1 00:00:03,510 --> 00:00:07,980 In this episode, The Changing Character of War Program welcomes Dr. Derrick Congreve, 2 00:00:08,460 --> 00:00:13,020 an anthropologist and archaeologist from the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. 3 00:00:13,710 --> 00:00:21,600 His talk, entitled What We're Missing About the Missing looks at the underexplored topic of missing persons in conflict and the political, 4 00:00:21,630 --> 00:00:25,680 judicial and practical challenges of studying subjects we haven't yet found. 5 00:00:27,650 --> 00:00:32,420 When I was first invited, I'll admit I didn't know about the changing conflict of war program, 6 00:00:32,990 --> 00:00:40,940 so I did a bit of Googling and I saw a lot of parallels that connected with the department that I'm a part of. 7 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:47,240 I'm an anthropologist by training and by profession archaeologist, an anthropologist, biological anthropologist. 8 00:00:47,720 --> 00:00:53,660 But I work in the Department of Political Sciences, in the School of Global Affairs, at the University of Toronto, 9 00:00:54,050 --> 00:01:00,590 and our current director, who next year will become the next chancellor of the University of Cambridge, 10 00:01:00,950 --> 00:01:09,509 Stephen too is a lawyer and he wanted to make us more than kind of a traditional feeder institution to government and international organisations. 11 00:01:09,510 --> 00:01:13,790 He wanted to kind of more bridge the, I don't know, 12 00:01:13,790 --> 00:01:21,229 theoretical or perhaps real gap between theory and practice and make us more closely 13 00:01:21,230 --> 00:01:26,510 identifying or may help us more better integrate with professional practice. 14 00:01:26,510 --> 00:01:32,659 And so I'm part of that because of my professional consulting and and we're doing 15 00:01:32,660 --> 00:01:36,799 more kind of collaborative efforts with government and international organisations. 16 00:01:36,800 --> 00:01:47,510 That's kind of the direction we're headed. So I see some parallels there and I'll just give you kind of a very brief overview of what 17 00:01:47,510 --> 00:01:53,330 I'm going to talk about in the course of my consulting and now my research and teaching. 18 00:01:55,100 --> 00:02:01,370 It's I'm generally working on missing persons, people who were missing in the context of armed conflict. 19 00:02:01,910 --> 00:02:07,550 So forensic and humanitarian investigations, I'll talk about those distinctions in a bit, but there are three, 20 00:02:08,260 --> 00:02:13,220 in my experience in different places, three terms, I think, that represent the problems. 21 00:02:13,430 --> 00:02:18,499 I think these days in academia we're inclined to use different wording puzzles. 22 00:02:18,500 --> 00:02:22,190 I hear puzzles all the time, but what's the puzzle? I hate it. It's a problem. 23 00:02:22,190 --> 00:02:25,610 My mother is a social worker. She says, no, there are no problems. There are just challenges. 24 00:02:25,760 --> 00:02:33,229 The euphemism, it's awful. It's a problem. And when I think of what I do, I think about what are the problems that we have to deal with? 25 00:02:33,230 --> 00:02:37,880 And I think that can be summed up with mothers methods and mandates, and I'll spell those out as I go along. 26 00:02:38,570 --> 00:02:47,150 But to give you some some background on the subject, when I'm talking about missing, this is a number from Lebanon, from the civil war in Lebanon. 27 00:02:48,350 --> 00:02:52,610 And what's happened in Lebanon is essentially nothing. 28 00:02:52,610 --> 00:03:03,260 They have a president after a long period of time of kind of political deadlock, but there are 17,000 at least missing, 29 00:03:03,920 --> 00:03:07,670 and nothing has been done on behalf of the government to search for these people. 30 00:03:07,670 --> 00:03:10,640 And yet the Red Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross is there, 31 00:03:10,910 --> 00:03:15,290 kind of imploring the government to kind of fulfil their responsibilities to investigate. 32 00:03:15,890 --> 00:03:23,510 The book that I recently edited brings together 22 different authors, journalists, psychologists, criminologists, historian, 33 00:03:23,840 --> 00:03:31,040 biological and cultural anthropologists who are all working in different contexts and in different elements of missing persons investigations. 34 00:03:32,300 --> 00:03:37,580 And although these are generally about the missing from conflict, I wanted to push the boundaries a bit. 35 00:03:37,580 --> 00:03:44,690 And the origin of that is from my Dr. Research, which I did in Spain on the missing from the Spanish Civil War, 36 00:03:45,950 --> 00:03:48,950 which has been in the press quite a lot over the past few years. 37 00:03:48,950 --> 00:03:55,100 But for decades after the war and during the Franco dictatorship, I mean, there was no news, no discussion about the missing. 38 00:03:55,610 --> 00:03:59,180 And there are over 100,000 people who were extrajudicially executed. 39 00:04:01,490 --> 00:04:06,020 But when I was working in Spain, you know, Spanish society has been quite divided, as, you know, 40 00:04:06,080 --> 00:04:10,459 whether they should look back into the past or whether they should just turn the page, 41 00:04:10,460 --> 00:04:15,110 all these kind of perhaps inappropriate metaphors that people use. 42 00:04:16,370 --> 00:04:21,740 And so Spanish society has been very divided on whether they should go back and start searching for the missing. 43 00:04:22,070 --> 00:04:26,090 So when I'm there as a foreigner, a lot of people would ask me in particular to the press, 44 00:04:26,090 --> 00:04:30,110 because this became an angle that they liked, you know, that foreigners were interested. 45 00:04:31,190 --> 00:04:35,839 And and for them, I suppose the idea that a Canadian should be interested in what's happening in Spain, 46 00:04:35,840 --> 00:04:39,409 when half of Spain wasn't concerned, was interesting to them. 47 00:04:39,410 --> 00:04:46,100 And I would say, well, you know, I'm interested because Canada has thousands of missing people that our government won't investigate. 48 00:04:46,100 --> 00:04:51,440 And people were generally incredulous. And most Canadians wouldn't even agree with that statement. 49 00:04:51,740 --> 00:05:00,620 But the truth is, for about 150 years, there were state sponsored and church run residential schools for indigenous children, 50 00:05:01,520 --> 00:05:05,150 and it was kind of rooted in very kind of colonial minded racism. 51 00:05:05,720 --> 00:05:11,060 But as many as 6000 children died in these schools over the span of 150 years. 52 00:05:11,060 --> 00:05:13,070 And when people think of Canada, they don't think about this. 53 00:05:13,070 --> 00:05:19,340 And when most Canadians think about Canada as part of this kind of, oh, it's historic, it's also a marginalised community. 54 00:05:19,490 --> 00:05:26,750 So most people don't care. Only very recently has the government led a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look into. 55 00:05:26,830 --> 00:05:32,650 That the Spaniards found that kind of confounding, that, you know, that Canada and Canadians should be interested in this. 56 00:05:33,070 --> 00:05:39,070 And I would say we're not doing anything in Canada about it. So I'm looking to where things are happening to see what we can learn from you. 57 00:05:39,850 --> 00:05:46,180 And that was intriguing to them. But it also allows me to kind of push the definitions of who's missing. 58 00:05:47,140 --> 00:05:51,910 And I also include in the book a chapter by someone who works in a museum where they curate and 59 00:05:51,910 --> 00:05:57,730 sometimes display the remains of indigenous persons remains that were collected in the name of science. 60 00:05:57,910 --> 00:06:03,129 This is something that, as an archaeologist and biological anthropologist, we're really having to confront and having to confront. 61 00:06:03,130 --> 00:06:08,560 We ought to have confronted it much, you know, a long time ago. 62 00:06:08,950 --> 00:06:15,010 But this kind of social awareness again of marginalised communities has changed in of their political power. 63 00:06:16,270 --> 00:06:22,389 And even here at the University of Oxford and the Rivers Museum, I was there yesterday, took this image of all these cranes. 64 00:06:22,390 --> 00:06:26,770 And I wonder, you know, who asked these communities or did anyone? 65 00:06:27,070 --> 00:06:31,840 One of my research colleagues is six year old, was taken to a museum in Toronto and she said, 66 00:06:32,020 --> 00:06:40,540 but that all these things are so beautiful and so interesting. How did the museum get them to agree to give these things up? 67 00:06:40,920 --> 00:06:45,820 It's a what a brilliant question from a six year old, because there was generally no agreement these things were taken. 68 00:06:46,840 --> 00:06:51,820 And so I wanted to explore the idea of are these missing persons or these victims of enforced disappearance, 69 00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:57,190 because there are repatriation claims from Canadian indigenous groups for remains like this. 70 00:06:58,480 --> 00:07:00,129 But for the purposes of this talk, 71 00:07:00,130 --> 00:07:10,780 I'm just really going to stick to those who go missing in armed conflict and contemporary investigations are very much the very much begin, 72 00:07:10,780 --> 00:07:19,959 I suppose, with Argentina. And this phrase in the image apparition can be that appearance alive became 73 00:07:19,960 --> 00:07:23,650 a sort of mantra that's been continued and echo today in modern day Mexico, 74 00:07:23,650 --> 00:07:28,690 where 43 student teachers went missing at the hands of the government. 75 00:07:28,930 --> 00:07:32,590 They were detained and they disappeared in a lot of media attention. 76 00:07:33,490 --> 00:07:38,620 Public pressure has gone in, but none of those 43 have been found. 77 00:07:39,880 --> 00:07:44,320 And the expression when protests are being staged and you see it all over Mexico City. 78 00:07:44,320 --> 00:07:52,750 I was there for a conference last week. You said you see 43 and you you hear people chanting Beatles, they lost Joe Arum, 79 00:07:52,870 --> 00:07:59,140 Beatles lost caramels, which means they were taken away alive and we want them back alive. 80 00:07:59,950 --> 00:08:01,569 Now, when we talk about missing persons, 81 00:08:01,570 --> 00:08:10,270 it's generally a horrible euphemism because there is a belief that's quite reliable that odds are these people are dead. 82 00:08:10,720 --> 00:08:14,530 But until there's some sort of physical evidence, we can't believe it. 83 00:08:14,650 --> 00:08:21,160 And how can I tell a mother who searching for her son or her husband that, oh, you know what, they're probably dead. 84 00:08:21,310 --> 00:08:24,430 So you, you know, don't give up on that idea. 85 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:32,680 The International Committee of the Red Cross in Bosnia wanted to resolve questions for widows, widows, 86 00:08:32,980 --> 00:08:39,280 wives, mothers of missing people, wanted to help them with issues of inheritance and things like that. 87 00:08:39,460 --> 00:08:45,820 Because with this ambiguous status of missing, there's no kind of legal resolution for a lot of problems that exist. 88 00:08:46,480 --> 00:08:51,250 So the ICRC started to coordinate the issuing of death certificates for the missing. 89 00:08:52,300 --> 00:08:55,900 They thought that this would help families, and in some respects it does. 90 00:08:56,140 --> 00:09:03,459 But so many families were horrified by this. They clung to a belief that they're not all they're missing, but they're not dead. 91 00:09:03,460 --> 00:09:07,210 They're being held in prisons in in Serbia and Kosovo. 92 00:09:07,210 --> 00:09:12,070 The same thing, the same belief was held by Albanian Kosovars that, oh, are missing, 93 00:09:12,070 --> 00:09:20,140 are being held in prisons in Serbia and by Kosovar Serbs are missing, are being held in Albania for a period of time. 94 00:09:21,340 --> 00:09:23,850 It's possible that that was true in general. 95 00:09:23,860 --> 00:09:32,499 We know now because of exhaustive investigations, you know, they were dead families of Americans who went missing in action. 96 00:09:32,500 --> 00:09:37,659 Soldiers in Vietnam still to this day believe they can go to Vietnam as a tourist. 97 00:09:37,660 --> 00:09:44,379 They can search the whole country. The United States Department of Defence spends on the books $100 million a year. 98 00:09:44,380 --> 00:09:51,430 But its recent audit showed that it was probably closer to $200 million a year searching for missing combatants from Korea, 99 00:09:51,430 --> 00:09:57,309 World War Two and the war in Southeast Asia. But families, American families missing in action. 100 00:09:57,310 --> 00:10:03,370 Soldiers still believe some of them are a minority, but they're still being held prisoner somewhere in clandestine prisons. 101 00:10:03,790 --> 00:10:07,119 It's really awful to be kind of confronting this. 102 00:10:07,120 --> 00:10:11,589 And I can't I had Mexican mothers come and say, oh, we're going to dig, we're going to search for remains. 103 00:10:11,590 --> 00:10:14,800 We're going to do some examinations next week because the government won't do it. 104 00:10:15,190 --> 00:10:18,429 Will you come and help us? I didn't want to tell them. 105 00:10:18,430 --> 00:10:22,240 Oh, I've got to talk in Oxford. I really can't. I mean, it sounds awful. 106 00:10:22,690 --> 00:10:26,470 I said, Well, let me see what I can do if I can kind of help connect you with some people who are in the. 107 00:10:29,630 --> 00:10:33,590 But it's interesting. I'll try to develop this a little more that. 108 00:10:34,820 --> 00:10:39,950 We've seen this sort of evolution adaptation transference from one context to the next. 109 00:10:39,950 --> 00:10:49,040 So moving from Argentina to Spain, even though the crimes committed in Spain happened decades previously, this was kind of what was happening. 110 00:10:49,040 --> 00:10:56,929 This silence will ensue. Mass graves. But over time, and especially since the year 2000, there's been a change in the social memory, 111 00:10:56,930 --> 00:11:00,140 social consciousness, the fading of the dictator Franco. 112 00:11:00,410 --> 00:11:04,880 And in his absence come up his victims. The victims of his army and the dictatorship. 113 00:11:07,270 --> 00:11:16,000 In Iraq in 2003, the American led campaign was under the guise of looking for weapons of mass destruction, 114 00:11:16,960 --> 00:11:23,770 went in and took out the Baath Party regime. And as soon as that regime fell, families rushed out. 115 00:11:24,310 --> 00:11:27,910 People were missing. But in many instances, they knew where those people were. 116 00:11:28,090 --> 00:11:33,100 They were being detained at a military base or in a prison. Notorious prisons, not in unlike Syria. 117 00:11:34,240 --> 00:11:39,129 And people came to the belief that they were dead and buried but couldn't search, weren't allowed to search. 118 00:11:39,130 --> 00:11:44,080 As soon as that regime crumbled, they went out and started digging them up with mechanised backhoes. 119 00:11:44,620 --> 00:11:52,959 And this was the result. And for the American administration, in particular, also the British, this was a problem. 120 00:11:52,960 --> 00:11:59,980 As they failed to find weapons of mass destruction, they thought politically this could be very valuable. 121 00:12:00,700 --> 00:12:05,830 But when excavations and investigations are held like this by desperate families 122 00:12:05,920 --> 00:12:09,250 and there are some images of soldiers kind of standing by international soldiers 123 00:12:10,330 --> 00:12:17,830 and watching because they're standing between desperate mothers or families and 124 00:12:17,830 --> 00:12:22,660 the desire to be able to use that evidence of past crimes by a previous regime. 125 00:12:23,200 --> 00:12:27,460 This was done by the Nazis in 1943, in Belorussia, Poland, the Ukraine. 126 00:12:27,820 --> 00:12:35,020 They conducted some remarkable forensic investigations of mass graves, of victims of the NKVD, the Soviets. 127 00:12:35,770 --> 00:12:41,260 And they used it as a way of saying, look, you can trust us. Look at what the previous administration did to your people. 128 00:12:41,740 --> 00:12:48,940 You can trust us. And we know how that worked. So there's a real political interest in controlled excavations. 129 00:12:48,940 --> 00:12:55,090 And eventually there were both my wife and I were involved in investigations for the US Department of Justice in Iraq. 130 00:12:55,570 --> 00:13:01,389 But there were others, colleagues of ours and your friends who said, no, it's too political, it's too one sided. 131 00:13:01,390 --> 00:13:06,310 And the right you know, we have to balance questions like this. 132 00:13:06,790 --> 00:13:14,260 I'll just give you a brief kind of develop this idea of the transnational discourse and the missing and and universal jurisdiction. 133 00:13:14,830 --> 00:13:19,150 It's one of the chapters in the book written by two Spaniards, a journalist and a social anthropologist. 134 00:13:20,530 --> 00:13:30,090 And they talk about how Spanish investigative judge Baltasar Garzon indicted Pinochet when he came to the UK for back surgery. 135 00:13:30,340 --> 00:13:39,010 He was out of power and got a son, said there are 30 some Spaniards who died, Spanish citizens who died under the Pinochet regime or went missing. 136 00:13:40,090 --> 00:13:44,010 And under the guise of universal jurisdiction. I want to investigate this case. 137 00:13:44,020 --> 00:13:48,390 If the Chilean government won't, I will. And it became a big deal. 138 00:13:48,400 --> 00:13:53,200 I mean, if you're in the UK at the time, I'm sure you saw and knew all about it and Maggie Thatcher intervened and said, 139 00:13:53,200 --> 00:13:56,590 No, Mr. Pinochet goes home, we do not extradite him to Spain. 140 00:13:57,040 --> 00:14:01,989 And Garzon lost that battle. But then in Spain, it created this awareness. 141 00:14:01,990 --> 00:14:05,319 People started to say, Well, wait a minute, because people were proud of it. 142 00:14:05,320 --> 00:14:08,470 They were excited, yeah, we're going to go after these dictators. Right. 143 00:14:08,830 --> 00:14:14,020 Thinking in a perhaps post-colonial way, the former colonies, they're a mess. 144 00:14:14,020 --> 00:14:19,870 We need to help sort them out. But then Spaniards started to say, But wait a minute, what about our dictatorship? 145 00:14:20,530 --> 00:14:22,150 What about our regime? Okay. 146 00:14:22,160 --> 00:14:30,370 It's been a couple of decades since, but we've done nothing with over 100,000 missing people who have been extrajudicially executed. 147 00:14:30,380 --> 00:14:36,430 These are not battle casualties. These people were taken from their homes at night, executed and made to disappear. 148 00:14:37,270 --> 00:14:40,120 And a lot of people knew where they were, but they never spoke of it. 149 00:14:41,020 --> 00:14:50,410 In 2008, Baltasar Garzon took up the case and he said, I'm investigating 20 different officials from the war, 150 00:14:50,620 --> 00:14:54,099 from the dictatorship, who I think have committed crimes. 151 00:14:54,100 --> 00:15:01,030 And his argument was with missing persons, it's an ongoing crime until we know where those people are, 152 00:15:01,060 --> 00:15:05,260 until we know what happened to them for sure by a legal standard of knowledge. 153 00:15:05,920 --> 00:15:09,040 It's an ongoing crime and the families continue to be victimised. 154 00:15:10,480 --> 00:15:17,470 And this resonated with a lot of people. It excited. There were civil society, civil society organisations that were going out and digging up bodies. 155 00:15:17,680 --> 00:15:21,970 One of the authors of the chapter that I that I mentioned, he he started it. 156 00:15:22,180 --> 00:15:27,759 He went looking for his grandfather and he found him. He just put an ad in the local papers that I'm looking for my grandfather. 157 00:15:27,760 --> 00:15:34,270 He disappeared on this date in 1936. I understand he's in a buried in a buried near a ditch somewhere near this town. 158 00:15:35,110 --> 00:15:39,759 Can you help me? People came forward. They went out, hired a mechanical excavator. 159 00:15:39,760 --> 00:15:43,270 Some scientists volunteered. The government didn't want to touch it. 160 00:15:43,700 --> 00:15:47,320 They found 13 people in a mass grave, one of which was his grandfather. 161 00:15:47,680 --> 00:15:49,690 He identified him by a ring and a gold tooth. 162 00:15:49,900 --> 00:15:57,520 He paid for DNA sampling and he was immediately flooded with phone calls from other Spaniards saying, yeah, help us do that, too. 163 00:15:58,540 --> 00:16:02,710 And Spaniards said, why are we so concerned with those dictators when we've got so many missing here? 164 00:16:03,610 --> 00:16:06,720 Now, Garzon lost his appeal. 165 00:16:06,780 --> 00:16:13,700 To pursue this investigation. But it was in part because he had, in another case, authorised illegal wiretaps. 166 00:16:14,090 --> 00:16:18,470 And so he was basically removed from the bench and then became a consultant to the International Criminal Court. 167 00:16:21,530 --> 00:16:30,860 But then, in a sort of ironic twist, an Argentine judge, some Argentines who were the children and grandchildren of victims from Spain, 168 00:16:31,010 --> 00:16:37,910 their families had fled the war and the dictatorship, sought refuge in Argentina, nationalised the next generation. 169 00:16:38,420 --> 00:16:41,480 And they made an appeal to an Argentine judge. Universal jurisdiction. 170 00:16:41,720 --> 00:16:45,470 Help us investigate the disappearance of our parents and grandparents in Spain. 171 00:16:46,490 --> 00:16:54,050 So this judge that really took up the case made an appeal to the Spanish judiciary, and it's still ongoing. 172 00:16:54,350 --> 00:17:00,060 But the Spanish government authorised exhumations in Spain on behalf of the Argentine judge. 173 00:17:00,080 --> 00:17:05,330 They wouldn't do it for their own judge, but they did it for the Argentine judge. 174 00:17:07,220 --> 00:17:11,660 This comic I love this this this cartoonist, they're allowing him often. 175 00:17:11,660 --> 00:17:20,780 And again, it just represents what's happening. These mass graves in Spain migrating across the globe and being opened up, discovered in Argentina. 176 00:17:22,370 --> 00:17:26,150 There's a really interesting one. I talked about the mothers of the Plaza, the you in Argentina. 177 00:17:26,570 --> 00:17:38,630 There's also a grandmothers of the Plaza de Milo and they're looking for their daughters who were detained while pregnant by the Argentine government. 178 00:17:39,020 --> 00:17:43,130 And there's a belief that there were about 500 cases like this. 179 00:17:43,140 --> 00:17:46,220 There's a belief that the babies were born while the woman was incarcerated, 180 00:17:46,460 --> 00:17:51,650 that the babies were given up to military families, forced adoptions, and then the mothers were executed. 181 00:17:52,820 --> 00:17:58,190 So the grandmothers of the plaza, the major, that's their main agenda to find their biological grandchildren. 182 00:17:59,000 --> 00:18:01,760 And one Argentine said here in Argentina, 183 00:18:01,820 --> 00:18:07,190 the grandmothers search for the grandchildren and the Republican grandchildren, Spanish Republican grandchildren. 184 00:18:07,310 --> 00:18:11,180 We search for our grandparents. It's the other way around. Really interesting connection. 185 00:18:12,680 --> 00:18:16,180 Again, just more kind of illustrations as the Argentine judge banging on, 186 00:18:16,430 --> 00:18:21,020 because in Spain they would argue there's an amnesty law, we know international law and so on. 187 00:18:21,020 --> 00:18:25,410 And Garzon argued vigorously against the amnesty. 188 00:18:25,430 --> 00:18:30,799 Doesn't count. It doesn't it doesn't apply in these cases or it's a legal right. 189 00:18:30,800 --> 00:18:36,830 According to international law, Asensio mendieta is an Argentine. 190 00:18:37,490 --> 00:18:41,030 In her nineties, she was one of those who made the plea to the Argentine judge. 191 00:18:41,240 --> 00:18:50,530 And just recently in this year, in January, her father was exhumed from a cemetery by an NGO. 192 00:18:50,840 --> 00:18:57,110 So Spanish officials conceded to the exhumation, but Spanish forensic practitioners were not permitted to participate. 193 00:18:57,440 --> 00:19:05,300 It's a strange kind of game that the Spanish government is playing. And he was buried with 22 others in a cemetery. 194 00:19:05,840 --> 00:19:12,499 So it's a mass grave and victim buried on top of a victim. And they DNA identified her father. 195 00:19:12,500 --> 00:19:21,050 And her whole idea was, I want to be buried with my father's remains, not in an in a plot with no name unmarked plot. 196 00:19:22,100 --> 00:19:27,440 This brings me to the idea why do we care about the dead? This headline came out in August in Al Jazeera. 197 00:19:28,700 --> 00:19:35,059 Syrian rebels shot down a Russian helicopter. You may remember this and that allegedly had the bodies. 198 00:19:35,060 --> 00:19:40,430 I don't know how this played out, but had the bodies of the crew from that from the helicopter. 199 00:19:40,610 --> 00:19:46,790 And we know certainly in Canada, I presume in the UK, the value of a dead soldiers body. 200 00:19:47,090 --> 00:19:56,120 Right. It's played out a lot. It has a tremendous kind of social value to us, whereas well, I'll leave it at that. 201 00:19:56,240 --> 00:20:00,200 But they wanted to exchange them for living prisoners, kind of their allies, their associates. 202 00:20:00,740 --> 00:20:04,340 So really interesting, the kind of the political value that's being played here. 203 00:20:05,810 --> 00:20:11,240 But why do we care about the dead? I mean, it's captured in the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols all developed 204 00:20:11,240 --> 00:20:16,460 that a little more later about government obligations to mark burial sites, 205 00:20:16,700 --> 00:20:21,499 to investigate, to inform families of the missing of the status of the investigation, 206 00:20:21,500 --> 00:20:27,170 of the whereabouts of those who have gone missing and have died in the United States. 207 00:20:27,320 --> 00:20:32,360 I mean, I grew up on the border with the United States and then later went to work for the US Department of Defence. 208 00:20:32,570 --> 00:20:39,350 They have a lab in Hawaii, made reference to it earlier and they're just continually sending teams to Europe, 209 00:20:39,350 --> 00:20:43,160 to Vietnam, to Korea to search for those missing soldiers. 210 00:20:44,090 --> 00:20:49,940 This flag is the only flag that routinely flies over the White House other than the American flag. 211 00:20:50,330 --> 00:20:53,750 And it's of the P.O.W. MIA Movement. I mean, it's a movement. 212 00:20:53,750 --> 00:20:57,380 There's no particular group that that is represented by this flag. 213 00:20:57,620 --> 00:21:06,350 It shows an image of a young soldier, its profile, the brush cut, and there's a tower, kind of a watchtower in the background and barbed wire around. 214 00:21:06,950 --> 00:21:10,849 It's this idea that these people are still alive and need to be rescued. 215 00:21:10,850 --> 00:21:18,410 They're missing in action. They're not dead. But of course, the government generally believes that they're almost all certainly dead. 216 00:21:19,100 --> 00:21:22,760 But until they come back with those remains, people won't be convinced. 217 00:21:23,120 --> 00:21:26,239 As tremendous political clout, this idea until they're home, 218 00:21:26,240 --> 00:21:33,410 this is the kind of phrase that that is associated with the P.O.W. movement and even in some instances. 219 00:21:33,410 --> 00:21:40,040 So I worked in the laboratory and the laboratory argued, look, we're spending millions of dollars going to Vietnam and seldom do we find remains. 220 00:21:40,310 --> 00:21:44,600 They've died. They died in jet crashes. It's very acidic soil. 221 00:21:45,800 --> 00:21:49,910 The Vietnamese weren't performing funerals for the pilots that were bombing their villages. 222 00:21:50,090 --> 00:21:53,870 Should we be surprised by this? No. So the lab said, do you want bodies? 223 00:21:53,870 --> 00:22:01,640 Do you want IDs? Because 15 kilometres down the road from the lab is a cemetery, a war cemetery with all kinds of burials of unknown soldiers. 224 00:22:02,030 --> 00:22:05,050 We think we can figure out who those people are. Do you want bodies? 225 00:22:05,060 --> 00:22:08,240 Do you want IDs? Because Congress said we need 200 IDs a year. 226 00:22:08,870 --> 00:22:15,800 200 identified bodies a year. So historians with the Department of Defence started to look into the archives and say, 227 00:22:15,920 --> 00:22:21,170 Well, you know what, I think this guy is Mr. X or Captain or whatever. 228 00:22:21,920 --> 00:22:27,320 And so the in the lab management, they said, okay, give me a list of all potential candidates. 229 00:22:27,770 --> 00:22:36,230 Give me a sense of the probability of who it is. And then we can convince the military to grant permission to exhume because the military does not. 230 00:22:36,800 --> 00:22:40,850 Pearl Harbour, the ships that went down, it's a sacred place. 231 00:22:41,180 --> 00:22:46,460 So just outside the lab is Pearl Harbour. Those sailors that line the ships go untouched. 232 00:22:47,150 --> 00:22:51,530 It's it's but it's because of their home and a certain way of thinking. 233 00:22:52,940 --> 00:22:58,700 Another chapter in the book is by a Guatemalan psychologist, but she's also indigenous Mayan Miyagi. 234 00:22:59,780 --> 00:23:07,339 And she says, according to Maya cosmology, when people die, when Maya die, they don't die. 235 00:23:07,340 --> 00:23:11,690 Their physical body or their physical self, their self transforms. 236 00:23:12,050 --> 00:23:17,180 And they become embodied in spirit. And that spirit protects the region, ancestral lands. 237 00:23:17,750 --> 00:23:25,640 But they can't make that transition successfully unless the body is accompanied to a funeral, a cemetery and proper rites are held. 238 00:23:26,420 --> 00:23:32,720 When, during the civil war in Guatemala, when so many indigenous communities were were devastated, 239 00:23:33,140 --> 00:23:37,430 mostly men, but a lot of women and children as well were forced into disappearance. 240 00:23:38,540 --> 00:23:43,580 For the Maya, they can't make that transition without a body, without those rights, without that transition. 241 00:23:43,940 --> 00:23:49,260 They're stuck in sort of a, uh, an odd kind of state. 242 00:23:49,280 --> 00:23:51,080 They don't know how to explain the presence. 243 00:23:51,500 --> 00:23:58,610 And the chapter talks about how the families of the missing communicate with the missing who are in distress through their dreams. 244 00:23:58,640 --> 00:23:59,810 It's really remarkable. 245 00:24:00,260 --> 00:24:06,260 And the argument I make is, look, we can't help these people unless we understand how they understand the situation of the problem. 246 00:24:07,070 --> 00:24:13,640 But there's still this this need, psychological need to recover the missing members. 247 00:24:14,600 --> 00:24:21,650 And another quote from an Argentine, it's in Spanish, translated, but still, subtitles is dying down soon. 248 00:24:22,190 --> 00:24:27,049 But Amita, only five members of her family, three great uncles, an uncle, 249 00:24:27,050 --> 00:24:32,180 and I think her father or her grandfather were all killed during the Civil War or in the dictatorship. 250 00:24:33,080 --> 00:24:38,720 And she says, My great uncles, they're already in their place because civil groups found their bodies and identified them. 251 00:24:38,880 --> 00:24:44,540 And this idea that they're in their place because the place where they were dead and buried wasn't their place. 252 00:24:45,230 --> 00:24:49,430 Right. It was unacceptable to her because families should have the right to decide where they live. 253 00:24:50,090 --> 00:24:53,750 But she's still looking for one uncle. He's still not in his place. 254 00:24:54,680 --> 00:25:00,860 Really interesting conception. So getting out of the three M's, I was going to call this the three M mother's methods of mandates, 255 00:25:00,860 --> 00:25:04,339 but I thought I might run into trouble with intellectual property rights, 256 00:25:04,340 --> 00:25:08,360 and I have no financial interest to disclose, so I'm just not going to use an acronym. 257 00:25:08,390 --> 00:25:13,880 It's Mother's Methods and mandates. One quick story that, too, 258 00:25:14,800 --> 00:25:20,390 to exemplify this situation I was in Kosovo was my only my second year doing 259 00:25:20,390 --> 00:25:24,530 forensic work and a lot of victims were buried in the yards of their homes. 260 00:25:25,100 --> 00:25:30,230 So we'd go in to investigate. Yellow crime scene tape would be put up or familiar with this from TV. 261 00:25:30,620 --> 00:25:37,100 And the idea really in theory, certainly is to prevent contamination of the evidence. 262 00:25:37,880 --> 00:25:45,350 But I think in this context, it was really much more as a way of distancing ourselves as scientific practitioners from the families. 263 00:25:46,340 --> 00:25:52,040 The idea that we would be some due to psychological harm or stress if we were interacting with them directly. 264 00:25:52,520 --> 00:25:59,480 And this is very different from how things happened in Argentina, where the mothers and grandmothers were protesting. 265 00:25:59,630 --> 00:26:03,320 The mothers and grandmothers were at the graveside during the first exhumations. 266 00:26:03,890 --> 00:26:08,180 They were protagonists. They were participants. They were side by side. 267 00:26:08,310 --> 00:26:14,090 Guatemala it's the same thing. Remote indigenous communities with the families helping excavate. 268 00:26:14,750 --> 00:26:18,680 I was giving testimony at the International Criminal Court in a trial recently. 269 00:26:19,670 --> 00:26:22,969 I'll tell the story later in Question Time. 270 00:26:22,970 --> 00:26:29,240 If we have time, I just want to run overtime. But the defence counsel was asking me questions about methods. 271 00:26:29,300 --> 00:26:32,690 We had the yellow tape, but there were a couple of locals who were inside the tape. 272 00:26:32,690 --> 00:26:38,690 We videotaped it all of the investigation for the benefit of the defence, and some of that was played back in court. 273 00:26:39,710 --> 00:26:45,290 And so the defence counsel was asking me during cross-examination, you know, really is this normal, is this acceptable? 274 00:26:45,710 --> 00:26:49,400 We went back and forth for about a day on that and related matters. 275 00:26:51,050 --> 00:26:57,470 But I explained to him actually this is normal practice in a lot of countries, but the families are integrated in the process. 276 00:26:57,590 --> 00:27:02,180 And I'll go back to this with mandates. Oh, one other quick story. 277 00:27:02,450 --> 00:27:08,200 Also in Kosovo, I went we went in part of the investigations. 278 00:27:08,210 --> 00:27:14,090 We had the authority, legal authority to go and exhume whoever we decided needed to be investigated. 279 00:27:14,870 --> 00:27:18,200 But someone in their great wisdom said, let's ask for permission from the families. 280 00:27:19,040 --> 00:27:26,210 And one particular instance I went with an investigator and a translator, went to ask for permission from a couple whose children had been executed. 281 00:27:27,680 --> 00:27:34,070 We explained who we were, what we were doing. It was a father and a mother, and the mother kind of stood behind the father. 282 00:27:34,640 --> 00:27:38,810 And the father said, But why? Why do you want to do this? And the investigator got agitated. 283 00:27:39,110 --> 00:27:43,190 We're all foreigners, and we're really believing in what we're doing. We're bringing justice to these people. 284 00:27:43,640 --> 00:27:50,870 He said, We want to try Slobodan Milosevic and the military generals and the heads who were responsible for these massacres. 285 00:27:51,020 --> 00:27:52,970 We want to bring them to trial and put them in jail. 286 00:27:53,390 --> 00:27:57,680 And the father said, what about the police officer who executed my children in front of my wife and I? 287 00:27:59,030 --> 00:28:04,310 Investigator kind of thrown off. He got a bit defensive and he said, oh, well, that's a matter for the Kosovar courts. 288 00:28:04,680 --> 00:28:08,780 You have to know that at that time the infrastructure was wrecked. There were no Kosovar courts. 289 00:28:09,890 --> 00:28:20,620 But it was the plan. To take the heads of military state to trial and establish courts eventually to try the small fish, so to speak. 290 00:28:21,280 --> 00:28:29,429 The father said he's still a police officer in this town. Very awkward moment investigator trying to argue for a bit. 291 00:28:29,430 --> 00:28:32,610 And the father said, no, you can't see my children go away. 292 00:28:34,170 --> 00:28:40,170 And it was a really stark kind of awakening where I thought we came in with this idea of bringing 293 00:28:40,170 --> 00:28:45,570 justice to these people and we're doing further harm to the primary stakeholders of this process. 294 00:28:46,020 --> 00:28:50,910 So right time with his mothers in some countries, they're working directly with them in some countries. 295 00:28:51,360 --> 00:28:54,330 During the sidelines, the Argentine mothers. 296 00:28:55,380 --> 00:29:00,360 There's sometimes primary victims, secondary victims, but they're often culturally represented as vulnerable. 297 00:29:00,390 --> 00:29:05,240 The Argentine government was kind of casting them as the crazies. 298 00:29:05,280 --> 00:29:10,049 You know, there's something wrong with them. They're protesting. They don't know what they're talking about. Their children were guerrillas. 299 00:29:10,050 --> 00:29:14,340 They died in battle. It's that simple. But of course, they won the day. 300 00:29:14,490 --> 00:29:19,580 It's hard for police and military to take on 50 year old women with white handkerchiefs on their heads. 301 00:29:19,590 --> 00:29:26,400 Right. How do you justify physical violence against them? Some of them were assassinated, but eventually they won the day. 302 00:29:27,120 --> 00:29:36,270 We see similar organisations with the mothers of Srebrenica and in Liberia where women are kind of using becoming powerful political agents. 303 00:29:37,830 --> 00:29:42,450 I was working with the Argentine forensic anthropology team in Africa when this news 304 00:29:42,450 --> 00:29:48,810 came out that one of the pregnant mothers who was detained in Argentina survived. 305 00:29:49,170 --> 00:29:53,370 She gave birth in prison. She was allowed to leave and told never to speak of it again. 306 00:29:54,090 --> 00:29:58,360 Her son, her baby, was given up to a military family for decades. 307 00:29:58,370 --> 00:30:05,130 She didn't talk about it until her son had doubts about his parents. 308 00:30:05,910 --> 00:30:11,040 They were military or the father was in the military and it was in the news a lot that this has happened. 309 00:30:11,430 --> 00:30:18,660 And he went and gave DNA and his mother's biological mother decided she would also give her DNA. 310 00:30:19,050 --> 00:30:22,230 They were analysed and they were they were linked. 311 00:30:23,100 --> 00:30:26,580 Biological mother who survived. She was detained but survived. 312 00:30:26,850 --> 00:30:35,580 Met her son. And this is all because of these mothers organisations that are coordinating this campaigning, publicity, paying for DNA tests. 313 00:30:37,170 --> 00:30:42,480 And in Spain and this this image is from the press. So it's not you know, it might be biased. 314 00:30:43,320 --> 00:30:49,800 And these are the daughters and granddaughters, but you see that women are heavily represented in these public protests. 315 00:30:49,830 --> 00:30:55,830 In this particular instance, it was protesting the removal of about this other son from the legal case, 316 00:30:56,580 --> 00:31:01,200 holding up signs or images of their fathers and grandfathers who are missing. 317 00:31:02,370 --> 00:31:05,100 I'm going to move into methods now, which has been a focus of my own research, 318 00:31:05,670 --> 00:31:15,030 and it's the product of frustration from failed searches, because the typical method, how do we find the missing? 319 00:31:15,180 --> 00:31:21,030 You go and you ask around where people buried. It worked in Spain with the first exhumations, and it works in most places. 320 00:31:21,030 --> 00:31:26,140 Up to a certain point you ask around, people say, dig there, you dig there, you find bodies. 321 00:31:26,160 --> 00:31:34,410 Great. But in some instances, most instances where look at Bosnia, 20 years, 322 00:31:34,860 --> 00:31:40,740 hundreds of millions of dollars invested, perhaps the most advanced DNA lab in the world. 323 00:31:42,420 --> 00:31:47,250 International experts from all over the tribunal investing heavily in investigations. 324 00:31:48,450 --> 00:31:52,940 And just from Srebrenica alone, when there were up to 8000 men and boys who went missing. 325 00:31:52,980 --> 00:31:58,380 There are still a thousand missing, one out of eight. With all that effort and we know about Rwanda. 326 00:31:58,600 --> 00:32:04,260 Right. With 508,000 men, we can't even get a good idea of the number of missing. 327 00:32:04,920 --> 00:32:07,260 Two mass graves have been excavated. That's it. 328 00:32:07,690 --> 00:32:15,210 Now, there are different reasons for that, but there are clearly limits on these kind of methods that we currently employ around the world. 329 00:32:16,740 --> 00:32:23,070 So I started looking, well, what are kind of sources of information? Can we get this images from 1977? 330 00:32:23,400 --> 00:32:28,160 It was declassified by the United States government and it's of a military base in Argentina. 331 00:32:28,170 --> 00:32:33,800 Satellite image from 1977, it's pretty clear. And they were looking for a mass grave. 332 00:32:33,810 --> 00:32:37,890 This was only a couple of years ago. I thought, wow, that's great. 333 00:32:38,130 --> 00:32:41,370 And we always knew. Generally, we know that the U.S. government have this. 334 00:32:41,370 --> 00:32:44,810 But when I was with the U.S. Department of Defence, I couldn't get my hands on these images. 335 00:32:44,820 --> 00:32:50,940 I was a former and I would argue, but I'm here, I'm doing research, I'm working for, you know, sorry, classified. 336 00:32:51,430 --> 00:32:56,200 Okay, great. Thanks. Then. And this was the kicker. 337 00:32:56,440 --> 00:33:03,940 This image is from 1945. I was in this field with a team from the US Department of Defence and we were digging here with this red arrow. 338 00:33:04,270 --> 00:33:08,710 We're looking for a pilot who was on a bombing missions plane, got shot down, crashed in Germany. 339 00:33:09,640 --> 00:33:14,110 Witnesses said, Oh no, the plane crashed here. Single pilot in the plane. 340 00:33:14,920 --> 00:33:18,500 We found this big crater. It's usually a good sign. That's where the plane crashed. 341 00:33:18,520 --> 00:33:24,460 Things blew up. That's where you find the pilot. Typically, we only had maybe a week left. 342 00:33:25,750 --> 00:33:31,300 We weren't finding anything. Lots of kind of metal, scrap metal, a few pieces of plane, not much. 343 00:33:31,570 --> 00:33:36,460 A German comes walking down the road here and he says to me, I think you're digging in the wrong place. 344 00:33:36,490 --> 00:33:40,780 Oh, great. Like, I haven't heard that before. And, like, I don't believe that because we've been digging here for three weeks. 345 00:33:41,170 --> 00:33:44,350 I kind of have the sense and I said, What makes you think that? 346 00:33:44,350 --> 00:33:51,820 He says, Look at this image. Where did you get that? He says, I think you need to be digging 30 metres over there here. 347 00:33:51,850 --> 00:33:58,720 I said, I think you're right. He got this image from a U.S. Army Air Force archive here in Britain. 348 00:33:59,530 --> 00:34:03,580 I thought, how can the U.S. Department of Defence not come up with this image? 349 00:34:03,730 --> 00:34:07,510 Some local German does. He was on vacation in the U.K. and he knew about this archive. 350 00:34:07,510 --> 00:34:12,790 And he said, I wonder what happened in my local community. You know, around the time of the end of the war, we found the pilot. 351 00:34:14,490 --> 00:34:18,480 It just goes to show this exists, but we seldom tap into it. 352 00:34:19,140 --> 00:34:24,570 And this kind of triggered my Ph.D. research, which is spatial analysis and modelling of burial site locations. 353 00:34:24,900 --> 00:34:28,590 I thought, is there a way to kind of give a test to oral testimony? 354 00:34:28,800 --> 00:34:32,640 Because it's oral testimony. It could be true and accurate, precise. 355 00:34:33,210 --> 00:34:37,860 It can be that the person believes they're telling the truth and that they know exactly what happened. 356 00:34:38,220 --> 00:34:42,629 So many Vietnamese people tell me we married. We buried him one metre deep. 357 00:34:42,630 --> 00:34:46,410 We had a little funeral ceremony. He's right here and we dig in. 358 00:34:46,410 --> 00:34:49,830 There's nothing digging. There's nothing, nothing, nothing. Are you sure? I swear. 359 00:34:50,730 --> 00:34:55,080 Okay. They in some instances, they probably believe they were telling the truth. 360 00:34:55,080 --> 00:35:03,450 But memory, you know, especially after so many years, a traumatic event, a jet crashing into their village, and then in other instances, they lie. 361 00:35:04,080 --> 00:35:08,010 But I can't tell up front. I try, but I'm not good at judging. 362 00:35:08,160 --> 00:35:12,360 Is this the truth? Is this something they believed to be the truth but are mistaken about? 363 00:35:12,360 --> 00:35:18,810 Or is this a lie? So I say, can we come up with something that will help corroborate or refute, refute or testimony? 364 00:35:19,260 --> 00:35:23,670 This is kind of a brief some of the theoretical underpinnings. 365 00:35:24,220 --> 00:35:31,049 Talk about spatial autocorrelation. I'll show an image that helps illustrate this what it is in geography. 366 00:35:31,050 --> 00:35:35,430 It means that the location of one thing impacts the location of other things. 367 00:35:35,850 --> 00:35:39,450 Spatial relationships and characteristics impact one another. 368 00:35:39,840 --> 00:35:43,410 I'm currently based in Costa Rica, where you grow coffee. 369 00:35:43,920 --> 00:35:47,700 Coffee grows best where there are other types of shady trees. 370 00:35:48,510 --> 00:35:55,649 So flourishing coffee is related, spatially correlated with the presence of shaded trees. 371 00:35:55,650 --> 00:36:03,480 And this is what spatial autocorrelation is about, but we see it in ecology, geography, culture that maybe we can use this to help us find things. 372 00:36:05,080 --> 00:36:08,050 Behavioural decisions are particularly restricted in times of war. 373 00:36:08,320 --> 00:36:12,920 This is an assumption I'm making saying fewer resources, limited territory and security. 374 00:36:13,000 --> 00:36:16,540 You've got their bodies. What do you do with them? Your options are limited. 375 00:36:18,140 --> 00:36:24,710 Status. Thoughts about rational choice theory. I mean, I say rational choice theory and he talks about the logic of violence and civil war. 376 00:36:24,740 --> 00:36:29,390 He uses it to say, how do occupiers calculate who to kill? 377 00:36:29,450 --> 00:36:36,260 Who's the enemy? I thought, Wow, can we extend this now to say once they've identified who their enemy is, what do they do with their bodies? 378 00:36:38,600 --> 00:36:44,060 And then the hypothesis that I came up with is that, look, resources are limited, people are making rational decisions. 379 00:36:44,150 --> 00:36:49,940 We always characterise these context with, you know, psycho pathology, right? 380 00:36:49,970 --> 00:36:54,560 And I'm not saying, oh, he's a madman, very calculating. I mean, we know this inherently. 381 00:36:55,130 --> 00:36:59,300 There's a bit of, I think, psychopathology, of course. 382 00:36:59,750 --> 00:37:04,550 But generally when it comes to body disposal, especially in criminal context, 383 00:37:04,700 --> 00:37:09,080 it's a lot of rational decisions being made and it produces spatial patterns of body disposal. 384 00:37:09,260 --> 00:37:13,339 The null hypothesis is that great locations are random, and this is an argument in Spain. 385 00:37:13,340 --> 00:37:18,680 They say, Oh, the killings, the random, it was anarchy. I'm looking to test this assumption. 386 00:37:20,600 --> 00:37:25,880 This map was produced as evidence in the Mladic trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. 387 00:37:26,990 --> 00:37:33,830 It's difficult to see, but there are red triangles that represent schools and red circles that represent mass execution and burial sites. 388 00:37:35,360 --> 00:37:40,340 What's the relationship between schools? They detained thousands of people over several days. 389 00:37:40,520 --> 00:37:43,700 Where could they possibly detain these people before they executed them? 390 00:37:44,180 --> 00:37:46,850 Schools. Schools weren't in. What was going on. 391 00:37:48,380 --> 00:37:54,230 Once they killed them or they had to transport groups, hundreds of people, they weren't going to take them far. 392 00:37:54,800 --> 00:37:59,390 Right. So if you're looking for mass burial sites, where are the schools? 393 00:37:59,660 --> 00:38:03,380 Right. We know this now in hindsight, but there are still a thousand missing. 394 00:38:04,160 --> 00:38:11,180 So what are we missing? Can we use these sorts of information to draw inferences about where further bodies are buried? 395 00:38:12,830 --> 00:38:18,300 I call the United in analysis, the spatial analysis of the location of primary and secondary burial sites. 396 00:38:18,320 --> 00:38:22,880 Very briefly, primary burial sites are where bodies were buried originally, 397 00:38:23,000 --> 00:38:26,900 often where they're executed two months after they were executed in Srebrenica. 398 00:38:27,560 --> 00:38:33,510 The US State Department released aerial images showing heavy machinery working. 399 00:38:33,530 --> 00:38:35,750 People are still saying, where are the missing from serving pizza? 400 00:38:36,200 --> 00:38:40,010 And they said, we see all kinds of activity and disturbances in the ground from these images. 401 00:38:40,070 --> 00:38:44,149 We believe that men killed and buried over the next two months, 402 00:38:44,150 --> 00:38:50,960 the Bosnian Serb army went to the primary battle sites, used mechanical excavators, dug up bodies and relocated them. 403 00:38:51,350 --> 00:38:59,770 The orange points represent the primary mass grave sites, the green yellow orange dots and the green dots represent the secondary. 404 00:38:59,780 --> 00:39:10,610 So the second burial place, which did a simple task called Moran's Eye to show, is the relationship, is the spatial positioning of these is at random. 405 00:39:11,480 --> 00:39:15,470 And the reason this is important, I mean, it shows a less than 1% probability. 406 00:39:15,560 --> 00:39:16,790 And we know this intuitively. 407 00:39:17,510 --> 00:39:26,090 But this can be important because we're talking about crimes against humanity and genocide, things that are systematic, organised, coordinated. 408 00:39:26,300 --> 00:39:31,130 It's not anarchic. It's not thousands of individual homicides. 409 00:39:31,580 --> 00:39:38,000 This is something that's organised and it helps us not only understand the crime, but in resolving the fate of the missing. 410 00:39:38,810 --> 00:39:45,290 I did a study, a couple of graphs over the detail in Spain, so I wanted to create a model contrasting. 411 00:39:45,560 --> 00:39:53,900 I used known burial sites where people have been identified and I created random sites which called nine sites to create two contrasting groups. 412 00:39:54,440 --> 00:39:55,759 Using logistic regression, 413 00:39:55,760 --> 00:40:03,080 create an algorithm and it creates this projection across the map that says these are the types of locations where you find burials. 414 00:40:03,350 --> 00:40:08,090 These are the types of locations where you don't find burials. I thought this might be useful. 415 00:40:08,120 --> 00:40:11,809 So if you have a witness saying, Oh, no, they were taken in that direction and buried. So here. 416 00:40:11,810 --> 00:40:15,980 And another one saying, no, no, they were taken over there. And you can look at this map and say, you know what? 417 00:40:15,990 --> 00:40:20,660 That's not the type of place where we see people being buried, but that is where do we start digging. 418 00:40:21,410 --> 00:40:27,470 So it could be, you know, something that helps guide. I looked at let's talk about this briefly at lunch. 419 00:40:28,130 --> 00:40:34,970 I looked at how far people were being taken from the point of detention to their murder and burial site and what this means. 420 00:40:35,060 --> 00:40:39,170 How many towns did they cross during that journey from detention to death and burial? 421 00:40:39,950 --> 00:40:43,040 The average is one they crossed over into the next administration. 422 00:40:44,030 --> 00:40:52,160 75% of cases, one or two towns, the removing victims from their own community and dropping them off in the next community. 423 00:40:53,510 --> 00:40:58,100 This is a graph showing the density change from the place where the person was detained to where they were buried. 424 00:40:58,340 --> 00:41:01,400 The density, it's not a tight correlation, but it's dropping. 425 00:41:02,330 --> 00:41:07,100 They're taking them to other municipalities, other jurisdictions, and they're taking the less populated areas. 426 00:41:07,550 --> 00:41:10,640 These are all kind of logical things, but we never really given them the test. 427 00:41:13,200 --> 00:41:17,730 But in Spain it was non-combatants. North Korea had to show a couple of images. 428 00:41:18,700 --> 00:41:22,680 This kind of limited data and ability to speak in North Korea. 429 00:41:23,460 --> 00:41:31,410 The Americans went in 2001 and they had a historian find this image from 1950 POWs, battlefield bodies lying on the ground. 430 00:41:31,920 --> 00:41:39,450 Where are we going to look for these bodies? The North Korean gave government gave permission to the American military to go in and search for bodies. 431 00:41:40,440 --> 00:41:44,310 They kept them on a camp, barbed wire, facing in very limited. 432 00:41:44,550 --> 00:41:49,440 But they want to do as much work as possible. And it was something that I was working on before we get there. 433 00:41:49,470 --> 00:41:55,050 Where do we look? And they looked where the bodies were lying on the ground, and that's where they found them. 434 00:41:55,500 --> 00:42:00,479 And this is very common in with combatants in this kind of context, 435 00:42:00,480 --> 00:42:08,070 where they die there they lie sort of probably in perhaps an inappropriate kind of phrasing, but that's pretty common. 436 00:42:09,090 --> 00:42:12,360 But when we compare them in the same context, combatants and non-combatants. 437 00:42:13,230 --> 00:42:17,850 This is from Cyprus, from Greek Cypriot victims don't have access to the Turkish Cypriot victims yet. 438 00:42:18,540 --> 00:42:23,670 And yet it's kind of a hope. Well, there were two phases in 1974. 439 00:42:24,000 --> 00:42:28,590 The first campaign invasion from the north, the size of the circle, represents the numbers of victims. 440 00:42:29,580 --> 00:42:33,960 So we correlate where people went missing. The type of victim green is combatants. 441 00:42:34,290 --> 00:42:39,630 Blue is civilians. And we see temporal patterns, spatial patterns. 442 00:42:40,200 --> 00:42:46,770 We start to understand the politics and logistics of killing and burying combatants overwhelmingly buried where they died. 443 00:42:47,040 --> 00:42:51,660 Civilians not so much removed from their communities, taken away, buried elsewhere. 444 00:42:53,610 --> 00:42:57,209 And the killings according to kind of different months, different phases. 445 00:42:57,210 --> 00:43:00,870 So it tells us a bit about kind of those who are conducting operations and perhaps 446 00:43:00,870 --> 00:43:06,420 why they treat combatants and non-combatants differently mandates that last them. 447 00:43:07,590 --> 00:43:13,920 And I'm producing I'm going kind of there were fewer answers and more questions here. 448 00:43:15,270 --> 00:43:20,610 But this is a question of whether or not we should assume in the first place, certainly with Jewish victims from World War Two. 449 00:43:20,850 --> 00:43:25,340 But a lot of objection from the Jewish community, if their objection if they're objecting, 450 00:43:25,350 --> 00:43:32,130 there's kind of an orthodox tradition, generally an orthodox belief that that's disturbing the spirits of the dead. 451 00:43:33,420 --> 00:43:38,110 But in Poland right now, there's a community that's strongly advocating the exhumation of a grave. 452 00:43:38,130 --> 00:43:41,640 They want to demonstrate that they weren't responsible, that it was the Nazis that did it. 453 00:43:42,090 --> 00:43:44,970 And the Jewish community, the dissenting community is saying, don't touch it. 454 00:43:45,600 --> 00:43:52,620 We don't want the mothers of the plaza the minds of Split one group saying we want exhumations. 455 00:43:52,620 --> 00:44:00,269 And the other group, the association mothers saying when you exhume the body and return it to a family, they stop campaigning there. 456 00:44:00,270 --> 00:44:06,990 Militancy stops. They don't care anymore. We want full justice, full accounting, confessions, sentences of everybody. 457 00:44:07,440 --> 00:44:12,540 And until we have all those things, we don't want the bodies. We're really contrasting opinions. 458 00:44:14,310 --> 00:44:20,250 This is a question of do exclamations placate calls for a fuller justice that comes from that in Argentina, and we've seen it elsewhere. 459 00:44:21,630 --> 00:44:28,860 And then there's the question. It's it's a bit of a trope, I guess, justice or peace and transitional justice. 460 00:44:29,460 --> 00:44:35,700 Do exhumations provoke unrest? Further continued conflict, certainly a sense people into hiding those responsible. 461 00:44:36,360 --> 00:44:43,410 Whereas in South Africa, we see kind of a confessional model of kind of transitional justice, truth and reconciliation. 462 00:44:44,850 --> 00:44:51,240 And there's a lot of debate about whether that is there's not much evidence to suggest that exhumations, in fact, provoke further conflict. 463 00:44:51,510 --> 00:44:58,230 But it's used often, particularly by politicians and people who are well connected to those responsible for the deaths and the disappearances. 464 00:45:00,050 --> 00:45:06,410 Coming to the end, humanitarian or forensic? This is sort of a false dichotomy or perhaps a bad practice, bad habit. 465 00:45:08,210 --> 00:45:16,640 The Yugoslav tribunal was interested not in which individuals died, but how many Muslims died, how many Orthodox died. 466 00:45:16,970 --> 00:45:20,540 The thing about crimes against humanity and genocide, they're not thinking about murders. 467 00:45:20,690 --> 00:45:25,880 They're not thinking about should we DNA test this person, try and figure out who they are so we can send those remains back. 468 00:45:26,510 --> 00:45:30,350 The really interesting, the legal case to try their heads. I talked about the problems of that. 469 00:45:31,670 --> 00:45:36,560 The International Committee of the Red Cross, on the other hand, is neutral, humanitarian. 470 00:45:37,250 --> 00:45:42,860 They don't cooperate. That's not how they work. When they exhume bodies, they don't technically examine bodies. 471 00:45:43,550 --> 00:45:50,600 They encourage governments to fulfil their obligations to investigate when governments investigate. 472 00:45:50,900 --> 00:45:55,160 The ICRC can help facilitate the analysis of those remains for the identification. 473 00:45:55,580 --> 00:46:01,780 But they won't say a word about the cause of death. They're worried that that will be used in criminal cases and they can't participate in that. 474 00:46:01,790 --> 00:46:05,510 That's their mandate. So in the literature you see this dichotomy. 475 00:46:05,840 --> 00:46:12,860 But of course, humanitarian elements are part of justice, and the criminal justice is more social justice. 476 00:46:13,230 --> 00:46:17,270 These things are not as separate as they're you know, sometimes it works that way. 477 00:46:17,270 --> 00:46:24,590 In Kosovo, right after the conflict ended, NATO's sending gratis forensic teams, a Canadian team, British team, American team. 478 00:46:25,520 --> 00:46:30,290 They're all doing forensic work on behalf of ICG. But a few months later, I see, too. 479 00:46:30,290 --> 00:46:37,759 I said, no, no, no, we're ready. We can do this now. We're going to do it on our own multinational teams, some gratis teams incorporated in others. 480 00:46:37,760 --> 00:46:48,830 The British and Americans continue to operate independently. The British all got overseas, and a couple of years later we kind of lost interest. 481 00:46:48,840 --> 00:46:53,180 The international community walked away, and that's an exaggeration. 482 00:46:53,360 --> 00:46:57,530 But the United Nations mission in Kosovo set up an Office of Missing Persons and forensics, 483 00:46:57,800 --> 00:47:00,950 and they were interested in forensics and humanitarian mandate. 484 00:47:01,970 --> 00:47:06,770 So there was an evolution in Iraq that talked about the ethics and the political influence of scope. 485 00:47:07,100 --> 00:47:11,570 We're only looking for victims of the Baath Party regime. Anyone who died post 23. 486 00:47:12,440 --> 00:47:15,950 It's not our interest. We're not looking into that. That was problematic. 487 00:47:16,190 --> 00:47:19,940 It is problematic. It's not. I shouldn't use the past tense. 488 00:47:20,900 --> 00:47:25,460 The ICRC since 23 has developed this thing called humanitarian forensic action. 489 00:47:25,610 --> 00:47:31,280 They're incorporating the two words in one, but they're still only pushing a humanitarian mandate. 490 00:47:32,510 --> 00:47:39,920 But in international humanitarian law, the obligation to search for the dead, maintain their dignity, the right to know all these things. 491 00:47:40,340 --> 00:47:44,780 So then just as I going to wrap up here, think about the future and what does this mean? 492 00:47:46,430 --> 00:47:51,580 The mandate clash, I think in Georgia, the International Criminal Court has been asked by the Georgian government to investigate. 493 00:47:51,590 --> 00:47:56,270 It started preliminary investigations. I've worked for the ICRC and part of this is personal. 494 00:47:56,270 --> 00:48:02,089 It's personally motivated. I'd love to hear from some of you to say, Oh, there's a parallel in these countries where the romantic clashes, 495 00:48:02,090 --> 00:48:05,120 organisational conflicts and this is how we resolved it. It's great, 496 00:48:05,300 --> 00:48:11,000 it's copy paste because I work I could solve for the International Criminal Court and the Red Cross and 497 00:48:11,000 --> 00:48:17,390 they're both in Georgia and they're both collecting information on missing persons and they won't share. 498 00:48:18,140 --> 00:48:23,000 And I think, well, who are they serving here? They're both serving families, but in their own way. 499 00:48:23,090 --> 00:48:24,560 And if they're not collaborating, what's the problem? 500 00:48:24,590 --> 00:48:31,850 What's going to happen with complementarity, the principle of complementarity between the International Criminal Court and the Georgian government. 501 00:48:32,060 --> 00:48:35,990 One might see conflicts in. It's complementary, right? In theory, I'm not sure. 502 00:48:35,990 --> 00:48:37,070 In practice we'll see. 503 00:48:38,270 --> 00:48:46,489 In Colombia, I was really hoping for a yes vote on this plebiscite and one because I know a lot of Colombians who were on the side of the. 504 00:48:46,490 --> 00:48:49,520 Yes, they wanted this peace deal to be formalised. 505 00:48:50,060 --> 00:48:55,820 But obviously a lot of people didn't they didn't agree with the agreement. They rejected it by the narrowest of margins. 506 00:48:56,450 --> 00:49:00,920 The ICRC was expected to lead the process here in finding the missing. 507 00:49:01,760 --> 00:49:06,770 But people rejected this idea that there would be immunity for some people responsible for crimes. 508 00:49:07,370 --> 00:49:15,709 The government has opposed this and pass legislation which justice and peace, which has kind of a limited criminal investigative mandate. 509 00:49:15,710 --> 00:49:23,840 But it's really more it's also humanitarian. So there's some tricky kind of games being played about, you know, what what should happen. 510 00:49:24,080 --> 00:49:27,649 And I throw in this last bit the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. 511 00:49:27,650 --> 00:49:31,280 I don't know if you know about this Bill Wylie is behind it. 512 00:49:31,280 --> 00:49:35,320 And it's I don't know if technically it's an NGO, it's NGO ish, 513 00:49:35,990 --> 00:49:41,150 but it's really the result of frustrated attempts of working with organisations like ICTY, 514 00:49:41,180 --> 00:49:48,170 why the criminal tribunal in Yugoslavia and the ICC and saying, Oh, they're so scared about security and they won't win. 515 00:49:48,620 --> 00:49:57,680 So this CIA is using people in Syria to confiscate documents and information and testimony and smuggle it out of the country. 516 00:49:57,800 --> 00:50:03,310 And they're sharing it with. Governments that are interested how they decide who to share this information with. 517 00:50:03,580 --> 00:50:12,430 I don't know. Four days ago, the Canadian minister of Foreign Affairs announced, you know, he in front of the prosecutor, 518 00:50:12,430 --> 00:50:21,370 chief prosecutor for the ICC said Canada is supporting the ICC in supporting CIA, which is kept a very low profile until now. 519 00:50:22,690 --> 00:50:26,020 I mean, it's kind of like private intelligence gathering. 520 00:50:26,560 --> 00:50:31,450 Maybe this isn't new, but in for its implications of missing persons in forensic investigations. 521 00:50:31,720 --> 00:50:34,780 For me, it's it's a bit upsetting. There's a lot of unknowns. 522 00:50:35,110 --> 00:50:40,780 They're also working in Iraq, which when Bill Wiley, who's behind this organisation, was speaking recently in Toronto, 523 00:50:41,110 --> 00:50:45,910 he wouldn't say they were working in Iraq, but the Canadian foreign minister just kind of announced it. 524 00:50:46,330 --> 00:50:51,440 So now it's public. And who controls data on the missing? 525 00:50:51,460 --> 00:50:54,940 This is my question that I live with and who are they serving? Right. 526 00:50:55,150 --> 00:51:00,130 So this is what I kind of foresee, this clash of organisations and interests taking place.