Second paragraph of third chapter:
Since the bodies had been buried by people in Kibuye after the genocide, the general location of the main grave was known: a large, somewhat sunken area of dirt and grass below the priests’ rooms and on the cusp of the northern slope down to the lake. With Stefan at the controls of the backhoe over the previous day or two, the surface layers had already been lifted away and four of us began working with picks, shovels, and trowels to expose the human remains closest to the top of the grave. Doug was setting up and running the electronic mapping station that would chart the contours of the site and provide a three-dimensional outline of each body and its location in the grave. The production of highly detailed and trial-friendly maps was Melissa’s specialty. Ralph was running between the grave and the analysis areas by the church, photographing both processes.
A couple of rather gruesome books up for review today and tomorrow, I’m afraid. Clea Koff outlines the experiences of a forensic anthropologist in the mid to late 1990s in Rwanda and the Balkans. This was a side of conflict resolution that I never came very close to, though colleagues certainly did. The description of how an international team of variously motivated and variously qualified specialists comes together and works together in different and difficult sets of circumstances is very interesting reading; but the core is in the detail, if you can take it, of how she was able to bring closure (or often, sadly, not) to people whose relatives had disappeared as their countries collapsed.
It’s easy and lazy for conspiracy theorists (and genocide apologists) to claim that Srebrenica, or the Serbian attack on the people of Kosovo, or the Rwandan massacres, were hoaxes made up by the international conspirators of your choice. It’s vital that we do enable international organisations to follow these stories to their natural conclusion, and although Koff doesn’t dwell on the political underpinning for her work, it’s always there. You can get The Bone Woman here.
This was both my top unread book acquired in 2022, and my top unread non-fiction book. Next on those piles respectively are Silence, by Diarmaid McCulloch, and The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition.
