Politics

"Truth and reconciliation do not always travel hand in hand": an interview with Christian Jennings

December 12, 2013
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Bosnia, writes Christian Jennings at the beginning of his new book, is "still struggling to come to terms with the events that took place from 1992 to 1995." Central to the attempts to deal with the legacy of the war in the Balkans is the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), an organisation that, in 1999, took on the job of identifying the remains of the victims of that bloody conflict. In its mandate, the ICMP assumed the task of helping governments in the region "deal with the enormous problem of persons who had been killed or had gone missing as a result of wars, ethnic conflicts [and] human-rights abuses..."

In Bosnia's Million Bones, Jennings examines the scale and complexity of the ICMP's work, especially its attempt to identify the scattered remains of the victims of the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, in which several thousand Bosnian Muslim men were shot by Bosnian Serb troops under the command of General Ratko Mladic. Given the way the Serbs disposed of the bodies (burying them, exhuming them, moving the remains and then reburying them), this was, Jennings reports one scientist as saying, "the world's greatest forensic puzzle".

Jennings, who has covered the Balkans as a journalist since 1999, responded to my questions by email.

JD: Do you see forensic work of the kind you describe in the book as part of the process of truth and reconciliation or as a pre-condition of it?

CJ: Quite often, in the singular, traumatised and psycho-socially idiosyncratic world of missing persons, the two vital concepts of truth and reconciliation do not always travel hand in hand. For such people as the mothers, sisters and  daughters of men who went missing and were executed in countries such as Iraq, Bosnia and Libya, only to be exhumed years later from the mud or sand of a mass grave, the first thing they want is the truth. The truth of what happened, where and when, how and why their menfolk ended up in a mass grave with their hands bound behind their back, blindfolded, with bullets from assault rifles still stuck in their long-decomposed bodies.

The next thing they want back, desperately, is a body, or any part of it, human remains that prove that those close to them actually existed, had a name and an identity, and have not been eradicated by time or war or the hate-filled sawmill of another faction’s ethnic cleansing or murderous policies.

The proper application of forensic science techniques, such as forensic archaeology and forensic anthropology, in the excavation and exhumation of mass grave sites, is the first step in establishing truth about past events in the context of the investigation of war-crimes in countries such as Bosnia. The next step in establishing absolute scientific truth is the deployment of DNA-assisted technology. It is normally only when bodies have been found and definitive identifications made—ie. when missing persons are no longer missing—that reconciliation, either between a victim, the relative of a victim, a perpetrator or perpetrators, or between a victim and themselves, is made easier.

We've heard a great deal about "truth and reconciliation" in the week since the death of Nelson Mandela. Do you the think that process is especially hard in the case of the former Yugoslavia, where, as you point out, the war had "deeply involved the civilian population at every level"?

The conflicts in Iraq, the Great Lakes Region of central Africa and Sri Lanka, to name but three, have also involved the civilian population at almost every level. Reconciliation in all such places is obviously very hard, and by no means something that will always happen or can happen. It depends upon the individual, collective and state predisposition towards acceptance, forgiveness and admittance of guilt between victim, relative of victim and perpetrator.

Britain’s outgoing ambassador to Bosnia and Hercegovina, Nigel Casey, makes a perspicacious point when he says that “‘Bosnia and Herzegovina’s progress towards genuine reconciliation has been held back by the time it has taken to uncover the truth about what happened in the 1990s, in the face of determined concealment and denial; to find those missing; and to bring those individuals responsible to justice. The ICMP’s work has been of critical importance in establishing the incontrovertible evidence of what happened at Srebrenica and elsewhere.”

You suggest that the forensic work of the ICMP had wider ramifications in terms of social, economic and political rights. Could you explain how and why it did so?

The forensic work provides a scientifically absolute footnote to history. And in terms of using it in cases of mass murder and human rights abuses in regions like the former Yugoslavia, the resultant human identities can be used to establish the rights of relatives of missing persons. For instance, by providing incontrovertible proof of the identity of victims, their living relatives can proceed to deal with such quantities as inheritances or pensions or property and land ownership.

Would it be fair to say that this is also a book about the "international community", or at least an attempt to get at what we miss when, as we often do, we use the term casually?

Very much so—Bosnia’s Million Bones is about the specifics of one particular, and very effective, international community intervention in the former Yugoslavia: the work of the ICMP. It’s an organisation staffed by British, Americans and Canadians, among others, but predominantly by a lot of rather clever and resourceful Bosnians. It’s the story of their work in the former Yugoslavia and what happened next. But it is also about interventions  in the wake of such natural disasters as the Asian tsunami.

Why, when evidence of mass murder in Bosnia during the war was reasonably plentiful, was the "international community" so slow to react? The question becomes particularly acute when one considers, as you do at length in the book, the scale of the cover-up operation.

In the aftermath of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, parts of the international community were fast to react. The first investigators from the International Criminal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY, based in The Hague, arrived on the ground in Bosnia within days. The ICTY indicted then-General Ratko Mladic for crimes committed at Srebrenica four months after the massacres, and investigators began exhuming mass graves in 1996, soon after the war ended. But despite the large numbers of people reported missing following the fall of Srebrenica, it took time to find the full human evidence of this, particularly as the perpetrators had gone to such extraordinary lengths to hide the bodies. What took the longest time was to find and arrest Ratko Mladic, and transfer him to The Hague.  

You cite the journalist Ed Vuillamy's damning assessment of the Dayton Accords. Do you agree with him that "rarely has mass murder been so amply rewarded at the negotiating table"?

The verdict that the creation of the Republika Srpska in some ways “rewarded” the actions of Bosnian Serb forces for their campaign of land-grabbing and ethnic cleaning in eastern and northern Bosnia is an oft-repeated one by many people within the Muslim-Croat Federation in Bosnia and Hercegovina. It’s based on the fact that under Dayton the Bosnian Serbs reportedly ended up with more territory after Dayton than they did when war-fighting actually ended in 1995.

The Balkans fell very abruptly off the international agenda after 9/11. Did that make the work of the ICMP more or less difficult?

Excellent question. On the one hand 9/11 saw foreign policy priorities, particularly those of the Americans, shift away from the Balkans towards Afghanistan, Iraq and the Global War on Terrorism. This affected funding available for post-conflict projects in regions such as the former Yugoslavia. But for ICMP it was a bit different—their laboratory system made their first positive DNA match of a Srebrenica victim in late 2001, after which the rate of identifications of missing persons’ remains made by their DNA laboratory increased enormously. Based upon these scientific developments, and their ability to run the organisation well, the number of international donors increased from two or three, to the 22 governments, including successive British ones, that now support the ICMP.

You write that after the war "Bosnians wanted to put the past behind them". Did the appearance of Ratko Mladic in The Hague hasten that process?

To a certain extent it closed a chapter on the war, but it took 16 years, during which time Bosnians of all hues were asking quite why and how a war criminal of the stature and notoriety as Ratko Mladic could remain at large for quite so long.

What impact do you think the way the Serbs disposed of their victims' bodies—dispersing body parts over different sites—had on the surviving relatives? You spoke to mothers of the victims of Srebrenica. Was this something they mentioned or found especially distressing?

Very much so—these are women whose sons, husbands and brothers had been taken from them by force at Srebrenica, executed, hidden in "primary" mass-graves to rot in the boiling heat of the 1995 Balkans summer, and then dug up, to be buried in "secondary" mass graves, so as to hide the evidence. To have the bodies then broken up during the reburial process by bulldozers and mechanical diggers meant that when the relatives were finally reunited with the exhumed remains of their family members, sometimes years later, they were, literally, in pieces. One man’s remains were found spread over four different mass graves some 15 miles apart.

Do you regard the belated arrest of Mladic as a triumph for the system of international justice or, given how long it took for the international authorities to track him down, an indictment of it?

Late is always better than never, and it is always temptingly easy to play the card of hindsight in the present. That he was arrested in Serbia in 2011 and handed over to The Hague for trial is a tribute to international justice, and to the pressure put on the Belgrade authorities by international players to find and arrest him. That he wasn’t arrested in 1996 or 1997 when he was in Bosnia, under the eyes of NATO’s peacekeepers, had one major knock-on effect. He escaped into Serbia proper, out of international reach, and was hidden by a network of former and serving Serb and Bosnian Serb military and intelligence personnel, meaning it took more than another decade before the Belgrade government finally arrested him.

Is, in your view, the work of the ICMP primarily a scientific success story or a legal-moral one?

Human genetics and molecular biology cannot exist in a vacuum—they have to be linked to a human-rights and rule-of-law based approach. ICMP’s triumphs consist of many things, but primarily of successfully applied operational trifurcation: science, rule-of-law and human rights, and effective work with the governments that request their assistance.

Christian Jennings's "Bosnia's Million Bones: Solving the World's Greatest Forensic Puzzle" is published by Palgrave Macmillan (£16.99).