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Apr 17th 2008
  The grim skills of identifying and analysing human remains are being transferred from one benighted place to another

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AT THE new “family viewing facility” in the divided capital of Cyprus, human bones extracted from mass graves across the island are laid out on a long table covered with white cloth. Greek- and Turkish-Cypriots come to grieve for long-lost relatives, and to collect the bones for reburial.
  Elias Georgiades, a Greek-Cypriot ex-police officer, says the first reaction is rage: “Family members have lived without someone for 30, maybe 40 years. They demand to know exactly what happened.” Then comes grief, mixed with gratitude for the identification.
  It has taken a long time to get to this point. The last real fighting on Cyprus took place in 1974, when a coup, fomented by the dictators who held sway in Athens, triggered a Turkish invasion. Many of the bodies that now lie in mass graves date from earlier rounds of fighting. Until recently the fate of missing persons–almost 1,500 Greek-Cypriots and about 500 Turkish-Cypriots–was mainly treated as a propaganda point in inter-communal bickering, not as a human problem that cried out for a solution.
The fact that (so far) about 100 Cypriot families have been able to bury a loved one is also a by-product of the vast amount of experience in the identification of human remains that has been built up in other places blighted by war or tyranny.
  At a technical level, the biggest “school” for the genetic identification of human bodies is undoubtedly Bosnia, where an International Commission on Missing Persons was set up in 1996 at the behest of President Bill Clinton. By matching DNA from exhumed bones–ideally from a femur or tooth–with blood samples offered by relatives, the ICMP’s three laboratories have identified the bodies of 14,000 people who went missing in the wars that ravaged Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. These include more than 5,000 of the 8,000 or so Bosnian Muslim men and boys who are thought to have died at Srebrenica in 1995.
  As Kathryne Bomberger, the ICMP’s director-general, points out, the speed and value for money of identification by DNA has risen sharply in recent years. It now takes only a few weeks to train a police officer to use a “bone sample collection kit” which costs just a few dollars.
  Iraqi forensic specialists have been trained in Bosnia to investigate the 270 mass graves that have been identified in their country. Although some Iraqi graves, containing victims of Saddam Hussein, have been studied by high-ranking American experts, the country will need a lot of local expertise in forensic anthropology for years to come.
  The ICMP has been asked to help with investigations into the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri; and Ms Bomberger recently went to Colombia to offer advice on how that country’s past might be probed. The Sarajevo agency also helps after natural disasters: when the 2004 tsunami hit Thailand, some 1,700 bone samples were sent to Bosnia in German diplomatic bags; 900 DNA matches were wired back to Bangkok.
  An important supporter of the cause of identifying missing persons is the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Swiss-based humanitarian body. Its officials helped to draft a UN convention on “protection from enforced disappearance”, adopted by the General Assembly in 2006. This affirms the right of families whose relatives are missing to know the truth, and to get compensation; it also describes as a “crime against humanity” the systematic practice of abduction without trace. With its 140-year-old experience of working on both sides of every battle-line, the ICRC can reassure the families of prisoners who are still alive, and it can lobby governments and warring parties to observe the law. But it has no mandate to engage in post-conflict exhumations.
  The greatest fund of knowledge about the political and moral dilemmas of forensic anthropology is surely in Argentina, where at least 9,000 people disappeared during the 1976-83 military dictatorship, and efforts to ascertain their fate have been spearheaded by non-government organisations rather than by state authorities.
  The mentor of Argentina’s forensic anthropologists was Clyde Snow, an American who is still active in the field at the age of 80; he has analysed remains ranging from Egypt’s Tutankhamun to the Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. Mr Snow is famous for propagating the idea that every skeleton tells a life-story.
  Five of Mr Snow’s pupils formed the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, known by its Spanish initials as EAAF, which has provided its well-honed skills in more than 40 countries, including Cyprus. According to Mimi Doretti, an EAAF co-founder who is now based in New York, the organisation tries to work closely with victims’ families, not just to take genetic samples, but to get a full picture of how and why people died. It has huge expertise in traditional forensics.
  In the EAAF’s home base of Argentina, the identification of human remains has been slow, in part because bodies were so widely dispersed. Only 300 victims have been recognised, but the process should now accelerate, thanks to genetic skills that were refined in Bosnia–and to new insights from America, where highly degraded fragments of human material were found in the wreckage of the terrorist attacks of 2001, and successfully analysed.
  Armed with a $1.5m grant from the United States Congress, the Argentine NGO has just launched an initiative, along with counterparts in Peru and Guatemala, to speed up the identification of human remains, both by encouraging relatives to offer blood samples and by taking advantage of the latest American technology.
  In Bosnia and Argentina, the results of exhumation and forensic analysis have been put at the disposal of prosecutors. The war-crimes court in The Hague, which is supposed to mete out justice to the worst offenders in the post-Yugoslav mayhem, is grateful for the ICMP’s help.
  In Cyprus, the identification effort is taking place under a UN mandate, with help from the ICRC, and it rests on a delicate Greek-Turkish consensus which could be blown sky-high, in the view of local observers, by any talk of judicial procedures. Even 40 years on, it seems, people’s desire to face up to the past has its limits.
  See this article with graphics and related items at
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11057143