Learning From The Dead Forensic Scientists Want To Open International Center In Spokane
They died where they lived, on the land.
They were beaten until their skulls fractured, then chained together and dragged to where they were buried, one atop the other in a watery clay grave on the green hills of Bosnia.
At first, forensic anthropologist Noel Boaz thought the skeletal remains were a man and woman killed on a remote farm. Then in the sweltering July heat a thousand miles from his Spokane home, Boaz unfolded the story of the bones:
They were Serbian men, farmers, 25 and 45, neighbors who had held out on their land and then were killed by Muslim vigilantes.
It was 10:30 p.m. when the forensic team finished and drove back to Sarajevo. It had taken 14 hours to reach, recover and identify two men. Twenty-thousand others are still missing.
The mass murder of civilians worldwide is propelling the grim but advancing edge of forensic science. Forensic anthropologists, physicians and human rights activists are working to recover and identify the remains in mass graves. They are building prosecutors’ cases for war crimes and training locals in the science. Now they are considering making Spokane their headquarters.
For the last year, Boaz and Rick Harrington, another forensic anthropologist, have been quietly meeting with the Spokane County medical examiner and Washington State University officials in between trips to Bosnia. The goal: locating a forensic institute, founded by Boaz in 1991, in Spokane.
The center would offer training, conduct research in forensic anthropology, house rapid response teams to deploy to the world’s hot spots, and serve the Inland Northwest, helping a county sheriff, say, identify a single human bone washed onto a stream bank.
Boaz, a nationally noted scientist, anatomy professor, author and adjunct professor of anthropology at WSU, initially moved to Spokane with his wife, Meleisa McDonald, who was receiving medical training. He believes Spokane has the health care community, university presence, cost of living and quality of life that the institute needs to attract participants.
The world will supply the dead.
“There has been a change in war at the end of this century where the percentage of civilian casualties has skyrocketed, it’s enormous,” said Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights.
Civilian dead are harder to document and identify. Their deaths are often hidden, their whereabouts unknown. They have no dog tags.
Boaz and Harrington are among fewer than 100 professionals doing unprecedented work identifying the dead in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their work joins the most recent scientific advances like DNA analysis and radar detection with the worst of human behavior. But Boaz believes the education the scientists can offer - that the similarities between people are remarkable and their only real differences are learned - is the world’s best hope for peace.
At the farm grave site in July, Boaz determined the age, size, ethnicity and sex of the skeletons. He examined trauma to the bones and worked with local authorities who used other information and statements from survivors to identify the men.
Boaz was so unaffected he wondered if he was getting used to the aftermath of violent death. But after returning to his home in the Spokane Valley last week, the images returned sharp and startling. The two farmers must have loved the beautiful hills where they lived, he realized, because they died for them. It woke him from a sound sleep.
“People don’t go into the field of anthropology to help people in some faraway land learn the fate of their loved ones,” Rubenstein said. “Anthropologists who are willing to do it are really giving a gift.”
“I do this for people more as a humanist than a scientist,” Boaz said. “This is science in the service of people.”
Casualties of war
Nothing is more human than to grieve and bury the dead.
“If you look at every civilization for thousands of years, the one thing in common is that people need to know the fate of their loved ones and have rituals of burial and grief,” Rubenstein said.
It’s a need denied many.
When innocent civilians first became the “disappeared” in South America in the 1980s, anthropologist Clyde Snow used his expertise to locate and identify those in mass graves.
Beginning in 1996, Physicians for Human Rights sent 90 volunteer experts to the Srebrenica region of Bosnia. Once a United Nations “safe haven,” the area had been overrun by Bosnian Serbs earlier in the decade and more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims seeking refuge there disappeared. International teams focused on four mass graves, exhuming 136,000 bones and 650 bodies. The investigation led to the indictment of suspected war criminals and media attention worldwide.
Harrington, 45, was among the experts. For years, the University of Arizona-trained researcher worked identifying American war dead for the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. His job included monthlong sojourns to Vietnam to recover servicemen’s remains and a trip to Europe to recover a downed World War II aviator discovered in a farmer’s field.
On vacation, he’d travel to Bosnia. He has descended 50 feet into shafts, where dozens of bodies had been dropped. On gravel roads he examined bleached human bones that had been driven over daily for five years. He worked on a site where 200 hospital patients and staff were rousted and murdered, many with their casts, belongings and money still on them.
“There was a sort of arrogance that they could do this and not get caught,” he said.
This year, Harrington left his job with the U.S. Army to consult for the human rights group and work on locating the institute in Spokane. He spent months working on identifications so difficult they defy most detective work. International workers through Physicians for Human Rights are collecting photos of the missing, detailed descriptions, eyewitness accounts and DNA from relatives. The work is funded by the European Union and International Commission on Missing Persons.
“The ending is always sad,” Harrington said. “But at least we can give families closure.”
From her office in Bosnia, Caitriona Palmer, the special projects manager for the Physicians for Human Rights data project, said Boaz and Harrington’s contributions have brought “enormous comfort” to victims’ families.
“They’re experts in the field. To devote their time to such an extremely worthy cause, under frustrating conditions, speaks so highly of them. They’re incredibly dedicated professionals.”
Exhuming graves and analyzing skeletons in the field is harsh. Conditions range from blowing snow to 100-degree summer days. The forensic scientists struggle with mud, water, uncooperative officials, language barriers and sometimes deadly land mines. Both Harrington and Boaz have been nearly blown up while working for the human rights group that shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize for its work in defusing land mines.
Only a small number of exhumations being done now lead to criminal cases. Although almost none of the war criminals indicted in the former Yugoslavia have been arrested, Harrington says they have been driven into exile or hiding. And, he says, history is being written.
“One of the fundamental benefits to society is to document this in no uncertain terms,” said Boaz, 47.
Whether the work helps prevent mass murders in the future is less certain. As Boaz and Harrington worked on old graves in Bosnia this summer, human rights workers were unearthing new mass graves in Kosovo.
The latest murders show an increasing awareness among the combatants. Many of the mass graves were disguised, the dead dug up and buried individually after a mass execution, the bodies were burned or phony cemeteries erected.
“But we can always figure it out,” Boaz said. “You can’t lose a single hand bone when you do that. You can’t cover all your tracks.”
The science of tolerance
George Lindholm had barely met Boaz and Harrington when the Spokane County medical examiner thought of a case in which he could use their expertise, then another and another.
“Pretty soon I had a litany of cases that had been plaguing me,” said Lindholm, who has performed autopsies for Spokane County for 14 years. “I can think of dozens and dozens of situations where this relationship could be helpful.”
Lindholm has offered to share information, support and even space at his forensic center at Holy Family Hospital with the institute as it starts up in Spokane. Boaz and Harrington hope to work with WSU’s growing Spokane campus.
Lindholm sees Boaz and Harrington as experts who, like the battlefield surgeons of World War II, have seen so much field work that they are on the leading edge of the science.
“I’d be a fool not to do everything I can to augment and supplement these people,” Lindholm said.
Boaz and Harrington are already looking at more efficient ways to recover remains. They’ve been meeting with a firm in Alaska on the design of a high-tech four-wheel drive vehicle that would more efficiently exhume remains and allow for graveside autopsy.
The two men see the institute as providing research and training capabilities for graduate students and medical students. Boaz, a paleoanthropologist, or fossil specialist, is also earning a medical degree.
One of his most important contributions in Bosnia was to set up a university course to teach forensic anthropology to specialists from criminologists to pathologists. He also helped develop an internship program in the field and worked with the local medical faculty.
Boaz hopes that in Spokane, the institute can educate lay people as well. People use economic differences, accents and geography as proof they are different. Such tribalism has driven racism, murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide worldwide. Boaz and Harrington hope through grieving families and ruined communities to show the victims’ universal humanity.
Biologic anthropology is also on their side. Twenty years of scientific studies, for instance, show how the Muslims, Serbs and Croats who have died for their differences are, in fact, physically and genetically identical. In fact, most of the people in the world, regardless of the continent, are identical.
“Education is the ultimate antidote,” Boaz said. “It’s the predominance of ignorance that allows this tribalism.”
The bones reveal the price. The farmers they identified weren’t even combatants. They were just bystanders, trying to hold on.
“To hold these relics, it’s a very strong argument for stopping warfare,” Boaz said.