In this episode, The Changing Character of War Program welcomes Dr. Derrick Congreve,
an anthropologist and archaeologist from the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.
His talk, entitled What We're Missing About the Missing looks at the underexplored topic of missing persons in conflict and the political,
judicial and practical challenges of studying subjects we haven't yet found.
When I was first invited, I'll admit I didn't know about the changing conflict of war program,
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.
I'm an anthropologist by training and by profession archaeologist, an anthropologist, biological anthropologist.
But I work in the Department of Political Sciences, in the School of Global Affairs, at the University of Toronto,
and our current director, who next year will become the next chancellor of the University of Cambridge,
Stephen too is a lawyer and he wanted to make us more than kind of a traditional feeder institution to government and international organisations.
He wanted to kind of more bridge the, I don't know,
theoretical or perhaps real gap between theory and practice and make us more closely
identifying or may help us more better integrate with professional practice.
And so I'm part of that because of my professional consulting and and we're doing
more kind of collaborative efforts with government and international organisations.
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
I'm going to talk about in the course of my consulting and now my research and teaching.
It's I'm generally working on missing persons, people who were missing in the context of armed conflict.
So forensic and humanitarian investigations, I'll talk about those distinctions in a bit, but there are three,
in my experience in different places, three terms, I think, that represent the problems.
I think these days in academia we're inclined to use different wording puzzles.
I hear puzzles all the time, but what's the puzzle? I hate it. It's a problem.
My mother is a social worker. She says, no, there are no problems. There are just challenges.
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?
And I think that can be summed up with mothers methods and mandates, and I'll spell those out as I go along.
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.
And what's happened in Lebanon is essentially nothing.
They have a president after a long period of time of kind of political deadlock, but there are 17,000 at least missing,
and nothing has been done on behalf of the government to search for these people.
And yet the Red Cross, the International Committee of the Red Cross is there,
kind of imploring the government to kind of fulfil their responsibilities to investigate.
The book that I recently edited brings together 22 different authors, journalists, psychologists, criminologists, historian,
biological and cultural anthropologists who are all working in different contexts and in different elements of missing persons investigations.
And although these are generally about the missing from conflict, I wanted to push the boundaries a bit.
And the origin of that is from my Dr. Research, which I did in Spain on the missing from the Spanish Civil War,
which has been in the press quite a lot over the past few years.
But for decades after the war and during the Franco dictatorship, I mean, there was no news, no discussion about the missing.
And there are over 100,000 people who were extrajudicially executed.
But when I was working in Spain, you know, Spanish society has been quite divided, as, you know,
whether they should look back into the past or whether they should just turn the page,
all these kind of perhaps inappropriate metaphors that people use.
And so Spanish society has been very divided on whether they should go back and start searching for the missing.
So when I'm there as a foreigner, a lot of people would ask me in particular to the press,
because this became an angle that they liked, you know, that foreigners were interested.
And and for them, I suppose the idea that a Canadian should be interested in what's happening in Spain,
when half of Spain wasn't concerned, was interesting to them.
And I would say, well, you know, I'm interested because Canada has thousands of missing people that our government won't investigate.
And people were generally incredulous. And most Canadians wouldn't even agree with that statement.
But the truth is, for about 150 years, there were state sponsored and church run residential schools for indigenous children,
and it was kind of rooted in very kind of colonial minded racism.
But as many as 6000 children died in these schools over the span of 150 years.
And when people think of Canada, they don't think about this.
And when most Canadians think about Canada as part of this kind of, oh, it's historic, it's also a marginalised community.
So most people don't care. Only very recently has the government led a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look into.
That the Spaniards found that kind of confounding, that, you know, that Canada and Canadians should be interested in this.
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.
And that was intriguing to them. But it also allows me to kind of push the definitions of who's missing.
And I also include in the book a chapter by someone who works in a museum where they curate and
sometimes display the remains of indigenous persons remains that were collected in the name of science.
This is something that, as an archaeologist and biological anthropologist, we're really having to confront and having to confront.
We ought to have confronted it much, you know, a long time ago.
But this kind of social awareness again of marginalised communities has changed in of their political power.
And even here at the University of Oxford and the Rivers Museum, I was there yesterday, took this image of all these cranes.
And I wonder, you know, who asked these communities or did anyone?
One of my research colleagues is six year old, was taken to a museum in Toronto and she said,
but that all these things are so beautiful and so interesting. How did the museum get them to agree to give these things up?
It's a what a brilliant question from a six year old, because there was generally no agreement these things were taken.
And so I wanted to explore the idea of are these missing persons or these victims of enforced disappearance,
because there are repatriation claims from Canadian indigenous groups for remains like this.
But for the purposes of this talk,
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,
I suppose, with Argentina. And this phrase in the image apparition can be that appearance alive became
a sort of mantra that's been continued and echo today in modern day Mexico,
where 43 student teachers went missing at the hands of the government.
They were detained and they disappeared in a lot of media attention.
Public pressure has gone in, but none of those 43 have been found.
And the expression when protests are being staged and you see it all over Mexico City.
I was there for a conference last week. You said you see 43 and you you hear people chanting Beatles, they lost Joe Arum,
Beatles lost caramels, which means they were taken away alive and we want them back alive.
Now, when we talk about missing persons,
it's generally a horrible euphemism because there is a belief that's quite reliable that odds are these people are dead.
But until there's some sort of physical evidence, we can't believe it.
And how can I tell a mother who searching for her son or her husband that, oh, you know what, they're probably dead.
So you, you know, don't give up on that idea.
The International Committee of the Red Cross in Bosnia wanted to resolve questions for widows, widows,
wives, mothers of missing people, wanted to help them with issues of inheritance and things like that.
Because with this ambiguous status of missing, there's no kind of legal resolution for a lot of problems that exist.
So the ICRC started to coordinate the issuing of death certificates for the missing.
They thought that this would help families, and in some respects it does.
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.
They're being held in prisons in in Serbia and Kosovo.
The same thing, the same belief was held by Albanian Kosovars that, oh, are missing,
are being held in prisons in Serbia and by Kosovar Serbs are missing, are being held in Albania for a period of time.
It's possible that that was true in general.
We know now because of exhaustive investigations, you know, they were dead families of Americans who went missing in action.
Soldiers in Vietnam still to this day believe they can go to Vietnam as a tourist.
They can search the whole country. The United States Department of Defence spends on the books $100 million a year.
But its recent audit showed that it was probably closer to $200 million a year searching for missing combatants from Korea,
World War Two and the war in Southeast Asia. But families, American families missing in action.
Soldiers still believe some of them are a minority, but they're still being held prisoner somewhere in clandestine prisons.
It's really awful to be kind of confronting this.
And I can't I had Mexican mothers come and say, oh, we're going to dig, we're going to search for remains.
We're going to do some examinations next week because the government won't do it.
Will you come and help us? I didn't want to tell them.
Oh, I've got to talk in Oxford. I really can't. I mean, it sounds awful.
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.
But it's interesting. I'll try to develop this a little more that.
We've seen this sort of evolution adaptation transference from one context to the next.
So moving from Argentina to Spain, even though the crimes committed in Spain happened decades previously, this was kind of what was happening.
This silence will ensue. Mass graves. But over time, and especially since the year 2000, there's been a change in the social memory,
social consciousness, the fading of the dictator Franco.
And in his absence come up his victims. The victims of his army and the dictatorship.
In Iraq in 2003, the American led campaign was under the guise of looking for weapons of mass destruction,
went in and took out the Baath Party regime. And as soon as that regime fell, families rushed out.
People were missing. But in many instances, they knew where those people were.
They were being detained at a military base or in a prison. Notorious prisons, not in unlike Syria.
And people came to the belief that they were dead and buried but couldn't search, weren't allowed to search.
As soon as that regime crumbled, they went out and started digging them up with mechanised backhoes.
And this was the result. And for the American administration, in particular, also the British, this was a problem.
As they failed to find weapons of mass destruction, they thought politically this could be very valuable.
But when excavations and investigations are held like this by desperate families
and there are some images of soldiers kind of standing by international soldiers
and watching because they're standing between desperate mothers or families and
the desire to be able to use that evidence of past crimes by a previous regime.
This was done by the Nazis in 1943, in Belorussia, Poland, the Ukraine.
They conducted some remarkable forensic investigations of mass graves, of victims of the NKVD, the Soviets.
And they used it as a way of saying, look, you can trust us. Look at what the previous administration did to your people.
You can trust us. And we know how that worked. So there's a real political interest in controlled excavations.
And eventually there were both my wife and I were involved in investigations for the US Department of Justice in Iraq.
But there were others, colleagues of ours and your friends who said, no, it's too political, it's too one sided.
And the right you know, we have to balance questions like this.
I'll just give you a brief kind of develop this idea of the transnational discourse and the missing and and universal jurisdiction.
It's one of the chapters in the book written by two Spaniards, a journalist and a social anthropologist.
And they talk about how Spanish investigative judge Baltasar Garzon indicted Pinochet when he came to the UK for back surgery.
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.
And under the guise of universal jurisdiction. I want to investigate this case.
If the Chilean government won't, I will. And it became a big deal.
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,
No, Mr. Pinochet goes home, we do not extradite him to Spain.
And Garzon lost that battle. But then in Spain, it created this awareness.
People started to say, Well, wait a minute, because people were proud of it.
They were excited, yeah, we're going to go after these dictators. Right.
Thinking in a perhaps post-colonial way, the former colonies, they're a mess.
We need to help sort them out. But then Spaniards started to say, But wait a minute, what about our dictatorship?
What about our regime? Okay.
It's been a couple of decades since, but we've done nothing with over 100,000 missing people who have been extrajudicially executed.
These are not battle casualties. These people were taken from their homes at night, executed and made to disappear.
And a lot of people knew where they were, but they never spoke of it.
In 2008, Baltasar Garzon took up the case and he said, I'm investigating 20 different officials from the war,
from the dictatorship, who I think have committed crimes.
And his argument was with missing persons, it's an ongoing crime until we know where those people are,
until we know what happened to them for sure by a legal standard of knowledge.
It's an ongoing crime and the families continue to be victimised.
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.
One of the authors of the chapter that I that I mentioned, he he started it.
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.
He disappeared on this date in 1936. I understand he's in a buried in a buried near a ditch somewhere near this town.
Can you help me? People came forward. They went out, hired a mechanical excavator.
Some scientists volunteered. The government didn't want to touch it.
They found 13 people in a mass grave, one of which was his grandfather.
He identified him by a ring and a gold tooth.
He paid for DNA sampling and he was immediately flooded with phone calls from other Spaniards saying, yeah, help us do that, too.
And Spaniards said, why are we so concerned with those dictators when we've got so many missing here?
Now, Garzon lost his appeal.
To pursue this investigation. But it was in part because he had, in another case, authorised illegal wiretaps.
And so he was basically removed from the bench and then became a consultant to the International Criminal Court.
But then, in a sort of ironic twist, an Argentine judge, some Argentines who were the children and grandchildren of victims from Spain,
their families had fled the war and the dictatorship, sought refuge in Argentina, nationalised the next generation.
And they made an appeal to an Argentine judge. Universal jurisdiction.
Help us investigate the disappearance of our parents and grandparents in Spain.
So this judge that really took up the case made an appeal to the Spanish judiciary, and it's still ongoing.
But the Spanish government authorised exhumations in Spain on behalf of the Argentine judge.
They wouldn't do it for their own judge, but they did it for the Argentine judge.
This comic I love this this this cartoonist, they're allowing him often.
And again, it just represents what's happening. These mass graves in Spain migrating across the globe and being opened up, discovered in Argentina.
There's a really interesting one. I talked about the mothers of the Plaza, the you in Argentina.
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.
And there's a belief that there were about 500 cases like this.
There's a belief that the babies were born while the woman was incarcerated,
that the babies were given up to military families, forced adoptions, and then the mothers were executed.
So the grandmothers of the plaza, the major, that's their main agenda to find their biological grandchildren.
And one Argentine said here in Argentina,
the grandmothers search for the grandchildren and the Republican grandchildren, Spanish Republican grandchildren.
We search for our grandparents. It's the other way around. Really interesting connection.
Again, just more kind of illustrations as the Argentine judge banging on,
because in Spain they would argue there's an amnesty law, we know international law and so on.
And Garzon argued vigorously against the amnesty.
Doesn't count. It doesn't it doesn't apply in these cases or it's a legal right.
According to international law, Asensio mendieta is an Argentine.
In her nineties, she was one of those who made the plea to the Argentine judge.
And just recently in this year, in January, her father was exhumed from a cemetery by an NGO.
So Spanish officials conceded to the exhumation, but Spanish forensic practitioners were not permitted to participate.
It's a strange kind of game that the Spanish government is playing. And he was buried with 22 others in a cemetery.
So it's a mass grave and victim buried on top of a victim. And they DNA identified her father.
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.
This brings me to the idea why do we care about the dead? This headline came out in August in Al Jazeera.
Syrian rebels shot down a Russian helicopter. You may remember this and that allegedly had the bodies.
I don't know how this played out, but had the bodies of the crew from that from the helicopter.
And we know certainly in Canada, I presume in the UK, the value of a dead soldiers body.
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.
But they wanted to exchange them for living prisoners, kind of their allies, their associates.
So really interesting, the kind of the political value that's being played here.
But why do we care about the dead? I mean, it's captured in the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols all developed
that a little more later about government obligations to mark burial sites,
to investigate, to inform families of the missing of the status of the investigation,
of the whereabouts of those who have gone missing and have died in the United States.
I mean, I grew up on the border with the United States and then later went to work for the US Department of Defence.
They have a lab in Hawaii, made reference to it earlier and they're just continually sending teams to Europe,
to Vietnam, to Korea to search for those missing soldiers.
This flag is the only flag that routinely flies over the White House other than the American flag.
And it's of the P.O.W. MIA Movement. I mean, it's a movement.
There's no particular group that that is represented by this flag.
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.
It's this idea that these people are still alive and need to be rescued.
They're missing in action. They're not dead. But of course, the government generally believes that they're almost all certainly dead.
But until they come back with those remains, people won't be convinced.
As tremendous political clout, this idea until they're home,
this is the kind of phrase that that is associated with the P.O.W. movement and even in some instances.
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.
They've died. They died in jet crashes. It's very acidic soil.
The Vietnamese weren't performing funerals for the pilots that were bombing their villages.
Should we be surprised by this? No. So the lab said, do you want bodies?
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.
We think we can figure out who those people are. Do you want bodies?
Do you want IDs? Because Congress said we need 200 IDs a year.
200 identified bodies a year. So historians with the Department of Defence started to look into the archives and say,
Well, you know what, I think this guy is Mr. X or Captain or whatever.
And so the in the lab management, they said, okay, give me a list of all potential candidates.
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.
Pearl Harbour, the ships that went down, it's a sacred place.
So just outside the lab is Pearl Harbour. Those sailors that line the ships go untouched.
It's it's but it's because of their home and a certain way of thinking.
Another chapter in the book is by a Guatemalan psychologist, but she's also indigenous Mayan Miyagi.
And she says, according to Maya cosmology, when people die, when Maya die, they don't die.
Their physical body or their physical self, their self transforms.
And they become embodied in spirit. And that spirit protects the region, ancestral lands.
But they can't make that transition successfully unless the body is accompanied to a funeral, a cemetery and proper rites are held.
When, during the civil war in Guatemala, when so many indigenous communities were were devastated,
mostly men, but a lot of women and children as well were forced into disappearance.
For the Maya, they can't make that transition without a body, without those rights, without that transition.
They're stuck in sort of a, uh, an odd kind of state.
They don't know how to explain the presence.
And the chapter talks about how the families of the missing communicate with the missing who are in distress through their dreams.
It's really remarkable.
And the argument I make is, look, we can't help these people unless we understand how they understand the situation of the problem.
But there's still this this need, psychological need to recover the missing members.
And another quote from an Argentine, it's in Spanish, translated, but still, subtitles is dying down soon.
But Amita, only five members of her family, three great uncles, an uncle,
and I think her father or her grandfather were all killed during the Civil War or in the dictatorship.
And she says, My great uncles, they're already in their place because civil groups found their bodies and identified them.
And this idea that they're in their place because the place where they were dead and buried wasn't their place.
Right. It was unacceptable to her because families should have the right to decide where they live.
But she's still looking for one uncle. He's still not in his place.
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,
but I thought I might run into trouble with intellectual property rights,
and I have no financial interest to disclose, so I'm just not going to use an acronym.
It's Mother's Methods and mandates. One quick story that, too,
to exemplify this situation I was in Kosovo was my only my second year doing
forensic work and a lot of victims were buried in the yards of their homes.
So we'd go in to investigate. Yellow crime scene tape would be put up or familiar with this from TV.
And the idea really in theory, certainly is to prevent contamination of the evidence.
But I think in this context, it was really much more as a way of distancing ourselves as scientific practitioners from the families.
The idea that we would be some due to psychological harm or stress if we were interacting with them directly.
And this is very different from how things happened in Argentina, where the mothers and grandmothers were protesting.
The mothers and grandmothers were at the graveside during the first exhumations.
They were protagonists. They were participants. They were side by side.
Guatemala it's the same thing. Remote indigenous communities with the families helping excavate.
I was giving testimony at the International Criminal Court in a trial recently.
I'll tell the story later in Question Time.
If we have time, I just want to run overtime. But the defence counsel was asking me questions about methods.
We had the yellow tape, but there were a couple of locals who were inside the tape.
We videotaped it all of the investigation for the benefit of the defence, and some of that was played back in court.
And so the defence counsel was asking me during cross-examination, you know, really is this normal, is this acceptable?
We went back and forth for about a day on that and related matters.
But I explained to him actually this is normal practice in a lot of countries, but the families are integrated in the process.
And I'll go back to this with mandates. Oh, one other quick story.
Also in Kosovo, I went we went in part of the investigations.
We had the authority, legal authority to go and exhume whoever we decided needed to be investigated.
But someone in their great wisdom said, let's ask for permission from the families.
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.
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.
And the father said, But why? Why do you want to do this? And the investigator got agitated.
We're all foreigners, and we're really believing in what we're doing. We're bringing justice to these people.
He said, We want to try Slobodan Milosevic and the military generals and the heads who were responsible for these massacres.
We want to bring them to trial and put them in jail.
And the father said, what about the police officer who executed my children in front of my wife and I?
Investigator kind of thrown off. He got a bit defensive and he said, oh, well, that's a matter for the Kosovar courts.
You have to know that at that time the infrastructure was wrecked. There were no Kosovar courts.
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.
The father said he's still a police officer in this town. Very awkward moment investigator trying to argue for a bit.
And the father said, no, you can't see my children go away.
And it was a really stark kind of awakening where I thought we came in with this idea of bringing
justice to these people and we're doing further harm to the primary stakeholders of this process.
So right time with his mothers in some countries, they're working directly with them in some countries.
During the sidelines, the Argentine mothers.
There's sometimes primary victims, secondary victims, but they're often culturally represented as vulnerable.
The Argentine government was kind of casting them as the crazies.
You know, there's something wrong with them. They're protesting. They don't know what they're talking about. Their children were guerrillas.
They died in battle. It's that simple. But of course, they won the day.
It's hard for police and military to take on 50 year old women with white handkerchiefs on their heads.
Right. How do you justify physical violence against them? Some of them were assassinated, but eventually they won the day.
We see similar organisations with the mothers of Srebrenica and in Liberia where women are kind of using becoming powerful political agents.
I was working with the Argentine forensic anthropology team in Africa when this news
came out that one of the pregnant mothers who was detained in Argentina survived.
She gave birth in prison. She was allowed to leave and told never to speak of it again.
Her son, her baby, was given up to a military family for decades.
She didn't talk about it until her son had doubts about his parents.
They were military or the father was in the military and it was in the news a lot that this has happened.
And he went and gave DNA and his mother's biological mother decided she would also give her DNA.
They were analysed and they were they were linked.
Biological mother who survived. She was detained but survived.
Met her son. And this is all because of these mothers organisations that are coordinating this campaigning, publicity, paying for DNA tests.
And in Spain and this this image is from the press. So it's not you know, it might be biased.
And these are the daughters and granddaughters, but you see that women are heavily represented in these public protests.
In this particular instance, it was protesting the removal of about this other son from the legal case,
holding up signs or images of their fathers and grandfathers who are missing.
I'm going to move into methods now, which has been a focus of my own research,
and it's the product of frustration from failed searches, because the typical method, how do we find the missing?
You go and you ask around where people buried. It worked in Spain with the first exhumations, and it works in most places.
Up to a certain point you ask around, people say, dig there, you dig there, you find bodies.
Great. But in some instances, most instances where look at Bosnia, 20 years,
hundreds of millions of dollars invested, perhaps the most advanced DNA lab in the world.
International experts from all over the tribunal investing heavily in investigations.
And just from Srebrenica alone, when there were up to 8000 men and boys who went missing.
There are still a thousand missing, one out of eight. With all that effort and we know about Rwanda.
Right. With 508,000 men, we can't even get a good idea of the number of missing.
Two mass graves have been excavated. That's it.
Now, there are different reasons for that, but there are clearly limits on these kind of methods that we currently employ around the world.
So I started looking, well, what are kind of sources of information? Can we get this images from 1977?
It was declassified by the United States government and it's of a military base in Argentina.
Satellite image from 1977, it's pretty clear. And they were looking for a mass grave.
This was only a couple of years ago. I thought, wow, that's great.
And we always knew. Generally, we know that the U.S. government have this.
But when I was with the U.S. Department of Defence, I couldn't get my hands on these images.
I was a former and I would argue, but I'm here, I'm doing research, I'm working for, you know, sorry, classified.
Okay, great. Thanks. Then. And this was the kicker.
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.
We're looking for a pilot who was on a bombing missions plane, got shot down, crashed in Germany.
Witnesses said, Oh no, the plane crashed here. Single pilot in the plane.
We found this big crater. It's usually a good sign. That's where the plane crashed.
Things blew up. That's where you find the pilot. Typically, we only had maybe a week left.
We weren't finding anything. Lots of kind of metal, scrap metal, a few pieces of plane, not much.
A German comes walking down the road here and he says to me, I think you're digging in the wrong place.
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.
I kind of have the sense and I said, What makes you think that?
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.
I said, I think you're right. He got this image from a U.S. Army Air Force archive here in Britain.
I thought, how can the U.S. Department of Defence not come up with this image?
Some local German does. He was on vacation in the U.K. and he knew about this archive.
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.
It just goes to show this exists, but we seldom tap into it.
And this kind of triggered my Ph.D. research, which is spatial analysis and modelling of burial site locations.
I thought, is there a way to kind of give a test to oral testimony?
Because it's oral testimony. It could be true and accurate, precise.
It can be that the person believes they're telling the truth and that they know exactly what happened.
So many Vietnamese people tell me we married. We buried him one metre deep.
We had a little funeral ceremony. He's right here and we dig in.
There's nothing digging. There's nothing, nothing, nothing. Are you sure? I swear.
Okay. They in some instances, they probably believe they were telling the truth.
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.
But I can't tell up front. I try, but I'm not good at judging.
Is this the truth? Is this something they believed to be the truth but are mistaken about?
Or is this a lie? So I say, can we come up with something that will help corroborate or refute, refute or testimony?
This is kind of a brief some of the theoretical underpinnings.
Talk about spatial autocorrelation. I'll show an image that helps illustrate this what it is in geography.
It means that the location of one thing impacts the location of other things.
Spatial relationships and characteristics impact one another.
I'm currently based in Costa Rica, where you grow coffee.
Coffee grows best where there are other types of shady trees.
So flourishing coffee is related, spatially correlated with the presence of shaded trees.
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.
Behavioural decisions are particularly restricted in times of war.
This is an assumption I'm making saying fewer resources, limited territory and security.
You've got their bodies. What do you do with them? Your options are limited.
Status. Thoughts about rational choice theory. I mean, I say rational choice theory and he talks about the logic of violence and civil war.
He uses it to say, how do occupiers calculate who to kill?
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?
And then the hypothesis that I came up with is that, look, resources are limited, people are making rational decisions.
We always characterise these context with, you know, psycho pathology, right?
And I'm not saying, oh, he's a madman, very calculating. I mean, we know this inherently.
There's a bit of, I think, psychopathology, of course.
But generally when it comes to body disposal, especially in criminal context,
it's a lot of rational decisions being made and it produces spatial patterns of body disposal.
The null hypothesis is that great locations are random, and this is an argument in Spain.
They say, Oh, the killings, the random, it was anarchy. I'm looking to test this assumption.
This map was produced as evidence in the Mladic trial in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
It's difficult to see, but there are red triangles that represent schools and red circles that represent mass execution and burial sites.
What's the relationship between schools? They detained thousands of people over several days.
Where could they possibly detain these people before they executed them?
Schools. Schools weren't in. What was going on.
Once they killed them or they had to transport groups, hundreds of people, they weren't going to take them far.
Right. So if you're looking for mass burial sites, where are the schools?
Right. We know this now in hindsight, but there are still a thousand missing.
So what are we missing? Can we use these sorts of information to draw inferences about where further bodies are buried?
I call the United in analysis, the spatial analysis of the location of primary and secondary burial sites.
Very briefly, primary burial sites are where bodies were buried originally,
often where they're executed two months after they were executed in Srebrenica.
The US State Department released aerial images showing heavy machinery working.
People are still saying, where are the missing from serving pizza?
And they said, we see all kinds of activity and disturbances in the ground from these images.
We believe that men killed and buried over the next two months,
the Bosnian Serb army went to the primary battle sites, used mechanical excavators, dug up bodies and relocated them.
The orange points represent the primary mass grave sites, the green yellow orange dots and the green dots represent the secondary.
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.
And the reason this is important, I mean, it shows a less than 1% probability.
And we know this intuitively.
But this can be important because we're talking about crimes against humanity and genocide, things that are systematic, organised, coordinated.
It's not anarchic. It's not thousands of individual homicides.
This is something that's organised and it helps us not only understand the crime, but in resolving the fate of the missing.
I did a study, a couple of graphs over the detail in Spain, so I wanted to create a model contrasting.
I used known burial sites where people have been identified and I created random sites which called nine sites to create two contrasting groups.
Using logistic regression,
create an algorithm and it creates this projection across the map that says these are the types of locations where you find burials.
These are the types of locations where you don't find burials. I thought this might be useful.
So if you have a witness saying, Oh, no, they were taken in that direction and buried. So here.
And another one saying, no, no, they were taken over there. And you can look at this map and say, you know what?
That's not the type of place where we see people being buried, but that is where do we start digging.
So it could be, you know, something that helps guide. I looked at let's talk about this briefly at lunch.
I looked at how far people were being taken from the point of detention to their murder and burial site and what this means.
How many towns did they cross during that journey from detention to death and burial?
The average is one they crossed over into the next administration.
75% of cases, one or two towns, the removing victims from their own community and dropping them off in the next community.
This is a graph showing the density change from the place where the person was detained to where they were buried.
The density, it's not a tight correlation, but it's dropping.
They're taking them to other municipalities, other jurisdictions, and they're taking the less populated areas.
These are all kind of logical things, but we never really given them the test.
But in Spain it was non-combatants. North Korea had to show a couple of images.
This kind of limited data and ability to speak in North Korea.
The Americans went in 2001 and they had a historian find this image from 1950 POWs, battlefield bodies lying on the ground.
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.
They kept them on a camp, barbed wire, facing in very limited.
But they want to do as much work as possible. And it was something that I was working on before we get there.
Where do we look? And they looked where the bodies were lying on the ground, and that's where they found them.
And this is very common in with combatants in this kind of context,
where they die there they lie sort of probably in perhaps an inappropriate kind of phrasing, but that's pretty common.
But when we compare them in the same context, combatants and non-combatants.
This is from Cyprus, from Greek Cypriot victims don't have access to the Turkish Cypriot victims yet.
And yet it's kind of a hope. Well, there were two phases in 1974.
The first campaign invasion from the north, the size of the circle, represents the numbers of victims.
So we correlate where people went missing. The type of victim green is combatants.
Blue is civilians. And we see temporal patterns, spatial patterns.
We start to understand the politics and logistics of killing and burying combatants overwhelmingly buried where they died.
Civilians not so much removed from their communities, taken away, buried elsewhere.
And the killings according to kind of different months, different phases.
So it tells us a bit about kind of those who are conducting operations and perhaps
why they treat combatants and non-combatants differently mandates that last them.
And I'm producing I'm going kind of there were fewer answers and more questions here.
But this is a question of whether or not we should assume in the first place, certainly with Jewish victims from World War Two.
But a lot of objection from the Jewish community, if their objection if they're objecting,
there's kind of an orthodox tradition, generally an orthodox belief that that's disturbing the spirits of the dead.
But in Poland right now, there's a community that's strongly advocating the exhumation of a grave.
They want to demonstrate that they weren't responsible, that it was the Nazis that did it.
And the Jewish community, the dissenting community is saying, don't touch it.
We don't want the mothers of the plaza the minds of Split one group saying we want exhumations.
And the other group, the association mothers saying when you exhume the body and return it to a family, they stop campaigning there.
Militancy stops. They don't care anymore. We want full justice, full accounting, confessions, sentences of everybody.
And until we have all those things, we don't want the bodies. We're really contrasting opinions.
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.
And then there's the question. It's it's a bit of a trope, I guess, justice or peace and transitional justice.
Do exhumations provoke unrest? Further continued conflict, certainly a sense people into hiding those responsible.
Whereas in South Africa, we see kind of a confessional model of kind of transitional justice, truth and reconciliation.
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.
But it's used often, particularly by politicians and people who are well connected to those responsible for the deaths and the disappearances.
Coming to the end, humanitarian or forensic? This is sort of a false dichotomy or perhaps a bad practice, bad habit.
The Yugoslav tribunal was interested not in which individuals died, but how many Muslims died, how many Orthodox died.
The thing about crimes against humanity and genocide, they're not thinking about murders.
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.
The really interesting, the legal case to try their heads. I talked about the problems of that.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, on the other hand, is neutral, humanitarian.
They don't cooperate. That's not how they work. When they exhume bodies, they don't technically examine bodies.
They encourage governments to fulfil their obligations to investigate when governments investigate.
The ICRC can help facilitate the analysis of those remains for the identification.
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.
That's their mandate. So in the literature you see this dichotomy.
But of course, humanitarian elements are part of justice, and the criminal justice is more social justice.
These things are not as separate as they're you know, sometimes it works that way.
In Kosovo, right after the conflict ended, NATO's sending gratis forensic teams, a Canadian team, British team, American team.
They're all doing forensic work on behalf of ICG. But a few months later, I see, too.
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.
The British and Americans continue to operate independently. The British all got overseas, and a couple of years later we kind of lost interest.
The international community walked away, and that's an exaggeration.
But the United Nations mission in Kosovo set up an Office of Missing Persons and forensics,
and they were interested in forensics and humanitarian mandate.
So there was an evolution in Iraq that talked about the ethics and the political influence of scope.
We're only looking for victims of the Baath Party regime. Anyone who died post 23.
It's not our interest. We're not looking into that. That was problematic.
It is problematic. It's not. I shouldn't use the past tense.
The ICRC since 23 has developed this thing called humanitarian forensic action.
They're incorporating the two words in one, but they're still only pushing a humanitarian mandate.
But in international humanitarian law, the obligation to search for the dead, maintain their dignity, the right to know all these things.
So then just as I going to wrap up here, think about the future and what does this mean?
The mandate clash, I think in Georgia, the International Criminal Court has been asked by the Georgian government to investigate.
It started preliminary investigations. I've worked for the ICRC and part of this is personal.
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,
organisational conflicts and this is how we resolved it. It's great,
it's copy paste because I work I could solve for the International Criminal Court and the Red Cross and
they're both in Georgia and they're both collecting information on missing persons and they won't share.
And I think, well, who are they serving here? They're both serving families, but in their own way.
And if they're not collaborating, what's the problem?
What's going to happen with complementarity, the principle of complementarity between the International Criminal Court and the Georgian government.
One might see conflicts in. It's complementary, right? In theory, I'm not sure.
In practice we'll see.
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.
Yes, they wanted this peace deal to be formalised.
But obviously a lot of people didn't they didn't agree with the agreement. They rejected it by the narrowest of margins.
The ICRC was expected to lead the process here in finding the missing.
But people rejected this idea that there would be immunity for some people responsible for crimes.
The government has opposed this and pass legislation which justice and peace, which has kind of a limited criminal investigative mandate.
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.
And I throw in this last bit the Commission for International Justice and Accountability.
I don't know if you know about this Bill Wylie is behind it.
And it's I don't know if technically it's an NGO, it's NGO ish,
but it's really the result of frustrated attempts of working with organisations like ICTY,
why the criminal tribunal in Yugoslavia and the ICC and saying, Oh, they're so scared about security and they won't win.
So this CIA is using people in Syria to confiscate documents and information and testimony and smuggle it out of the country.
And they're sharing it with. Governments that are interested how they decide who to share this information with.
I don't know. Four days ago, the Canadian minister of Foreign Affairs announced, you know, he in front of the prosecutor,
chief prosecutor for the ICC said Canada is supporting the ICC in supporting CIA, which is kept a very low profile until now.
I mean, it's kind of like private intelligence gathering.
Maybe this isn't new, but in for its implications of missing persons in forensic investigations.
For me, it's it's a bit upsetting. There's a lot of unknowns.
They're also working in Iraq, which when Bill Wiley, who's behind this organisation, was speaking recently in Toronto,
he wouldn't say they were working in Iraq, but the Canadian foreign minister just kind of announced it.
So now it's public. And who controls data on the missing?
This is my question that I live with and who are they serving? Right.
So this is what I kind of foresee, this clash of organisations and interests taking place.