down to an area about the size of a grapefruit—where in space they all originated. “That’s useful in saying, ‘Well, the person was standing up when they were shot,’” says Grant Graham, a criminalist with the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. “‘The person was on their knees. The person was lying down.’…There are all different types of bloodstain patterns—swipes, wipes, drips, arterial spurts, gushes—and you can reconstruct what happens in the crime scene as things move along…. It’s a moving, flowing event.”
Unfortunately, many of the dead in Kosovo were burned beyond recognition. The report for 157 Millosh Gillic Street states that FBI investigators went to a burned-out residence and found “the skeletal remains of an indeterminate number of victims.” But even a charred pile of bones can contain enough evidence to identify the dead and the method of death.
“The human skeleton is a dynamic part of the body,” says Dr. Bill Rodriguez, the forensic anthropologist attached to the FBI team. “It is constantly altered by activity. In a runner, changes occur in the bones of the leg; in a dockworker, changes occur in the upper torso. Bones are just like fingerprints…their structures are so unique that you can make a positive identification.”
To identify the remains, the investigators need something to compare them with. Determining that you have a dead male in his mid-thirties who probably did a lot of heavy lifting doesn’t do much good unless you also have descriptions of missing people to pick from. X rays provide the most accurate matches, as do dental work and injuries, but absent those kinds of records, forensic anthropologists can still provide a huge amount of information about who was killed and how. There is only one right femur in a body, for example; the number of right femurs in a pile of bones tells you how many people there were. Not only that, but bones differ enough between sexes, races, and age groups that it is often possible to define quite narrowly who these people must have been.
In 1948 an anthropologist working for the army’s Office of the Quartermaster General—using war dead from Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and other Pacific battlegrounds—improved upon an already strong statistical connection between body height and femur length. If you multiply the length of the femur by 2.38 and then add 61.41 centimeters, you get the height of a person to within a fraction of a centimeter. Further military studies found that the shafts of the long bones of the body, known as the diaphyses, gradually form solid bonds with the caps of the bones throughout a person’s teens. Different bones solidify at different times, providing a good indication of the dead person’s age. Hundreds of dead American soldiers were identified using medical records and such statistical techniques; the same techniques can be applied to determine whether the dead in Kosovo’s mass graves match accounts given by people who witnessed the killings.
“From a war crimes standpoint, we document the number of individuals, determine the sex ratio, and then determine the ratio of adults to children,” says Rodriguez. “From there, we can move on to identifying the dead individually. We can also find evidence of blunt force trauma, stab wounds, gunshot wounds, malnutrition, and torture…. We deal with death on a daily basis. We’re scientists of death.”
The FBI convoy rolled out of Studenica in midafternoon. The family had reconvened in front of the house and was going through a pile of clothes that had been pulled up from the well along with the bodies. There were ski parkas, blankets, sweaters, a fake-fur coat. One man spotted the fake fur, knelt on it, and started sobbing. Xhevat, the grandson who had just returned from Germany, stood around a little uncomfortably, unsure what to do.
“Tell me about him,” I said to Xhevat, pointing to the grave where the old man was now reburied.
“He was a farmer. He saw World War One and World War Two,” Xhevat said. “He was a soldier for the Germans in World War Two. He always lived right here; he never considered leaving. Everybody fled, but he didn’t. ‘You are on my land…. No one will come and throw us out of here,’ he would say.”
“How long are you staying?” I asked him.
“Oh,” Xhevat said, glancing at the rotting clothes in his front yard. “I go back to Germany on Friday.”
In February 1994 German police took into custody a Bosnian Serb named Dusko Tadic, who had been hiding in his brother’s apartment in Munich. Tadic had been recognized by Bosnian Muslims who had survived the infamous Serb death camp of Omarska, near the city of Prijedor. Tadic wasn’t officially in the Bosnian Serb Army—he was a local cafe owner and karate teacher—but he would show up in the evenings to direct personally the torture of chosen prisoners. An ICTY indictment one year later accused him of rape, torture, thirteen murders, and—in his most infamous act—forcing a prisoner to bite the testicle off another, who subsequently died. Two years later, after a trial that lasted from May to November 1996, he was convicted of violating the laws and customs of war and of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
The Tadic case was the first successful prosecution of a war crime by the ICTY. It has indicted ninety people for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and has an unknown number of secret indictments. Thirty of the accused are now in custody, including ten Bosnian Croats who surrendered in 1997 and three Bosnian Serbs who surrendered in 1998. One was killed resisting arrest. On July 25, 1995, South African Judge Richard Goldstone, acting as the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, indicted Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic and his chief of staff, General Ratko Mladic, with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Four years later, neither one has been caught; Mladic is said to spend his days on a Bosnian Serb military base, tending beehives and a herd of goats. Each goat has been named after a Western leader or UN commander.
Considering the time and effort that it takes to indict someone for war crimes, the question of whether the investigations serve a purpose—in the absence of arrests—is a hard one to avoid. Judge Goldstone, who now heads an independent commission on NATO’s use of force in Kosovo, is adamant that they do. “To turn people for the rest of their lives into international pariahs is not something that any rational person would like,” he says. “Karadzic was no longer able to continue in office and had to disappear from the international scene…. The quality of their life is diminished considerably…. One is looking over one’s shoulder every day of one’s life.”
Slobodan Milosevic, as president of Yugoslavia, is not looking over his shoulder in quite the same way, but his is a precarious existence nonetheless. There is widespread discontent in the army, the country’s infrastructure and economy are in ruins, and Montenegro wants to abolish the Yugoslav Federation. Because of the international arrest warrants, Milosevic cannot flee to another country, and the United States is withholding economic aid to Serbia until he has been removed from power. “It is in the interest of the peoples of Serbia that [he] be transferred to The Hague,” maintains David Scheffer, United States ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. “It will remain a very difficult proposition to bring Serbia into the international community and into, frankly, the New Europe if Serbia remains a de facto sanctuary for indicted war criminals…. We think the odds are with us.”
Because of the turmoil in Yugoslavia, there is a good chance that Milosevic will one day stand trial. (Indeed, he has reportedly started making inquiries about hiring an English lawyer.) He has already been charged with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war and may be charged with genocide as well, the most serious breach of humanitarian law. To convict him, the ICTY would have to show that he intended to destroy, “in whole or in part,” the Albanian population of Kosovo. The fact that his forces generally spared women and children does not disqualify him from charges of genocide; theoretically, even one murder could be considered genocide if there was intent to harm the rest of the group. By that standard, the policies of the Milosevic government easily qualify.
The atrocities in Kosovo are so well documented that Milosevic will probably not bother to challenge them in court; instead, he may try to claim that he was unaware they were happening. He may already have had an eye toward that kind of defense when he encouraged paramilitary and militia forces to carry out many of the actual massacres in Kosovo. NATO has been eavesdropping on Serbian forces in the field since the beginning of the air war, though, and that will make an ignorance defense difficult. “To prove chain of command, we are relying to a great extent on intelligence agencies in the Western countries,” says Landale, spokesman for the ICTY. “They are obliged to give it to us. We will try to show knowledge of crimes and failure to prevent them or to punish them.”
When one hears accounts of the massacres in Kosovo, one is struck by both their terrible efficiency and their even more terrible savagery. Many of those responsible were hastily deputized militiamen who, to judge by the sheer creativity they showed in killing people, must have been quite intoxicated by their sudden power. They shot people one by one, and they mowed them down in groups; they burned them alive, and they cut their throats; they tortured them, and they just walked up and shot them in the backs of the heads. They briefly wielded absolute power in their brutal little lives and must have never stopped to think that they might one day be held accountable for it.
