Clea Koff: Making the Dead Speak
    By Christine Rousseau
    Le Monde

    Friday 08 April 2005

    Clea Koff's hands play distractedly with a little black notebook. Observing her, it is difficult to imagine that these long and well cared-for hands have shoveled, scratched the earth, and exhumed hundreds of skeletons or putrefying bodies in the mass graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo.

    This forensic anthropologist has deposited the observations from all those missions undertaken between 1996 and 2000 into a notebook identical to the one she's holding, a notebook that assisted her in composing "The Bones' Memoir" [published in English as "The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo"], an eye-witness book that provides a singular perspective on the "afterwards" of an atrocious and devastating genocide, the first act of which took place exactly eleven years ago.

    It was on April 7, 1994, the day after the attack that cost Rwanda President Juv nal Habyarimana his life, that the massacres began that would total more than 800,000 victims, mostly Tutsis. In November, the UN created the International Criminal Court for Rwanda (ICCR), which would send a team of legal-medical experts to investigate in 1996. Clea Koff was on that team. At 23, she was about to realize a "dream" in the middle of a nightmare...

    In the office of her Parisian publisher, this beautiful and charming young woman explains in a gentle and composed voice: "To go to Rwanda was the logical conclusion of my studies in forensic anthropology and of that discipline's involvement in the ends of justice. I achieved a dream that has been strengthened by each one of my missions."

    When she talks about her experience in Rwanda, in Bosnia or in Kosovo, it's always with the same strength of conviction. The same resolve for justice animates her. The same desire to restore a shattered humanity inspires the whole of her arresting, moving, and fascinating book.

    Her hands linger again on her little notebook. Evening after evening, when fatigue didn't lay her low, that was where the anthropologist deposited her days, days spent under a crushing sun or the rain, in ditches or in the tombs of misfortune, amassing proof, gathering bones, "listening" to them, assembling them to restore an identity, a dignity. And, in this way, allowing families to mourn. There also, this woman-child, who describes herself as "aged from within," found herself, confided her little hurts, her doubts, her questions, her terrifying, obsessive dreams, her fears and her anguish. The sole space for privacy, it was also the "outlet" thanks to which she was able to keep some distance from her emotions. "There's a big temptation to be drowned in feelings and to let the affective take over the work. At the same time, I have always worked to maintain a scientific view, by first of all considering the bones as a puzzle to solve before they become an individual. When I was in a mass grave and I discovered a hundred corpses, I would concentrate on just one and give myself over entirely to procedure." And she adds, passing from English to French: "I couldn't crack, otherwise I'd run the risk of being sent back, which was not an option."

    Clea Koff therefore held up, thanks to her fascination with bones, which goes back to her childhood. A migratory and formative childhood ("I feel myself to be a citizen of the world above all.") that she spent in Kenya, in Tanzania - her mother's native country - then in Somalia, according to the travel schedule of her parents, documentary film-makers engaged in the denunciation of colonialism and of all forms of racial discrimination. At seven, the little girl buried animal bones in a garden. At 13, she buried the bodies of birds found near her home in Washington before digging them up to observe their decomposition.

    Faced with this singular interest as well as a pronounced taste for history and its vestiges, her grandfather offered her an archeology book. The young adolescent thought she had found her path when, at an excavation site in Greece, she understood that she could not exhume bodies "decently" buried.

    The trigger would be her reading "Witnesses from Beyond the Grave," by her "model," Clyde Snow, who in 1987 created the Argentine forensic team responsible for identifying the people who had disappeared under the dictatorship. Charmed by the humanitarian application of forensic anthropology, the archeology student started a Master's Degree at the University of Arizona, where she familiarized herself with her first bodies. But nothing prepared her for what she would see and live through alongside the survivors of the Rwandan genocide. "I had my doubts, especially the first few days. Then, when I saw the mass graves, I understood that my discomfort had no place there..." It would, however, be necessary for her to learn how to get rid of a too vivid imagination, by, for example, avoiding reading depositions at the crime scenes; by avoiding meeting the families and working side by side with them in the cemeteries; by allowing herself to crack sometimes when she saw those "signs of life" (a collar, clothes, a sack of marbles, identity papers...) that said father, mother, or grandchild...the life before.

    Clea Koff barely speaks about her own "afterwards." She only just evokes the images of torn bodies that flood her memory on the airplane home, the police movies that she hates, the first nights at home when fear seizes her...

    A question of modesty? "To emphasize my own problems returning to normal life seems contemptible compared to the pain of the victims and the survivors." A shadow passes over her eyes, and then her luminous smile takes over when she starts talking about her plans. "I'm going to devote myself to the problem of disappeared persons in the United States. Do you know that there are close to 4,000 unidentified bodies in California? I'm in the process of putting together a team that will work with families and the police to finally take into account all the anthropological data."

    In a few months, Clea Koff will leave Australia, where she resides for part of the year, to move definitively to Los Angeles. And so pursue her dream.

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