meaning, who after months of bodies lying out on the surface, want to clean up out of respect for the dead. And, well, forensic evidence here is gone. This is Bisisero in the Kibuye Province in the western part of Rwanda. And these were bodies that were just lying out on the surface. How many are there, I have no idea. And this is the grave that figured significantly in David Rhode’s escapade into Bosnia, the grave of Lazete.

Graves are destroyed by the perpetrators. Here we have a grave that has been gone after the grave was dug and we see they've taken with a backhoe, parts of bodies. In 1998, what was dug by the tribunal were secondary graves derived from the parts of bodies removed from the primary graves. And then it's oftentimes the graves are done with the best intentions are ruined by the in-expert that use the tools at hand. They hope to reveal the atrocities perpetrated on them to the world community and in the process they ruin what they hope to preserve. In Somalia in 1997, after the floods eroded graves in Hergashia, Somalia, under the generalship of General Morgan and in just one and a half days, on the ground, two forensic experts were able to look at 116 graves, randomly pick one, dig this grave, carefully use archaeologic techniques, determine the demographics of the individuals involved, to see the scars from the earth mover that's consistent with the witness testimony, the lines that you see on the bottom of the grave to show the bulk the grave was dug consistent with the witness testimony and then just briefly lift up the flap, the corner of a mass grave and you can see the rosary of victims connected by ropes one to the other to the next one. Their hands tied behind their backs. This is a -- I may refer
to an issue later on called the forensic band-aid -- and this was a forensic band-aid.

The missions have significantly changed since -- Eric alluded to the original missions in Latin America, where a couple stalwarts, and their favorite journalists could accompany them, they'd bring their calipers, their cameras, they spend three days, four days, two weeks, volunteering their time, utilize the local hospital's x-ray facilities, pick up some local laborers, do a report, and come back home. Since 1996, the international forensic investigations up on the front stage now are giant missions. They're complicated logistically, they're expensive in the million dollar range. They involve people being on the ground and being paid salaries. It involves equipment and also -- I'll give you a little idea about this -- before you can do a grave like this, before you can do all this planning, you have to know what you're getting into and you have to do an assessment on the ground.

The assessment in Rwanda, for instance, took about four weeks and it took visiting graves to find out the potential condition of the bodies, what kind of graves they were, what the topography was like, what's the logistical support available, what are the political problems you're going to find with the local prefect, with the bergermeister, to try to talk the local priest out of trying to rent the crime scene to you because you want to dig the grave on the church property, and figure out what's available there. In Rwanda, there was nothing available. If you didn't bring it, you didn't have it. And an assessment -- and this is an elegant assessment evidentiary-wise from the grave of Vukovar. An assessment that with the skeletons of three men across a trench proving you had a mass grave, artifacts with the bodies that show that they're Croats, and ballistic evidence from the surface of the grave. It was enough to trigger, I think, really a lot of the impetus to the Yugoslav Tribunal and it was enough to commit the guarding of this grave, which is unprecedented and hasn't been repeated for five years straight until we were able to dig this grave in 1996. These are the 200 individuals that derived from the Vukovar Hospital.

Staffing -- just to look at the kind of staffing in Bosnia in 1996, all told, I had about 100 people on the ground, about 50 people at a time rotating through. That's 33 pathologists, 24 anthropologists, and we had, as you can see, x-ray technicians, evidence technicians, photographers, data entry people, logisticians, electricians, drivers, translators, and local laborers. Supplies -- backhoes, refrigerated containers, water filtration systems so you could run your x-ray equipment, fluoroscope, archaeology equipment, surveying equipment. In Rwanda we had to bring our own toilet paper. And if you did get there and you get on the scene and you don't have what you need, well you better make it up or you do without it. And we got into Rwanda on the ground, found out that our darkroom for our x-ray processing was not there. Well, we brought our own toilets. So we crammed the processor in the toilet. We had a -- lucky, we had an anorexic radiographer and we crammed him into the toilet and we taped the door shut and we let him out every once in a while to give us an x-ray.

The steps to an exhumation, just to give you an idea of what is involved after the assessment, the other thing we're working in security risk areas and we're working in areas where we have to, we're obligated before we can put our people on the ground, to have a de-mining and an ordinance assessment. And we had our projects held up for as many as three weeks at a time in the field in Bosnia before the lack of planning properly for de-mining and then we established a security perimeter and that grave is guarded from the time it is opened, guarded for guarding our equipment, guarding the grave and the evidence. And then after the de-mining is done, then we look over the surface and we pick up surface evidence, whether it be bullet casings, scars that would show the use of the kinds of machinery that were used to dig the grave. And then the excavation involves the delineating the boundary of the grave to find out the size and then to kind of close in on it. If it looks like it's going to rain, you have to make digging trenches on the side for drainage, et cetera. And then the documentation of the evidence as you find it, photography, mapping, exposure of the remains, and removal and our storage until they get to the examination area. And I show you the grave at Vukovar again before the actual exhumation started in 1996.

Now we have to find out where the edges of this grave are. And how we do that is look for where the disturbed earth is and where the non-disturbed earth is and we found that here now. And now we've made our areas, our approach to it with these side trenches, and now we're going to work on the grave and start lifting off layers until we get down to the bodies and try not to walk on the bodies and back out of that grave and expose this grave. Now, the amount of exposure you can do around a grave depends upon the weather. If it's very hot, dry you expose the remains too long and it makes it in bad conditions for the pathologists to work on. But in this -- we had got into the rainy season and we were fortunate enough here to have a great big tent over the whole grave, like a warehouse over the grave, so we were able to expose this whole grave of 200 individuals before we removed any of them.

And you can see as we go into the grave now, we're getting to the outer perimeter of the grave and we're starting to run in to bodies that are from this mass in the grave. And as we get into the outer bodies, the outer bodies are going to be more skeletalized. But the bodies in the center of the mass of the grave, sealed in moisture, and they undergo a decomposition reaction called saponification and they're very pristine. In fact, bodies in this mass grave after five years had pristine tattoos and flesh and faces and ears and features that you could recognize. And then you see more and more, we're backing out, we have a corridor we can walk on if we're moving it. Now the whole grave is exposed. And, yes, this was hospital patients. We have an external fixation to bodies for a broken arm here.

And after it's cleaned up in the lab, this is what we have and then we continue documentation. A tattoo from one of the individuals and many of them had tattoos.

I slow plate this one and that's one of the reasons -- I had a four-ring circus going on. I was going absolutely crazy here. But sometimes you're lucky and you have the resources to cover the grave and sometimes you're not. And this is what you run into. So you're working under this environment and this was after -- this was at a point in time, we had been working in the graves -- we went directly from Rwanda to Bosnia, where we had been working in the graves for eight months. And we did 1,200 exhumations in 1996.

Establishing a field morgue is the next. There are no morgues that we could utilize. So we have to make an examination area now. And I remember when I was in Bosnia, for months we had been pushing for a facility and there was no facility forthcoming. Two hours before we were going into the field, they held up the convoy with all of our field crew in so they could rush me down to this facility at Kalesha. And they showed it to me and I thought, it's good. There's a gate, and a little guard house. It's an old war-damaged clothing factory. I said, “Does it have water?” They said, “Running water?” They said, “No.” I said, “Does it have electricity?” They said, “No.” I said, “Well, I'll take it.” I had no choice. I took it.

So when you set up the facility you have to have electricity, you have to have generators, you have to have water pumps, you have to have bathrooms, and then you have to set up your actual examination facility. The body examination in this particular instance that involved overall photography when we brought the bodies out of the containers. We had fluoroscopy because these people were shot, so we could look at them and get a quick x-ray glimpse to determine where to look for bullets, shrapnel, ballistic evidence, any kind of orthopedic treatment they may have had. The autopsy involved not only the pathologist's examination, but the anthropologist's examination and determination of sex, stature, and reconstruction of fragmented bones, et cetera. And then the autopsy report and body transfer to the Andonese once we were done.

This is what we started with and it's very, very crude. Utilitarian, but crude. And we worked on here and did about 450 autopsies in Bosnia before we quit. This particular scene -- that's the autopsy being performed, that's evidence being collected. Then we document the evidence and bullet fragments and then, in this particular instance in Bosnia, people wore multiple clothing. And it was very, very crucial in the identifications because wives and mothers would remember the color of thread they used in Srebrenica to sew on the patches. And so we had to wash the clothing because it was impregnated with mud. And we had eight Bosnian locals washing clothes eight hours a day for four months straight to clean the clothes enough so we could describe colors, et cetera.

And when you put this all together, what do you have? You have a story of the grave. Here's Sirsca, a lonely road, off an embankment down the side of the road. We've searched, had the de-mining dogs in to sniff out and see if there's any mines. Hope they got them all, if any -- they didn't find any. Then we search for ballistic evidence. And there's a cut on one side of the road where dirt has been removed. We see on one, the far side of the road, a lot of cartridge casings littered along the side of the road. And now we've cleaned off the vegetation so we can start working on it. And we see a lot of bodies now piled up along the road and down the bottom of the incline, now, the bodies are about five feet deep. We looked at the bodies closer now. We get an idea of where one starts and where ones end. And as soon as we can find that out, then we're able to remove it and know that we got the complete individual.

Now we are confronting also the cause of death, which in here is multiple high-velocity gun shot wounds. So we're dealing with a lot of fragments that have to be glued together and put together once we get them into the examination area. But recovered all together this is the part when I was asked by Mr. Bluit to bring the press on the site because of the natural reaction formation. Reaction formation is, ‘No. There's not a grave.” Then you find a grave and then people say, “Oh, yes. Well, there is a grave but there was from World War II or some other combat.” And then if you say, “Oh, no, no. It's not. It's a contemporary grave.” And they say, “Well, yes. But it was during a fight, you know. And there was something, you know, it was natural, you know.” And you say, “Yes. But, you know, the people had their hands wired behind their back. How could that happen?”

And so the story of this grave is that the killers stood on this side of the road. They shot their weapons at 150 men and boys lined up across the road from them. They rolled down the hill as they were shot. They piled up. After they were all dead, they came in with a large machine, they removed the dirt, covered them up, and drove away.

Kibuye was a grave. I believe we covered over 450 people, men, women, and children, from the grave in Kibuye. And there were other remains scattered along the hillside between the church and Lake Kivu. People may be hiding, people trying to escape. And we forget, and Michael Ignatieff has written eloquently about this and asks a very, very crucial question -- why do we have to deal with these numbers? In the United States, one homicide will command hundreds of thousands of dollars in investigation and prosecution. But when we are dealing with these kinds of atrocities, we have to have numbers and more numbers. And we forget and people are talking about graves of 200 in Vukovar and 150 at Sirsca and 130 at Lazette, and 500 in Kibuye. But what it really comes downs to is one individual. And we can't forget that. And this is the story of one individual. This is the grave at Kibuye. The top part of the grave where the bodies are more skeletalized and deeper in the grave, when you have mothers with their dresses wrapped, swaddled around infants that are tied to their backs in a grave like this. We had 25 percent -- 70 percent of this grave's contents were women and children. Twenty-five percent of the children were under 10 years of age. And this is the story of one man. We can't forget these are all single human beings.

We lay a skeleton out, first part of the skeletal examination, and we examine his left hand. And we see up in the metacarpal area sharp force trauma cutting his hand, severing his hand almost in half. We look at his other hand and, likewise, we can see the cuts going across the metacarpals. We look at his lower part of his legs. Right here. You have to translate the flesh it takes to get through to bones to really understand what happens in terms of blood and in terms of incapacitation. These are wounds that would cut the Achilles tendon and render somebody unable to move around. Both legs were. And, if you can appreciate this, the cheek arch is cut off. You can see it closer. It involves the mandible and then hit to the head.

So what does this story tell us? Here's a man, an elderly man, probably over 50 years old, who is trying to defend himself. And he's moving and he's moving, he's on the ground, we don't know what the sequence of blows are, and that's how he's killed.

Issues. There's a couple issues I want to mention. One is the, what I alluded to as the forensic band-aid. Forensics has been very successful in these kinds of abuses and in the court proceedings that derive from them. And now I'm seeing when we have problems like this, Somaliland is one example I will point out, what happens is while the media is interested in it, entities cram a couple forensic experts into the dike. Put a little forensic band-aid on it and then no follow-up is ever gone. After that one-and- half days in Somaliland, nothing has ever been done about those people.

The other issue now is the -- what has really driven a lot of the human rights investigations in this area in the past has been the resolution for the family to return the dead to the family so they get that grief resolution. Right now what's happening in Bosnia, we have 3,000 bodies piled up in a Tuzla tunnel unidentified. And right now, there is a disconnect, a tension between the tribunal and the agencies that are trying to identify these people and the entities, and they're not sharing the information from the examinations that would allow the bodies to be identified. Now isn't that a dandy story?

William D. Haglund, Bio.
Director, International Forensic Program, Physicians for Human Rights