The Bone Woman:A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo
By Clea Koff
Knopf Canada, 271 pages, $34.95
Approximately 15 million lives have been taken in acts of genocide in the 20th century, the majority in the last 40 years. In response to international pressure in the 1990s, the United Nations created two ad hoc organizations, the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), to prosecute those responsible for perpetrating "crimes against humanity" and other violations of UN conventions. As with most criminal proceedings, the tribunal prosecutors rely on modern forensic science to provide physical evidence of the crimes. Much of this evidence comes from the most damning of sources: the victims themselves. At issue are the identities of the victims and the manner in which they died. Were they soldiers or non-combatants? Were they killed in battle or executed?
Forensic anthropologists are key members of these investigative teams, as they are trained to exhume graves and accurately unravel the history of life and death recorded in a skeleton. In The Bone Woman, Clea Koff — raised by documentary filmmakers in Africa, England and the United States, and one of just a handful of forensic anthropologists who has worked for both tribunals — provides us with a deeply personal chronicle of her experiences.
The work in the graves and in the morgue is gruesome, intellectually stimulating, emotionally draining, rewarding, dangerous, backbreaking and inspiring. It is extremely difficult to convey these seemingly conflicting issues to those who do not work with the dead, yet Koff paints an accurate portrait of the nature of the forensic anthropological efforts, while simultaneously demonstrating the empathy required to serve the victims and their families properly.
A Rwandan survivor of the 1994 genocide prays over the bones of victims at a mass grave in Nyamata, Rwanda. (Sayyid Azim/AP)
The book is based on the author's journal entries, which helped her process emotionally the loss of humanity she documents. This style is risky, yet the result is honest and effective. The six missions are laid out chronologically, so that we watch a savvy veteran emerge from the naïve, though already worldly, novice. The writing is so personal that the reader may feel voyeuristic as Koff writes of her haunting dreams, the feelings of futility as killings continue around her, and the need to assimilate the objective nature of science with the subjectivity of human emotion. For instance, Koff could not tolerate reading witness accounts of the massacres while in the field, as they interfered with her scientific detachment. "I need distance from the bodies themselves to learn about their lives," she writes, "or I can't restrain my own sadness, fear, empathy, and despair enough to do the bodies justice. And doing the bodies justice is my job, my duty."
Koff also takes us behind the scenes with an unflinching account of her interactions with her teammates, men and women whose courage, passion, tempers and skills both coalesce and collide during months of gruelling work and bureaucratic mayhem.
Koff's first two missions were in Rwanda, where Hutu extremists conducted machete massacres of nearly a million people in just 100 days. Many of the dead were buried in mass graves, while the skeletal remains of others, who attempted to flee the massacres, still littered the otherwise pristine landscape. Koff, still only 24, was then asked to work under the auspices of ICTY in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. In non-technical prose, she adroitly illustrates the anthropological and archeological methods applied in the graves and the morgue. She describes how graves are located, by observing differences in soil colour and consistency, and how soft-tissue preservation of bodies in the centre of mass graves is more complete than that of peripheral bodies.
Exhumation procedures are systematic yet flexible, requiring keen observation of spatial relationships among individuals, extensive documentation techniques, and brute strength to lift out heavy, decomposing bodies. Anthropologists work alongside other forensic specialists in the morgue by assisting with autopsies, reconstructing skulls shattered by rifle butts and bullets, and assessing the age, sex, ancestry, stature and diseases of the skeleton to construct a biological profile that, ideally, can be compared to medical and dental records to afford a positive identification. In many cases, such records do not exist, and identifications are made by comparing DNA from the victims to that of surviving family members.
Koff artfully demonstrates how forensic anthropologists interpret the skeletal clues of torture and death. For instance, deep gouges in the back of the lower leg give reality to a chilling theory about the killers in Rwanda: that they cut the Achilles tendons of the victims so they could be easily hunted. Such documentation is imperative, as it helps establish an objective and accurate historical record of controversial events that will nullify official propaganda, derail revisionist subterfuge and provide the victims a permanent voice.
Though stalwartly non-academic, this book is a must-read for students of forensic science, political science, international law and other disciplines that study or directly contribute to human rights investigations. The historical narrative is too shallow in places, and assumes detailed knowledge of specific events, but the forensic work is richly contextualized, and non-scientific readers will be able to appreciate the basic methods and significance of the anthropological contributions.
Many of us who are involved in this arena keep journals as a sort of therapy, and share the words only with close confidants. But few of us could convey the social and scientific complexities of the work as sensitively and effectively as Clea Koff.
Dawnie Wolfe Steadman teaches anthropology at Binghamton University, State University of New York. She is the editor of Hard Evidence: Case Studies in Forensic Anthropology, and has been involved in human rights investigations in Argentina and Cyprus.
