In early January, 1996, a tall, beautiful young woman fresh from graduate school in Arizona stepped on to a plane in California that was to take her halfway round the world to her first real job. Of that job she later said: “Of course, physically you feel good. You do hard work. You exhaust yourself. There are no telephones and you’re not dealing with friends or people you need to meet for dinner. It’s a very basic existence but one during which you’re also accomplishing a lot because you don’t have to do anything else. You’re there to get the work done.” The work in question, wholesome as it sounds, was not building barns or shearing sheep. It was the exhumation, on a UN rate of $35 a day, of mass graves in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo for the international criminal tribunals that have so far sentenced 44 assorted thugs and psychopaths to jail terms ranging from 25 years to life for genocide and other crimes against humanity.
This woman’s name is Clea Koff, and she has given some of the best years of her life to digging up mutilated bodies and coping with the inevitable emotional toll of such intimacy with death. It was a labour that an American friend of her family called her mitzvah — her “meritorious deed” — and it has left her feeling old at 31, “and yet also content; not searching to prove anything to anyone ”.
A pattern seems to have been established during the 1990s by which genocides were experienced in different ways by successive waves of people: first, the perpetrators and victims, then the survivors, then journalists, aid workers and UN officials (usually in that order), and only then, sometimes years after the slaughter, the forensic anthropologists. The witnesses’ hyperbole ebbs with the passing of time, so that Koff talks and writes about her work with almost shocking control. Still, the facts and descriptions speak for themselves. There are only a handful of people who have seen and felt (and smelt) what the violence of the new world order has wrought, and she is one of them.
At Kibuye, in Rwanda, unearthing a mass grave in early 1996 on the edge of a lake favoured in happier times by water-skiers, Koff envied the smokers on her team. They had an excuse to pause, and smoke to take the edge off the stench.
She became expert at reading grave sites. In a chapter in her book on the lost men of Vukovar, in Croatia, she notes briskly that toe bones are as unmistakeable as shoes: “The big toe phalange chunky like a baby carrot, the other toe phalanges more like small liquorice pieces.” Sometimes she and her fellow-diggers were alone with the dead, and with the visions that they tried not to conjure, exactly, but to build, step by manageable step, of the manner of their dying. Sometimes she shared grave sites with survivors, like the grandfather who stood quietly above her as she uncovered his grandson’s body (shot in the legs and then in the back) one sunny summer’s day in Kosovo. “We locked eyes for a moment and I wanted to say ‘I’m sorry’,” she recalls. “But I couldn’t. I wanted him to know we were there for a reason, yet of course he already knew it. He had agreed for us to take the body. So I just pursed my lips and he half-nodded and turned away. I felt there was almost a vacuum of air and sound between us. It’s one of those things . . . What can you say? What can you say?”
From an averagely blinkered First World perspective, Koff has been knee deep in scenes of unimaginable horror without even the consolation that liberators of the Nazi death camps found in the form of survivors. Yet repeatedly she describes her excitement at the prospect of the work and her sense of fulfilment having done it. She also misses it. She writes of her “discomfort mixed with longing” whenever reminded of a particular dig, a particular grave, from the security of her parents’ house in Los Angeles or her own new home in Australia.
Yes, she has read Anthony Loyd’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So, but no, she’s not a war-zone junkie. “It’s never been an addiction,” she says. “The longing is for a feeling of having complete understanding of what you’re doing and why you are doing it.” “It” is the operative word, since “it” is her vocation. She can describe it fluently now as bringing “justice for the bodies” by “helping the bones speak”, and in the process defying not just the killers but revisionists who are already claiming these genocides simply didn’t happen.
Her interest began with a peculiar teenage fondness for burying dead animals and digging them up again. “I was about 13,” she says. “We were living in DC (District of Columbia) and I found a large dead pigeon in a terrible mess. I put it in a bag, buried it and eventually dragged it to my science teacher to find out what was going on. He looked at me in the way you might look at someone if you’re wondering whether they’re going to grow up to be a serial killer.”
Before Washington, she was raised in England by her American father and Tanzanian-born mother, documentarians who once had to leave her with friends on a Norfolk pig farm for six months while they sued WGBH, the august Boston public TV station, for censoring their film about racism and gun violence among British police. (They won. Blacks Britannica was eventually screened in full in the US, though a court order limited audiences to 13 at a time for fear of riots.) After Washington the Koffs moved to California. Clea breezed into Stanford on a scholarship, thinking she would major in archaeology. When a Stanford dig in Greece stumbled on a grave that locals decided belonged to one of their ancestors, she realised she couldn’t stomach digging up bodies that had been properly buried. She would focus on the improperly buried, which was how she came to be studying forensic anthropology in a lab in Arizona when the invitation came to learn on the job in Central Africa instead.
No one ever asked her if she thought she could cope. “If you’ve done the training and stayed in forensics it’s proven you can cope,” she says. “It’s not even a question.” Yet perhaps it should have been. She did cope, more or less, but others didn’t. One of the most arresting passages in her new book The Bone Woman is the only one in which Koff admits to anger, and it ’s directed at an unnamed Swedish woman who arrives at a grave site in Kosovo, comes face to face for the first time with the skeleton of an ethnically cleansed child, and promptly breaks down.
Koff gives the Swede a sympathetic rub on the shoulder but inwardly is furious. By crashing through the thin emotional ice on which the rest of the team is skating, this woman has broken a cardinal rule. To Koff she also represents an empty gesture by the Swedish Government; a much-needed extra hand who arrives, be it noted, “in a green Range-Rover”, but proves insufficiently prepared and flees on day one. “ She probably could have helped if she had stayed,” Koff says. “I think she ran too quickly. But politically it was a false gesture and personally I wondered what made her think she could do it. What did she think she was going to see? What did she think this was?” For a moment Clea Koff seems downright scary. Here is a glimpse of a hardened pro with a good deal less patience for the living than the dead; a person entirely absent from the rest of our interview. And in truth she is no Ice Queen. She shed her share of tears during the exhumations and many more afterwards, and her book is, among other things, her attempt to record and confront emotions that had to be kept at bay while more important business was at hand. The book wasn’t her idea, however.
When she returned from Kosovo four years ago she started giving talks to fellow graduates and turned her journals into The Bone Woman at their suggestion. The result eschews the outrage to which she would have been entitled, and is the more powerful for of it. At times, as she pauses to discuss group dynamics and logistical frustrations (relieved at last by the swashbuckling General Jacques Klein, bringer of hot soup and fresh bread to the biggest mass grave in Croatia), it is possible to forget the nature of “the work”. Then she lets slip that British body bags are no match for “delux green American bags with carrying handles”, and you remember.
It hardly needs saying that she still has nightmares. One face that haunts her in particular, leaping out of tabletops and hanging in trees, is that of a corpse she exhumed from an unusual sitting position in Croatia with “bright turquoise mould forming in little circles on his forehead”. She has also suffered physically from so much heavy lifting in restricted spaces — “everything is done with back pain and injuries, and I have all sorts of problems with my hands from so much time with a trowel”. But the worst after- effects she traces back to a single evening by the lake in Rwanda. She was having dinner with colleagues at an outdoor table near the lake when she heard some “quiet moaning and splashing” coming from the water. A searchlight was switched on and two men treading water were executed by machinegun-fire yards from the table. The incident was never explained; neither did it leave her. She still drops to the ground at the sound of fireworks and had to leave LA for Melbourne to finish the book because of occasional gunfire from trigger-happy gang members operating near her parents’ house. “The shootings cut very deep because I wasn’t prepared for them,” she says.
And yet she was prepared for everything else, which, when you think about her experience of the unfathomable Nineties, is astonishing. In the opening chapter of Schindler’s Ark, Thomas Keneally wrote about the awkwardness of “good” as a literary subject. It is harder to make interesting than evil, and usually crops up in people tinged with complications such as ego, compromise and the eternal balancing of means and ends. But sometimes, he concluded, you find yourself staring good in the face and just have to recognise it. So it is with the Bone Woman.
The Bone Woman: a Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, by Clea Koff (Random House, £12.99; offer, £10.39, plus £2.25 p&p)
