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Probing a Landscape of Death
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Volume 52 Number 6, November/December 1999
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by Brenda Smiley
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Eva Klonowski digs the site of a mass grave at Lukavica, where former inmates of a nearby Serbian concentration camp told of being forced to bury 20 executed prisoners. (Brenda Smiley) [LARGER IMAGE] |
The earth shows signs of having been spaded. A covering of spring green
softens the rough clumps of dirt, in some places furrowed by the treads of
armored personnel carriers. Within the ridges, tiny white flowers push
through the soil. Eva Elvira Klonowski, in jeans and a T-shirt, dons rubber
boots for the grim task ahead. It is my first day in the field with Eva. I
ask her if she thinks we'll find bodies. "If they are there, I will find
them," she replies. "I'm a tough cookie."
It is also the first day of digging at a suspected mass grave near the
village of Lukavica, a Serb-controlled suburb of Sarajevo that abuts the
southern edge of the city's airport. Eva is chief forensic anthropologist
working with a team of local experts and gravediggers. Their mission is to
find and recover Bosnian Muslim victims of the ethnic cleansings of the
early 1990s. Some 20,000 are still listed as missing. The work proceeds
beneath the glare of the Serbs, whose hostility toward non-Serbs has surged
sharply since NATO began bombing Belgrade. The local populace also simmers
with resentment toward visitors from NATO-member countries. In Sarajevo,
the United States ambassador warns Americans not to venture into Serb
territories. It is those areas, where a Muslim minority once lived side by
side with the Serbs, that contain most of the mass graves so far
discovered.
Eva points to bullet hole in skull of a person executed at a prison camp. (Brenda Smiley) [LARGER IMAGE] |
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Her close-cropped hair as white as distant snow-capped Mount Bjelasnica,
Eva has recovered and identified at least 1,000 bodies during the past
three-and-a-half years. Beginning in 1996, she excavated throughout Bosnia
with international organizations such as the Boston-based Physicians for
Human Rights, but now she prefers to work alone, free of diplomatic
strictures. She returned by herself in 1998, volunteering to work directly
for the Bosnian Muslims, who, she says, "have the least money, and the most
dead." Now she is the only woman, and the only foreigner, working for the
International Commission for Tracing Missing Persons (ICMP), established by
the Bosnian state in 1996. With teams of pathologists, judges, Serb
officials, police, and gravediggers, Eva travels the ravaged countryside
searching for the missing and collecting evidence for The Hague War Crimes
Tribunal.
Brenda Smiley, writer and journalist, has published articles on Middle Eastern history and archaeology and covered the Iraq-Iran war as a radio reporter. She also has written on DNA privacy issues and is writing a book, Diary of a Gravedigger, about Eva Klonowski.
© 1999 by the Archaeological Institute of America archive.archaeology.org/9911/abstracts/death.html |