Although the United Nations has created several special tribunals to prosecute war crimes around the world, it has not always come up with the necessary funding and personnel to support war crimes investigations. Thus, a variety of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have begun to assist in the documentation of violations of international humanitarian law.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has monitored human rights violations in more than 20 countries worldwide and made their information available to war crimes investigators in Croatia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. In all of these countries, PHR undertook detailed exhumations of suspected mass graves; in Vukovar, they amassed evidence which helped lead to the indictment of the Yugoslav Army officers. In Sanski Most and areas around Srebrenica, they organized exhumations in an effort to support the activities of the UN tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). In addition, PHR established an antemortem database and collected information of missing persons from their relatives. These activities, combined with educational and other local capacity initiatives, assisted the Bosnian medical authorities in dealing with the identification of those persons who fell victim to grave violations of humanitarian law and who have been missing for more than five years.

In Sierra Leone, No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ) has been active in providing legal advice and support to the Government of Sierra Leone as it formulates the Special Court to try those persons accused of grave violations of humanitarian law in the territory of Sierra Leone. As part of the NPWJ Judicial Assistance Program, legal experts at the United Nations in New York and at the Field Mission in Sierra Leone have assisted in negotiating the proposed legal statutes for this Court, the first of its kind in West Africa

By far the most extensive support from NGOs in war crimes documentation took place in Kosovo, where the International Crisis Group (ICG) was specifically tasked with the field documentation of war crimes.The methodology, structure, and goals of the ICG Humanitarian Law Documentation Project set a new precedent for war crime documentation work. Its mission was comprised of some 46 international and 123 local staff operating in Kosovo and Albania for seven months between May and December 1999. ICG researchers collected some 4,700 witness statements on a CD ROM database and forwarded to the ICTY in Prishtina and the Hague. This searchable database gave the ICTY an extensive list of witnesses as well as information on the types of crimes alleged.

Articles 2,3,4, and 5 of the statute of the ICTY detail the crimes that the tribunal is charged with investigating in former Yugoslavia. Article 3 lists the violations of the laws or customs of war which include the "attack, bombardment, by whatever means, of undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings;" and the "plunder of public or private property". Article 5 deals with Crimes against humanity, which include "murder; extermination; deportation; torture and rape." It is under these two articles that Slobodan Milosevic and leading members of the Yugoslav cabinet have been indicted.

The task facing ICTY investigators following the withdrawal of Yugoslav army, police, and paramilitary units from Kosovo in June 1999 was on an unprecedented scale. Unlike Bosnia-Herzegovina, freedom of movement in post-conflict Kosovo was less complicated and entailed fewer security risks than in the immediate aftermath of the Dayton Agreement. In addition, the ceasefire in Bosnia was declared in winter, which limited the exhumation process, while the ceasefire in Kosovo came at the height of summer.

The pattern of killings and burial in Kosovo also differed from that of Bosnia -Herzegovina and hindered investigations in that the crime scenes and body disposal points were often scattered over a radius of several kilometers. Mass graves in western Kosovo tended to hold fewer bodies than their counterparts in Bosnia, reflecting the lower volume of killing, but also the more scattered distribution of remains. Some bodies were burnt individually, some in groups, while others were transported in refrigerated trucks to industrial crematoria at meat-processing plants.

Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina had been learned by both sides. The Holbrooke-Milosevic agreement of October 1998 gave NATO satellite and spy planes the right to monitor the situation on the ground, leading to an increased level of caution on the part of the perpetrators. One significant departure from Bosnia-Herzegovina was the widespread use of wells for the disposal of bodies which, along with the use of grenades to collapse the walls and landmines to hamper excavation, led to increased difficulties for investigators. Given the chaotic situation on the ground, the finite resources of the ICTY, and the rapid onset of winter which curtailed the exhumation process, ICG personnel were well placed to support the tribunal with the task of witness documentation.

The difficulties of documenting war crimes in a post-conflict environment should not be under-estimated. The wellbeing of the witness is of course paramount, and that of the local staff a close second. Daily field work often entailed attending mass grave exhumations and reburials, marking newly discovered bodies with Global Positioning Satellites (GPS), and recording crime scenes with digital cameras. With a fleet of 15 jeeps, the ICG focused on the municipalities of Decan/Decani, Gjakova/Djakovica, Rahovec/Orahovac, Malisheve/Malisevo, Istog/Istok, Suhareke/Suva Reka and Prizren/Prizren. The international legal staff were comprised of lawyers, some of whom had worked for the ICTY in the Hague; while local legal staff were drawn predominately from the various sub-committees of the Council for the Defence of Human Rights and Freedoms (CDHRF), the leading Kosovar human rights NGO. Data base entry was supervised by international IT support staff and a logistics unit.

While gathering testimony in remote rural areas, ICG staff encountered communities that had not been serviced by the international humanitarian relief net, which was still in its early stages of development. ICG staff facilitated the delivery of humanitarian items such as food, clothing, hygiene packs, blankets, and coffins.

In conjunction with Médecins Du Monde (MDM) Sweden, a War Crime Trauma Unit was established through which the services of psychologists and social workers was offered to witnesses. Interview training and debriefing sessions were also organised for local staff members by MDM Sweden, and a lecture series was conducted with the World Health Organisation (WHO) which dealt with psycho-social dimensions of rape, preventing mental distress from becoming a disorder, relaxation techniques, and rational psychotropic drug use.Close cooperation with local human rights NGOs in the field made the operation more effective by utilising local knowledge. This partnership was reciprocated at the end of the project through the capacity building donation of laptops, digital cameras, CD ROM writers, printers, and scanners to 24 local organizations working on human rights and psycho-social projects.

With the advent of the International Criminal Court (ICC), this evolutionary process has the potential to develop still further. Well managed and resourced NGOs can collect and store testimony to be interfaced with the data requirements of international tribunals, and this can be of value to fledgling institutions which may not be as well funded or resourced as their mandate would require. The number of conflicts involving gross violations of humanitarian law and/or human rights abuse does not appear to be decreasing and thus, while war crime documentation field studies remain problematic to say the least, the ICG Project offers a model upon which future projects might be based.

Incorporating humanitarian aid, psycho-social, and local capacity-building dimensions into such a documentation project also provides the testifying communities with tangible benefits, made all the more important by the fact that, although substantial bodies of testimony have been amassed, those indicted for crimes in Kosovo remain at large. A 292-page report based on the seven months of field research conducted by the project entitled "Reality Demands" is available from the ICG web site at www.crisisweb.org