A Matter of Life and Death. Sue Armstrong

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СКАЧАТЬ it. They want to talk to someone who’s not going to be a threat, and I think it’s a huge compliment that they’re prepared to do that, because policemen don’t give personal information very easily. But they’ve never, in any negative way, treated me differently because I’m a woman. And coming to Dundee, being a woman hasn’t made any difference whatsoever. If you can do the job and achieve the goals, then you’re the same as everybody else.

       Back to Kosovo – what were the challenges?

      Well, the first challenge was the first site – those 42 men who had been herded into an outhouse. The gunmen had stood at the door and sprayed it with Kalashnikov fire. The chap who managed to get into the corner first was a survivor, and it’s important for an indictment that you have one. The gunmen’s accomplices stood at the windows, threw in straw, and torched the place, so that when we arrived all the bodies were huddled into one area because they’d been trying to get away. There had been six months of decomposition, so there was very little recognisable soft tissue left. ‘Big, boiling masses of maggots’ is the only way to describe it. Partly burnt, and dogs had gone in and taken away bits for food.

      Our job was to document the evidence. If this is going to be an indictment site against Milošević, then the witness statement has to match up with the forensic evidence. If what the witness is saying is not borne out by the evidence, or vice versa, then that’s not going to be a site that’s likely to lead to conviction. So we literally had to start at the door of the building, on our knees, sifting fingertip through every piece of rubble. Once you got to what was a part of a body, or you could perhaps outline as a whole body, then you would lift it, take it away and do the post-mortem on what was left. Again, it’s about establishing: is this male or female? How old? How tall? Is there any clothing or documentation? And literally working your way through that room until you’ve cleared it – bearing in mind that there might be explosive ordnance there as well.

       I was going to say, what were the dangers?

      We had an explosive device left for us at that scene. You have to make things funny – it’s not at the expense of the deceased people, but it’s what keeps you going in these difficult situations. There was a tree next to the crime scene, and we’d use that tree when we needed to take care of bodily functions. The first person to do that was one of the Anti-Terrorist Branch explosive ordnance officers. He came back beaming from ear to ear, and said, ‘I’ve found a device!’ They’d planted a device near the tree, with a trip wire so that when we walked down the path it would go off. And he was so delighted, first because he’d found something to do, but secondly because he’d actually been relieving himself on to the device and he was really impressed that he could still stop peeing in mid-flow at his age!

      We had to blow up that device. And we had grenades that were placed underneath bodies with the pin removed, so that when you lifted the body the grenade would go off. You’d find razor blades, hypodermic needles in pockets, things that would inflict pain.

      And how did you deal with witnessing such horror and such obvious cruelty?

      Well, by that point I’d probably done 10 or 15 years of forensic work. I might not have seen anything on that scale, but it’s the same principle. To work in forensics you need a clinical detachment, because you’re there primarily to retrieve evidence. If you do become affected by it, you become inefficient in your objectivity. So you actually close down emotionally. Where it kind of breaks through is when you’re really tired, when you’re really hot – you know, when there are other stresses. Then sometimes it can boil over, but the majority of the time it doesn’t.

      I think anatomists learn this gradually as they’re exposed to the human body. The first case I went to was a microlight pilot who went down off Inverbervie. He was a decapitated torso. I did that case with my supervisor. You become more and more able to cope with things that are difficult. But what you don’t forget is that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can hit you any time. It may never hit you. It may be tomorrow, it may be a month, a year or even 10 years, so you have to be aware of it. But I can say, with my hand on my heart, I’ve never had the flashbacks or the lack of sleep …

      In Kosovo did you have the relatives around, and does that unnerve you?

      We didn’t on that particular occasion, because we were so close to the time when the Serbs had retreated that the refugees hadn’t started coming back. But they did very quickly after that, so we soon began to get onlookers. These were the relatives, neighbours, friends, and that adds an extra dimension, because the last thing you want is to add to their grief. So you take on board the responsibilities of your own job and the added responsibility of dealing with people who’ve gone through things we can only imagine.

      Often it’s very humbling. They felt they had to give you something, so they’d come with a cup of coffee, or cold water, and that was almost more difficult because they were thanking you for what you were doing.

      But the one that will stick in my mind forever was a man who lost his entire family. A rocket-propelled grenade took out his trailer and on the trailer were his wife, his mother, his sister-in-law and their eight children. They were all literally blown apart. He retrieved as much as he could and buried them, which is a tremendously brave thing to do … To be able to go round and pick up what’s left of your family, from an 18-month-old baby to your twin 14-year-old sons. And then we come along and say, ‘Look, the UN has identified this as a potential indictment site; we’d like to exhume what you buried. Are you okay with it?’

      We don’t have to get consent, because a UN indictment would override that, but it’s always best. He said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, ‘What I want more than anything is 11 body bags. I need to put every one of my family into the ground with a name, because it’s the only way God can find them. At the moment they’re all together, and I need God to find my daughter; I need God to find my wife; I need God to find my mother …’

      What we brought in filled a body bag and a half. That was all we could find, so there was huge pressure. I actually sent everybody out of the mortuary for the day and said, ‘I’ve got to do this one myself,’ because juvenile identification is my area of expertise. So I laid out 12 sheets along the floor of the mortuary and, going through the material I had, I started to separate little bits out … You know, ‘That can’t be the five-year-old, so is it the eight-year-old or the six-year-old?’ By the time I’d done all that, we had something that I was absolutely happy represented each of the 11 people. But there were two 14-year-old boys, and all I had of them were arms, and they were pretty much bare bone by that point. I couldn’t separate them because they were both male and the same age. One of them had a Mickey Mouse vest attached to it. I said to the policeman, ‘Go and ask the father which of his children had a Mickey Mouse vest.’ He came back with the name of one of the twins, and I thought: that’s all we need.

      We gave him back 12 body bags at the end of that day – the twelfth bag was what we couldn’t separate. It would be very tempting just to split that between the bags on the principle ‘He’ll never know.’ But that’s not the point. She [meaning her grandmother on her shoulder] won’t allow me to do that, because at the end of the day the man wants to be sure that in that bag is his wife; in that bag is his daughter …

      It mattered very much to him, but it also matters to the courts because they could come along and say, ‘Right, open up that body bag.’ If what’s in that bag doesn’t equate to the named missing person you’ve said it is, then you’re not a credible witness, and every bit of evidence you’ve recovered can be discounted. You can’t afford to do that.

      So we gave him back 12 body bags. And it was the most humbling experience of my life to hear him say, ‘Thank you.’ You think: God, for what he’s been through this is the absolute least we could do.

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