Clea Koff lays bare the bones of her writing and experiences as a forensic anthropologist

Sharon Meyering

The Bone Woman: Among the dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Croatia Author: Clea Koff Publisher: Atlantic Books (Penguin Books (SA) (Pty) Ltd) ISBN: 1843541394 Format: Softcover Normal price: R110.00. Click here to buy it now! Or WIN A COPY... Click here for more

It's a rare privilege to meet someone who has not only had an impact on the world, but inspires others to do the same. I have been fortunate enough to meet one of those people. Clea Koff is a forensic anthropologist who has given a voice to countless war-crime victims. She has become known as the Bone Woman, as her work involves discovering the truth based on the reconstruction of human bones. To use a phrase from a popular television series, "the evidence doesn't lie", and this is the truth Clea and her forensic teams are able to reveal.

The evidence Clea and her teams have collected over the past few years has had international repercussions by answering questions with indisputable scientific facts that could not be supplied previously. Not only has she played a role in determining the events that took place in Rwanda, Bosnia and Croatia, but she has also made it possible for healing to begin for the many families involved.

When Clea speaks of her "small role", as she modestly refers to it, one can see her passion for her work and the truth. She is honest, even revealing that she still has nightmares and has on occasion been known to drop to the ground at the sound of gunfire. She also shared how she has developed "gravedigger's back" and her hands seem to remember only how to hold a trowel from so many hours of excavating mass graves. But the look on her face tells me she wouldn't exchange these work-related quirks for anything.

Clea has captured the events of her time in Rwanda, Bosnia and Croatia in her autobiography The Bone Woman: Among the dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Croatia. Clea was very nervous to leave the reader alone in those graves, so in writing her story has given the reader the opportunity to stand with her in the grave and peer over her shoulder.

In places, The Bone Woman is a chilling read, especially when one realises this is a true story. Unlike a Kathy Reichs novel, you are compelled to read further because you know Clea was not able to close the book and keep the scary parts for later.

This book - actually, this woman - has been an inspiration to me, and meeting her in person proved just why ...

1. “When I analyse human remains I am interested, not repulsed. Trauma excites a curiosity in me about what instrument caused it - it does not frighten me. ... Not being upset by bones, bodies and trauma is kind of a basic requirement of the job. When working in the field I am distressed by fruitless digging, but once we unearth human remains, I am energised and even happy.” [p.181].

   Some people would find this view a little distressing, as not many people have ever come in contact with human remains. How would you explain your work and your passion for your work to them?

   Many people are quite comfortable with the concept of archaeology, this investigation into the past that may even involve the opening of prehistoric or historic graves. As a youngster I too was initially interested in old bones and dead things, but once I read Witnesses from the Grave I became much more interested, specifically in forensic anthropology, this science that deals with skeletons of people not "properly" buried - the skeletons of people who have been murdered or buried in clandestine graves. What inspired me was that in the forensic setting, anthropologists enable bones to "talk" on the witness stand in the trials of those responsible for their murders. I knew immediately that this was the field for me. I loved the idea that arrogant killers could think they had got away with a crime, only to have the very people they thought they'd silenced forever come back and point the finger of culpability at them. I thought that to be involved in that work in places where governments or militaries had killed their own citizens was to be a part of human rights-related forensics.

   So, given this ideal, one of the best feelings for me has been to stand in a mass grave as the first bodies are being uncovered and know that the killers never expected us to be there, removing the dirt. They never expected anyone to care about the people in the grave. To lift a body out of a mass grave is, for me, one of the most important steps that must take place on the path of justice - it precedes identification, analysis, evidence collection, trials. It is practical and symbolic all at once. And when this work leads to the return of someone's remains to their family, the effect on the family level ultimately becomes key to the healing of the "wounded" society as a whole.

2. How/where do you draw the line between objectivity and callousness in your work?

   One of the most important professional standards is always to remember that a body is that of a fellow human being who likely has relatives alive who care deeply about him or her. Remembering this engenders respect when working with human remains. Objectivity serves two purposes, and only one is related to protecting oneself from becoming upset by the body and its trauma; the other is all about serving the body: the objectivity is necessary so that one can properly "listen" to the bones, to the stories of their life and their last moments.

3. Is it different from the way you relate to the living?

   On the level of respect, no. In fact, I think that how I approach the dead is bound up with how I grew up interacting with people from all over the world, such that I viewed everyone simply as people, not as representatives of some descriptive marker like nationality or ethnicity or religion. However, I do know that I approach dead bodies with much more openness than I do living people. I want to remain as open as possible to anything the body could be telling me - and I feel like I do this less rarely with the living, although I am accused by my friends of being much too open towards people!

4. You were only 23 when you were chosen for the UN International Criminal Tribunal and went to Rwanda and had never been in the field before. Do you think anyone can ever be ready to see the things you've seen?

   If you take the mass grave at Kibuye, which held almost 500 bodies, but you think of it as a collection of 500 single murders, then one comes closer to understanding how someone like me, who was indeed a student and young but had seen many bodies of individual homicide victims, was in a sense prepared to deal with the forensic work. But of course, you deal with more than just the work. It is the stepping back and recognising that the 500 single murders were part of a campaign, a policy, that took the lives of many more people; the recognition of the destroyed fabric of a society and the deliberate way in which that was brought about by the planners of the genocide; the thought of the psyche of the people who survived these terrible events - it is all of that which would be difficult for anyone to be prepared for. How much of that sinks in is directly related to how much of it you want to see. I worked with people who saw the missions as almost a "holiday" from their usual work, whose minds did not wander to any of these other issues, whose knowledge of the places in which we worked did not extend to any moment before the day they arrived to work in the mission. I wasn't one of those people. Incidentally, the thing that I was least prepared for and which has had one of the most lasting effects, was the execution in the lake at Kibuye Guest House. This shocked me to my core and scared me out of my wits and I have lived with the after-effects of that in a more obvious fashion than the after-effects of what we saw in the graves. And it was in witnessing the execution that I understood that whatever we saw in the graves was nothing - nothing - compared with what people experienced at the moment the crimes were committed.

5. Your experiences are much like those of a young soldier going to war and then returning home. No one can understand entirely what you have experienced. Has this ever affected your relationship with people?

   This question makes me laugh a bit, rather ruefully. I did notice, upon coming back from Rwanda in 1996, that my circle of close friends soon went from four to one. Some of my friends couldn't even listen to stories - that I desperately needed to tell, in some cases - of experiences we'd had in Rwanda. It made it hard to go forward, with this block of time unknown between us, especially one that I felt had changed me. In terms of romantic relationships, the only ones I've had since doing this work have been with people I met on a mission. They are the ones most easily able to accept some of those after-effects - the sudden succumbing to body-shaking tears when watching a documentary on survivors in Rwanda, or footage from the fall of Srebrenica - the footage of the men walking out of the town; the inability to stop talking back to the TV news when a correspondent's getting it all wrong about Hutu/Tutsi or a BBC anchor's criticising the Tribunal over the apparent slowness of the trials. We share a lot of common ground and I seem to need the chance to rehash everything at will.

6. Why did you write The Bone Woman? To bring people face to face with human cruelty and suffering? Or did you want to inspire us?

   I really had to be prodded into writing The Bone Woman. I was asked to write it to share with people the physical reality of genocide, but for me there was more to it than this: I also wanted us to step out of the graves and consider the bigger picture, to recognise some of our similarities around the world, regardless of "differences" in culture, language, or religion. I particularly hoped that anyone reading the book would understand that the crimes it describes were not the result of "spontaneous violence" or "hatred" - rather, they were due to individual choices, to planning, policy, authorities, bribes, and so on. They were preventable, not cyclical. I hope that after reading The Bone Woman, when someone then reads in the newspaper about a conflict marked by the killings of civilians, they will ask, "What's going on behind the scenes?" instead of thinking, "Oh, there go those bizarre people again, killing each other like they always have" and turning the page. I did hope to inspire people, but only on this very basic level of recognising our common humanity, especially when those in power attempt to divide us on those lines. There are many more of us "regular people" with a capacity for solidarity than there are those who plan such division.

7. “... in 1997, gunmen burst into a school and told students to stand up and divide themselves into groups of Hutu and Tutsi. The children refused, saying, 'There is no Hutu or Tutsi: we are all Rwandan here.' The gunmen then shot most of the children. The incident is shocking; but buried in those children's stance is more hope than their parents' generation displayed. The confidence those children felt must have been based on the knowledge that they were closer to each other than any 'group' of them were to the gunmen.” [p.131]

   I was especially touched by your "After" chapter. Do you think the new "generation" of children are relating to one another in a way previous generations didn't have the opportunity to? I'm also thinking of South Africa here, where we have just celebrated ten years of democratic freedom.

   I'm glad the "After" chapter spoke to you. This was the part of the book that I felt most out on a limb with, felt I was revealing the most about myself in a way. Yes, you make a good point when you refer to "opportunity" - I do think the new generation in Rwanda has been given an opportunity to relate to one another in a different way. There are those who criticise the new government in Rwanda for having its own propaganda about the genocide and for down-playing reprisal killing that's going on of suspected genocidaires, and those criticisms are not without merit. However, the fact that "ethnicity" is no longer included on identity cards is already a step forward. Of course, the UN International Criminal Tribunals and the local trials in Rwanda are another positive factor - Rwanda has experienced large-scale killing before (though not quite on the scale of the genocide), but it has never experienced both national and international efforts at holding people accountable for crimes. How all of this will affect Rwanda's future, through its children, is yet to be fully seen, but I think that it bodes well.

8. Why did it take so long to actually write your experiences?

   I actually starting writing - outside of my journal - within two months of returning from my last mission to Kosovo in 2000. But I didn't find a publisher until 2002, and then finding one was entirely due to finding a wonderful literary agent - another South African - named Isobel Dixon. Isobel was able to get publishers to see that though I was writing about crimes against humanity, I wasn't writing some horrific tome; indeed, I wanted to take people with me to the graves, but I wasn't going to leave anyone there and I was hopefully going to provide a perspective that would lead people toward remembering that we're really just one people sharing a single earth, with the same fundamental needs and desires wherever we live. But I still had to be really prodded to keep writing over this time because I kept doubting whether I would be able to provide that perspective. Once I had a publisher, I had finished writing and editing within a year and a half.

9. Were you able to distance yourself from the events while writing, or are there specific events that keep coming back to haunt you?

   There certainly were events that came back to me very vividly while I was writing and, in fact, I think the distance (sitting in my cottage in LA or in a writing room in Melbourne) made them even harder to deal with. Even writing about them now is difficult. The specific memories - truly examined because I had to write about them, not hurry over them in conversation, say - were: the execution in Kibuye, the woman who recognised her brother's jacket at the Clothing Day in Kibuye, the woman who came to the Kigali Clothing Day but didn't find her son's clothing, the bones of the young man from the Cerska grave with the bullet in his knee, the grandfather in Kosovo who watched as I exhumed his grandson who had been shot in the back, the old couple in Kosovo who had been burned and the slicing trauma on whose bones left us all confused. All of these memories and the effort of trying to describe them not only made me cry while writing, but have undone me every time I've had to read them aloud from the book at public events. Again, it is the distance that makes it harder to bear - it's the sitting in a comfy room in an Amsterdam hotel talking about the Kosovan grandfather who I realise is still by a graveside. I could deal with him and his loss better when I had a legitimate reason for being in that situation; to remember him now is to feel only his pain and sadness, mixed with a kind of apology which cannot be expressed in words, that leaves me both drained and welling over - a simultaneous push and pull of emotions. I've come to realise that I feel this way because at the time - say, when I was in the grandson's grave in Kosovo - I felt all those things but couldn't express them because it would have cracked the rather thin protection I had in the form of professional distance - and so, in all the time since then, that bottled-up reaction is simply coming out, when it wants to, and I have to be alright with that.

10. Has there ever been a dark, lonely night when you wished you had never experienced some of the cruelty people are capable of inflicting on one another?

    No. I continue to feel grateful that I was given an opportunity to do this work, and I will take on the attendant emotions. There was a moment, when I was still being trained in forensics in Arizona, when I realised that I could never look at the town Tucson the same way again. I realised that I used to think of it as quaint and safe (which it is, compared with many cities), but after going to the morgue on case after case I couldn't help but focus on its "underbelly" - the drugs and violence and domestic murders that were resulting in homicide. But the fact of the matter is that every city has this, whether we're aware of it or not. And I prefer not to live in a bubble; I'd rather go through life conscious, even if that means taking the bad with the good.

11. Do you think people are becoming more and more tolerant of violence and crime because of the way it is portrayed by the media?

    I think that people have tolerance of violence and crime until it touches their lives. Connected to this, I also believe that most people are not aware of their own mortality - the relative fragility of the human body when pitted against the bumper of a car or most weapons.

12. How do you feel about the way in which the media portrays forensic and scientific anthropology? Five years ago - here in South Africa - we'd never heard of Crime Scene Investigators, let alone forensic anthropologists or forensic entomology. But since the airing of shows like CSI, and Medical Detectives, slowly people are beginning to realise this kind of work is out there.

    In the US, UK, and Australia I've noticed a theme of "forensics as infallible"; roaring in like the cavalry to help put away criminals. In the fictional setting - television programmes like CSI - I find this amusing, because criminals are continually caught by some minuscule trace they left behind at a crime scene where the investigators are cross-disciplinary and using the latest equipment that most real crime labs cannot even hope to afford. I like this "cavalry" idea (speaking domestically, because I'm very concerned about forensic teams swooping down on other countries to "show them how it's done") and wish it happened more in real life. But when DNA, for example, is presented in the media as a crime-fighting tool, I worry, because this creates expectations that often cannot be borne out. As for how the media portrays forensic anthropology in particular (as opposed to forensic pathology or criminalistics): I don't often see anthropologists in the media! CSI sometimes crosses over into bones and you occasionally see a forensic anthropologist character guest starring on Law and Order and shows like that. I love to see this. In the news, the only stories I usually see that involve anthropologists are stories about cases of unidentified bodies and the search for their identity. I save all of these.

13. What steps does someone take to become a forensic anthropologist?

    In the US, someone interested in forensic anthropology would first study physical anthropology at university, learning about human evolution and primates, and human osteology (the study of the skeleton), along with some comparative study of non-human animal bones. Then they would go onto a graduate program that specialises in forensic anthropology, to learn how to determine age, sex, stature and ancestry from human bones, along with recognising signs of trauma and pathology (disease) on bones and medical X-rays, and taking and reading dental X-rays. Ideally, in this graduate course, they would attend or assist with analysing human remains at their local county coroner's or medical examiner's office. This allows the learning to go beyond what can be shown in the laboratory on to the true diversity of characteristics that every person exhibits owing to their unique body and life. Lastly, upon graduation, this person must overcome the reality that there are really no jobs for forensic anthropologists! In the US, most forensic anthropologists teach at a university and provide services to coroner's offices for a small fee that goes back to the university. There are no actual jobs entitled "forensic anthropologist" - even the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory relies on the Smithsonian Institution to help them deal with cases that require an anthropologist! Back when the International Criminal Tribunals were conducting the sorts of missions I participated in, the forensic anthropologist also had to be willing to work without pay - as we did, with only a small stipend out of which we had to pay for housing, food, phone calls home, etc.

14. It's not the kind of work just anyone can do - what makes a good forensic anthropologist?

    When I think of a "good forensic anthropologist" I think of my mentor, Dr Walt Birkby. I would say that, among other things, he is characterised by an ability to discern even subtle details on tissue, bone, teeth and hair because he sees the body as representing the person that lived; he has a vast memory of characteristics of bodies he's seen in the past, so that he can place new characteristics in context; importantly, he has an assumption that though he knows an awful lot (and has confidence based on this), he must remain open to what he hasn't seen before; and lastly, he has an ability to resist being "drawn" by law enforcement or others who may "want" a body to be identified in a particular way. Walt's dedication is to the unidentified person and no one else. That is very important, because most of the time, the body is at the centre of some medico-legal debate - whether it be related to identity or cause of death - such that whatever Walt says is going to play a role in a criminal trial that will have a direct impact on a suspect's liberty.

15. What is the most challenging aspect of forensic anthropology in the 21st century?

    I think the biggest challenge to forensic anthropology in the 21st century will be ensuring that its practitioners do not become tools in the hands of those in power as the capabilities of the science become more well-known. The work must always be in the service of the body, to identify the unidentified and return their remains to their families, and in the service of justice in the case of those people who died a sudden death at the hands of others.

16. What two bits of advice to you have for anyone inspired to become a forensic anthropologist?

    (1) Be sure to study cultural anthropology as well, because the stories that you'll read from someone's bones will have been recorded in their life; it will help to have a broad, cross-cultural perspective as you proceed to interpret the bones.

    (2) Always remember that anyone you speak to about your profession may have had a relative or friend die suddenly and thus have been handled by a forensic scientist.

    On a lighter note …

    [Thanks for the lighter note!]

17. What is the first thing you notice about a person?

    I notice people's teeth straight away. I'd say that it's a professional habit, as I'm always scanning for good markers of identification on people, but I'm also fascinated by teeth in general.

18. What kept you sane during your time in the field?

    I think what kept me going in the field was in part actually doing the work - finding bodies and exhuming them, thinking about how this would help to prosecute killers. But when that became difficult to deal with, especially as we got progressively more tired, I really enjoyed the opportunity to go dancing with team-mates (and once I got to go to a dance club in Tuzla with some young Bosnian kids about half my age and it was great!), eating, listening to music, talking with anyone I had found common ground with, and of course, writing in my journal about anything I didn't feel I could talk to someone else about.

19. What keeps you sane on book tours?

    This is a great question! It makes me wonder about you, Sharon! On book tours, which were a completely new experience for me last year, chocolate played an important role! I ate a lot of it for comfort. Also calling my family and my best friend, Sam, which helped me to keep perspective on what I really wanted to share with people in interviews - and to stay "myself" instead of creating a persona to get through a rather tiring experience. I was deeply surprised at how difficult it was to go through weeks and weeks of never-ending touring (you'd think working in the graves would have been harder) - it was because I was repeatedly having to talk about, say, the grandfather in Kosovo - and I was drained at some point in every interview. I don't mind letting my emotions show, but I didn't want them interfering with what I was actually trying to share!

20. What is your next step?

    I am currently forming a non-profit agency in the US that will liaise between families with missing persons and the coroner's offices that have a backlog of thousands of unidentified bodies. The agency, MPID (Missing Persons Identification Resource Centre), will be addressing the situation where someone's relative has been found, but has been found dead and has remained unidentified (owing to the inadequate nature of the national computer database that matches information on missing and unidentified persons). Essentially, MPID will develop anthropological profiles of missing persons by using the sort of creative thinking we used to help identify people in Bosnia who didn't have dental records available. I hope MPID will be a safe environment for families; we won't use standard questionnaires and instead will be collaborative and dynamic, using grass-roots methods as opposed to law enforcement methods. Over time, I hope MPID will lead to a different approach to missing and unidentified adults altogether - at the moment, as it's not illegal for an adult to go missing, it's very difficult for families to get investigations going. Currently, no organisation like MPID exists in the States and families are out on their own, with no real knowledge of what happens with unidentified bodies or missing persons cases. And what I've seen is that it doesn't matter if people have lost a relative in the midst of a conflict or if it's been something quietly domestic, because the questions about the past, the need to know what happened, and the necessity to grieve are the same, wherever, whenever, by whomever.

21. Will you ever consider writing crime/forensic fiction?

    Funny you should ask, as I've started writing some forensic fiction - mysteries! But I don't know if this is just fun for me or something that's good enough to be published! Time will tell. As it is, I'm enjoying using fiction to explore some of the subjects within forensics that I've always researched but that have rarely been of interest to colleagues in the field - for example, the identification of people who are "mixed-race" when our science barely recognises that there is such a thing, and law enforcement still responds to an anthropological report that says the decedent is "mixed", with, "please pick one"! Meanwhile, people whose parents are of different "races" are the fastest-growing population in the United States!

22. How would you describe yourself, in five words?

    Oh, this is hard! To be fair, Sharon, you must also ask yourself this question and then write back to me with a response! I'd like to know. Ah … let's see: empathetic, critical, trusting, curious, loving.

23. And, finally: What do you think of the cover that was chosen for your book? And what do the chicken bones represent?

    The Bone Woman (UK trade paperback over)

    I am amazed that you asked about the bones on the cover! When I first saw this cover, I responded that I thought it was beautiful and encapsulated themes from the book … but I did tell the publisher that I was concerned that there were animal bones on the cover, as that seemed a bit misleading somehow - plus, I'm not a zoologist! I was never given an explanation of why non-human bones were on there (and I've not met the designer), but I was told that "no one" besides me was concerned, and I didn't try further to have them removed/changed. Sharon, you have just proved my point, but at the same time, you are the first person to actually ask this - and you've made me laugh! (Although I did bury birds and dig them up later, that was when I was much younger and it's not really a theme of The Bone Woman …)

So my suggestion is that you grab hold of Clea's hand and follow her through the pages of her story, among the dead.

Win a copy of The Bone Woman: Among the dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Croatia Send an e-mail to sharon@litnet.co.za and win! Send the e-mail addresses of friends you think would like to receive our fabulous newsletter and double your chances of winning!

LitNet: 28 April 2005

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