Dignity for the dead, closure for the survivors
HOW A CANADIAN SCIENTIST IS TRYING TO MODERNIZE THE SEARCH FOR BODIES IN WAR ZONES
I REMEMBER VERY CLEARLY THE CONFUSED AND TROUBLED LOOK ON THE FACE OF THE OLDER COUPLE WHO LIVED ON THE PROPERTY AS WE STORMED UP WITH ARMOURED VEHICLES, ARMED SECURITY, A MECHANICAL EXCAVATOR AND A TEAM OF ABOUT 20 PEOPLE. — DEREK CONGRAM
It was 1999 that Derek Congram and other members of a UN team invaded the unsuspecting Bosnians’ home, convinced their land contained a mass grave for victims of the country’s vicious civil war.
They tore up the family’s market garden, probably ruined their main source of income — and found nothing.
“I remember very clearly the confused and troubled look on the face of the older couple who lived on the property as we stormed up with armoured vehicles, armed security, a mechanical excavator and a team of about 20 people,” says Congram, a Canadian forensic anthropologist.
The incident underlined the agonizingly difficult task of recovering remains of the hundreds of thousands of people who have disappeared in conflict zones around the world, their graves long forgotten — or deliberately hidden by the killers.
But the Toronto-based expert has developed a computer-based system he believes can greatly ease the search for missing victims.
Congram is harnessing “geographic information software” — computer programs that can process data ranging from digital images to soil composition and road types — to come up with the most likely location for unknown graves. “It’s a way of taking in a lot of data, organizing it and analyzing it for spatial patterns,” he said. “If nothing else, it’s going to help people search more efficiently for missing persons.”
His ideas — described recently in the journal Forensic Science International — led to work with a huge U.S. Defence Department program seeking bodies of GIs still missing in foreign war zones.
And he’s about to leave his research job at the University of Toronto to work as a forensic coordinator for the Red Cross in South America, a continent with a dark history of political violence.
Congram is hoping to apply his system in Colombia as that nation recovers from a civil war that left countless civilians dead.
But the missing casualties of military and political struggle are all over the world, many recently deceased, others long dead.
Even in Spain, people are still searching for the estimated 115,000 or more people taken from their homes and murdered during the civil war and repression half a century ago.
The U.S. spends $200 million a year looking for its missing soldiers.
And countless dead remain lost in countries wracked by conflict or genocide from Rwanda to the Congo and Syria. “It’s a huge problem,” said Congram. “It’s bigger than we realize.”
Finding those bodies can be important for prosecution of war crimes or humanrights abuses, or just to allow family members to lay their loved ones to rest.
Effort is made in isolated cases, such as the mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda that resulted in UN investigations. Congram was part of a U.S. project that probed murders by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, among the 20 countries where he has done such work.
Often the only clues to grave locations come from the accounts of witnesses, whose recollection can be less than honest, or just faulty, as with that Bosnia incident.
He also relates a 2009 search in Spain for five men seized from their homes during the civil war in 1936. An elderly man recalled seeing — as a nine-year-old — an arm protruding from the earth and was sure that spot was where they were buried.
An extensive excavation, though, came up empty, bitterly disappointing the son of one of the victims. “He was crushed and swore he would never again try to find his father,” Congram says.
To try to make such hunts more precise, his system analyzes known data around the disappeared, then develops a sort of algorithm that can predict their likely locations. When possible, the inputs include information about bodies already recovered — such as the distance of the burial site from where people went missing and the area controlled by the suspected killers.
The result is a map that doesn’t pinpoint exact grave sites, but identifies “hot zones” where remains are most apt to be found.
He’s now trying to build an international database on the final resting places of the disappeared. It’s possible that when soldiers, terrorists or secret police dispose of the dead, their practices are similar worldwide.
“Ideally, you’d like to say, this is a very kind of human behaviour and we see a lot of consistencies, ” said Congram. “That way you can take a lot of information from other countries and make reliable predictions about a country you’ve not been to.”