by Sue Black
That March, a firefight occurred at the compound of a KLA leader in which sixty Albanians, eighteen of them women and ten children, were massacred by the Special AntiTerrorism Unit of Serbia (SAJ). This brought widespread international condemnation and by the autumn, the UN Security Council was expressing grave concern about people being dispossessed of their homes by excessive force. As diplomatic efforts to ease the crisis continued, and with fears of the hardships that winter would bring for large numbers of displaced people without shelter, it took an activation order from NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) for both a limited air strike and a phased air campaign over Kosovo to secure agreement to a ceasefire. It was agreed that Serbian military withdrawal would begin at the end of October but the operation was ineffective from the start and the truce lasted little longer than a month.
The first three months of 1999 saw bombings, ambushes and murders specifically targeting refugees trying to flee across the border into Albania. On 15 January, following reports that forty-five Kosovo Albanian farmers had been shot in cold blood in the village of Racak in central Kosovo, international observers were denied access to the area. The Racak massacre was a watershed moment for NATO. It mounted a campaign of air strikes which appeared to serve only to intensify the brutality being meted out to the Kosovar Albanians. The aerial bombardment continued, almost unabated, for nearly two months before Milosevic finally succumbed to international pressure and accepted the terms of an international peace plan.
Within days of the air operations being suspended, UN KFOR (Kosovo Force) peacekeeping troops moved into the region and Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), requested that all NATO member countries be prepared to assist with the provision of gratis forensic teams. Suddenly, instead of passively watching these devastating scenes play out on the television news, I was going to be catapulted right into the middle of them.
When I took that phone call in June from Peter Vanezis, I could not have imagined the impact it was going to have on my life. At that point I had never worked as a forensic anthropologist outside the UK and I was terribly ignorant about the way this kind of operation would function in the field. I knew that there would be large numbers of bodies to be examined and identified, but I wasn’t totally clear what my role would be, how I was going to get there, how long I would be away and what it all really meant. But given everything I know now, I would do it all again in a heartbeat.
It never occurred to me to say no. My husband Tom insisted that I had to do it, I had to go. He is an incredible man and I am blessed to have known him since we were friends at school. He was tremendous about the upheaval to family life. Beth was a teenager, Grace had just turned four and Anna was two and a half. We hired a nanny for the summer and I prepared for the experience of a lifetime without much idea at all of what that experience would involve. I certainly had no idea of the long-term repercussions it would have on so many of us.
Peter and other members of the British forensic team had been the first to enter Kosovo, on 19 June. I was to join them six days later. All I knew was that I would be flying from London into Skopje Airport in Macedonia, where someone would pick me up and take me somewhere to a hotel. The next day I would be met – somewhere else – by UN officials and escorted across the border into Kosovo, which was still strictly speaking a controlled military zone. I would then be staying somewhere in Kosovo for about six weeks. So that was the details sorted, then.
When I came out of the arrivals gate at Skopje Airport, I was completely unprepared for the overpowering heat, the noise and the sea of faces, all jostling for attention, looking for someone they knew or offering taxi services. As I hadn’t a clue who was supposed to be meeting me or where we were going, it was more than a little nerve-wracking. I stood there staring across the forest of white cards being waved at arriving passengers in the hope that maybe I would see my name written on one of them, or at any rate something that seemed to be directed at me. It dawned on me with some alarm that I was in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language and my mobile phone didn’t work. I had no idea what I would do if nobody turned up to claim me like a pathetic piece of lost luggage. If my mother had known she would have killed me. As it was, we didn’t tell her where I was going until I had arrived, and by then there was nothing she could do about it, except cry and worry, which apparently she did for the whole six weeks.
Eventually I spotted a white card with a single English word scrawled on it in marker pen. It was at least a familiar one: ‘Black.’ In for a penny, I said to myself as I approached the man holding it and tried to engage him in conversation. Unfortunately, his English was as non-existent as my Macedonian, or indeed any southern Slavic language. French didn’t work either and, given that my only other option was Scottish Gaelic, I knew I was scuppered. Unable to understand a syllable of anything the other was saying, we resorted to gestures. He motioned me to follow him and a lifetime’s worth of well-heeded advice about not getting into cars with strange men ran through my mind. If my nerves had been in a state of heightened alert before, they were now in tatters and screaming at me that this was probably the most foolish thing I had ever done in my life. If I was murdered and robbed, or worse, somewhere on a quiet Macedonian road, I would have only myself to blame.
The man led me to a rust-bucket of a taxi with a roaring engine that puffed noxious fumes through the closed interior. He was probably keeping the windows shut against the pollution from the streets, but the air outside couldn’t possibly have been any worse, especially after he lit his third cigarette. It felt as if I were being simultaneously cooked and gassed. We drove in silence for what seemed like miles, leaving the outskirts of the city behind and climbing into the mountains along dirt tracks that left plumes of dust in our wake. I was calculating how much damage I might do to myself if I jumped from the moving car (the presence of my passport in my hand baggage, which I was gripping tightly, was moderately reassuring – at least I would be able to take that with me) when we pulled round a bend and in front of us loomed a replica of the Bates Motel a decade after its heyday.
The windows were covered in dust and grime and there were slates missing from the roof. A mangy mutt was chained to a tree outside the front door, which was banging in the wind. Without a word, my driver, now firmly rooted in my mind as my prospective murderer, jumped out of the car, signalled to me to stay inside and disappeared into the building. It was now or never. I started to plan my escape, and how to retrieve my luggage from the boot, watching all the time for the driver to return.
As I put my hand on the door handle to make a run for it, there was a rap on my window and a loud squeal from someone, which I guess must have been me as I was the only person in the car. I cranked down the window and looked into the smiling faces of two strangers. In cut-glass Foreign and Commonwealth Office accents, they asked if I was, perhaps, Sue Black? They told me they were from the British Embassy and suggested that I might like to get into their car. They didn’t think the hotel was at all suitable for me, and I have to say I agreed with them.
As the man went off to deal with my taxi driver and I busied myself with my bags, it occurred to me that this could be out of the frying pan, into the fire, except that now I was convinced I was starring in a James Bond movie rather than a Hammer horror film. I only had their word for it that they were who they said they were, and I still didn’t know where I was going. But at least if they planned to kill me, they would be speaking to me in English while they did so. To my mind, that was an improvement.
Happily, they turned out not to be sadistic murderers but an utterly charming couple who did indeed take me to a very nice hotel in Skopje (right next to the airport where I had started my journey nearly four hours earlier). After a great meal in great company, I began to relax and slept like a baby that night, too exhausted to be scared any more. The following morning was spent on the inevitable paperwork in preparation for th
e time-consuming journey across the chaos that was the border, with its checkpoints, long queues of lorries going our way and equally long convoys of trucks trying to get out of Kosovo.
Having never been on such a deployment, I admit to feeling pretty edgy during the long drive. Border crossings were strictly militarised, entry and exit was by permission only and we knew that there were still snipers in the area, not to mention IEDs (improvised explosive devices) laid to welcome us. We crossed from Macedonia into Kosovo at the Elez Han gate and headed south-west across the most majestic mountain passes towards the city of Prizren.
Progress within Kosovo was slow and hazardous because of the condition of the roads – the potholes were bigger than craters on the moon. Drivers were armed and radio communications were tense: the Serbs had still not completely retreated and there were believed to be residual pockets of resistance. At one point, hurtling along far too fast for the difficult road conditions, we took a bend at high speed and the driver had to stand on the brakes as we found ourselves almost up the rear end of a tank. I think I might have squealed – again. I’d never realised I was capable of squealing like a girlie, but it seemed as if Kosovo was bringing that out in me. It may sound a stupid thing to say, but my goodness, tanks are simply huge, and very scary indeed up close. My heart was in my mouth until I noticed the red, white and blue colours of a tiny flag painted amid the green camouflage.
A flood of relief washed over me. It was ‘one of ours’. As a proud Scot, never before had the Union Jack meant anything much to me as a symbol of my identity but I will never forget how I felt on seeing it that day, stencilled on to the fat end of a tank, in that inhospitable landscape. In that moment, when it really mattered, I acknowledged willingly and gratefully that it was the British flag that brought me a sense of protection, safety and belonging and calmed my growing fears.
There was no time to drop me off at our residence: it was straight to the first ‘indictment site’, where the rest of the team were waiting. At the end of the dusty road that marked our outer security perimeter, the first thing I saw was another huge tank, this time a German one. These soldiers were efficient, they were polite and they were putting their lives on the line so that we could do our work unmolested. At the cordon, and parked along the track, was a raft of vehicles: a few stoic and persistent journalists were moving with us like the camp followers of old. A site entrance and exit route had been marked out with crime-scene tape and our HQ was a white scene-of-crime tent set up further along the track, out of the range of prying cameras. It looked just like any other crime scene, and the familiarity of the set-up was oddly reassuring.
In the tent we donned our usual white crime-scene suits, double latex gloves and heavy-duty black wellington boots, sweltering in the 38° heat. Our policing support was supplied by the Metropolitan Police, and our security advisers were the antiterrorist branch – SO13, as they were known at the time. Strange to think now that they were pretty quiet then, in the lull between Northern Ireland calming down and the rise of Al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic State terrorism.
The back story to this crime scene was sobering. On 25 March, the day after the NATO bombings began, a Serbian special police unit sacked the village of Velika Krusa, near Prizren, which is the second-largest city in Kosovo and the last major urban sprawl before the Albanian border. The villagers sought shelter in nearby woodland and could only watch as their homes were looted and burned. They had no alternative but to head for the Albanian border in a refugee convoy, even though they knew they were at risk of robbery, torture, rape and murder. Armed men halted the group, separated the men and boys from their families and herded them into an abandoned two-room outhouse. A gunman stood at the door of each room and sprayed it with automatic Kalashnikov fire. Their accomplices then threw straw in through the windows, soaked it with fuel and torched the building. It was claimed that over forty men and boys lost their lives that night. We don’t know for certain what happened to the women and children from that group, but wherever they ended up, we suspect they did not survive, either.
Incredibly, there was one survivor, who would become a crucial witness in the international war crimes process, and for that reason the site was earmarked by the ICTY for forensic-evidence retrieval. The principal criterion for designating a scene as an indictment site was the existence of strong information, perhaps from a credible eyewitness, indicating the time and location of the incident, the demography of those involved and what had allegedly happened. The forensic team would be instructed to gather all relevant evidence, log it, analyse it and compile a report. If this corroborated the eyewitness’s account, the incident would be prioritised in support of the charges of war crimes against Milosevic and his associates.
I was unaware at the time that it was Peter Vanezis’s arrival at Velika Krusa that had prompted his phone call to me. Surveying the scene in front of him, he had apparently said, rather graciously, ‘I can’t do this, but I know someone who can.’ No pressure, then.
There is nothing glamorous about working in a white scene-of-crime suit, black rubber police wellies three sizes too big, a face mask and double latex gloves in searing heat. Thus attired, I stood at the door of the charred shell of the outhouse and looked in on a nightmare scene that could never be adequately described. The central door of the building led into a short corridor with one room to either side. There were at least thirty bodies in one room and another dozen or more in the other, all piled on top of each other in the corner diagonally opposite the internal doors, all badly burned, all extensively decomposed and all buried under fallen roof tiles.
They had been there for three months as the Kosovo summer heated up, readily accessible to insects, rodents and packs of wild dogs. They were boiling with maggots, fragmented and partly scattered and eaten by the scavenging animals. There was only one way to clear the space and that was to strap on knee-protectors, get down on your hands and knees and work systematically inwards from the door, lifting and sifting every piece of debris down to floor level. As well as retrieving all body parts and personal effects such as clothing, identity papers, jewellery or other items that might be identifiable by family and friends, it was vital that we collected all evidence relating to the crime, which included bullets and casings, as it might be possible to link them at a later date to a specific weapon and from there to the person who fired it, their commanding officers, and so on all the way to the top. This is a ‘chain of evidence’ – and as we all know, a chain is only ever as strong as its weakest link. We did not want that to turn out to be the forensic evidence gathered by our team.
You can’t wear thick rubber gloves for work like this because you need to be able to feel what you can’t necessarily see. Bone feels like bone, and really nothing else, and it was necessary to begin to process a body part as soon as we came upon it. We would clear around the approximate corporeal shape of an individual to try to isolate one person at a time, although this was challenging given the commingled nature of the scene. The heat was ferocious, the smell almost unbearable and the constant drip of sweat down your back, into your gloves and off your forehead into your eyes, which left them constantly stinging, was unpleasant in the extreme.
We were warned to be on the alert for IEDs, which had been found in such sites in the past – indeed, a device had already been discovered just before I arrived, connected to a trip wire across the path and designed to maim rather than kill. I had never seen a bomb in my life and wouldn’t have recognised one if I found it in my porridge. I related my concerns to our SO13 explosives expert, who was an absolute gem. He said the best thing I could do if I came across anything at all that worried me was just stand up, call it in and leave the space. They would then suit up and check it out for us. He also advised me not to delve into the pockets of clothing as there had been reports of razor blades and hypodermics being placed there, again with the aim of causing injury rather than killing. He looked me in the eye and said, very slowly and clearly, ‘Whatever you
do, never, ever cut a blue wire.’ Talk about messing with my mind. As if I was going to cut anything: I was far too bloomin’ terrified.
Picture the scene: me, sweat dripping down my face and down my arms into my latex gloves, on my hands and knees sifting through rubble, face to face with boiling masses of maggots and rotting tissue, when suddenly, I spot the glint of metal. How much bravery am I going to show? Not a shred – the full double-yellow streaks run right down my back from top to bottom. I called it, we retreated and the explosives guys suited up and went in. They seemed to be in there for hours. When they walked back up to the base, where we were all standing around kicking dust, their faces were grave. They stripped off their body armour and the lead officer came over to me. He stood very close and his mouth was almost touching my ear as he told me, very clearly, without a hint of paternal compassion, ‘You will never understand just how lucky you are to still be alive, little lady.’ As he raised his hand into my eyeline, I could see that he was holding a shiny soup spoon.
Well, how was I supposed to know? Needless to say, I was ribbed mercilessly for days by my team-mates. If a bowl of soup was delivered at mealtimes, mine would come with four spoons. I found spoons in my kit bag and even in my bed. I became the cutlery queen of Kosovo. I bore the jibes with good humour because they were a sign I’d been accepted into the fold. These were good, kind men and if they went to the bother of teasing you, it showed they liked you.
At that time I was the only woman on the team, which in certain circumstances might have proved tricky for some, but it was no problem for me. As a mother of three, it was easy and natural to adopt a maternal role. I listened to everybody’s woes, sent them off to bed when they’d had too much to drink, offered advice and was generally non-threatening. Everyone was given a nickname – John Bunn was ‘Sticky’, Paul Sloper was ‘Slippy’ – and I would have been happy with Mother Hen or some such endearment. Unfortunately, however, I managed to earn myself a rather racier soubriquet by opening my own big mouth. Well, there’s a surprise.