by Sue Black
After we had cleared the first room and were about to start on the second, a press day was arranged. A gaggle of foreign ministers, including our own secretary of state for foreign affairs, Robin Cook, would be descending on us to see for themselves what conditions were like on the ground. Mr Cook and his entourage arrived by helicopter and gamely donned their white suits to come down to the burned-out building. I had decided I was going to dislike him purely on the basis that he was a politician. I certainly never expected to find myself truly warming to him, let alone admiring him. He did the required grandstanding for the cameras but when they were turned off, his microphone was removed and he stood at the door beside me, looking into that second room, he was visibly shaken by what he saw, no doubt imagining the horror suffered by those men and boys just a few months earlier. He said to me, ‘If I close my eyes, I can hear their screams and I can feel their pain. How could this be allowed to happen?’ He was doing exactly what we cannot allow ourselves to do: he was living it, and I respected his humanity and honesty.
As we came out of the house and walked up the dust track towards our decontamination station, all we could see behind the cordon running alongside it were rows and rows of camera crews. Every long lens at the site was trained on our party. I turned to my SIO, one of the most senior officers in the Met, and uttered a remark that provided him with a nickname for me which he uses to this day. As I peeled off my crime suit I quipped that, being the only woman in the team, I must look to the camera crews like the camp whore. From then on, in every Christmas card and every phone call, he would greet me as CW. It horrified my husband. But it was this kind of nonsense that kept us all going, even at the most sombre moments. As so often when we are in the presence of death, gallows humour dispels the tension. And it could have been worse. One of our pathologists, who arrived in a later team, and who shall remain nameless, was secretly referred to as ‘Dagenham’ because she was two stops short of Barking.
We cleared both rooms of the house at Velika Krusa and assigned as much of a biological identity to each body as we could, recording any individuating characteristics. Where we could establish a cause of death, it corroborated the eyewitness testimony, as gunshot injuries predominated. The oldest victim was probably in his eighties and the youngest around fifteen – not, in the eyes of his killers, a boy but a man to be wiped off the face of the earth before he took up arms against them.
Each body bag was given a number, all the personal effects were collected and samples of bone were taken for DNA analysis. Confirmation of personal identity would not be swift, not only because of the level of decomposition and the fire, but also because the Serbian forces had stripped many of the victims of their identity documents. We retained the personal effects and clothing and cleaned them so that they could be viewed by the families of the missing as a tentative means of identification. A preliminary determination of identity would need to be confirmed through DNA but in the meantime, the body would be assigned a URN (unique reference number) and released to the families for burial.
We had one mortuary tent equipped with a stainless-steel table for the postmortem examinations, but the initial triage of remains was carried out in the courtyard of the blackened outhouse, where we processed the evidence. We balanced two long planks of wood between the lip of a well and the back of a tractor to serve as a table. There was no electricity, no running water, no lights, no toilets and no rest areas. Our work in the field is rough and ready but ingenious. If I could choose, I would far rather be doing my job in an environment where we are challenged by real logistical difficulties than trying to do it in more comfortable conditions hampered by impenetrable red tape. At the forefront of our minds the whole time was that the quality of evidence collection was paramount. And I’m proud to say that forensic evidence from the British forensic team was never once questioned in the International Criminal Tribunal.
Although quality of evidence was our prime driver, it was equally important to us to maintain the dignity of the deceased and respect the grief of the living. This principle came to the fore when we took over a disused grain store at Xerxe, north-west of Prizren, as a temporary mortuary. In the early stages, there had been few onlookers interested in our activities but as the refugees began to return from Albania, the privacy we had been afforded to do our work could not be sustained. So it made more sense for the team to be split into a recovery team, which would bring in the bodies, and a mortuary team operating securely from a closed building, rather than to have both teams working together at the crime scene.
We had just taken possession of a fluoroscope, which gave us X-ray capability, and we now had the luxury of a roof over our heads, running water from a garden hosepipe and electricity from a temperamental generator, the noisiest contraption on the face of the planet.
The bodies were queued up waiting for postmortems and examining them was almost like working on a factory production line. We had a deadline, too, as a mass community burial was due to be held. We worked day and night to finish by the Saturday chosen for the funeral. This was the first ceremony of its kind to take place in Kosovo, and although we knew it would turn into another media circus, we were not prepared for the colossal invasion of camera crews that turned up at our little mortuary and camped outside in the car park overnight. They were desperate for pictures and comment and when nothing was forthcoming, tempers outside in the unforgiving heat began to rise. As it was thought they might be kinder to a woman, I was sent out as the sacrificial lamb to talk to them and give them what I hoped would be enough to defuse their mounting frustration.
The bodies were due to be picked up for the funeral from our mortuary by the families. Most of them would bring little open-top trailers towed by a tractor or by something resembling a ride-on lawnmower. The procession would then move up the hill to the burial ground at Bela Cervka. With so many bodies, it was going to be a long, long day. Security at Xerxe was provided by the Dutch military, who were camped not far away in a disused winery at Rahovec, and we were so concerned about the presence of the media that they supplied reinforcements to guard the mortuary overnight, helped by local volunteers. Before the first family arrived, I gave some interviews and was taken aback, not to say a little frightened, by the ferocious onslaught of questions and the aggression directed at me and our team.
At one point a reporter shouted: ‘Are there children in there?’
‘Yes,’ I replied politely. He then asked if I knew where they were in the mortuary. Again I replied in the affirmative. He then demanded to be shown the bodies. I courteously but firmly declined his request. At that point, he very publicly called my parentage into question and invited me to perform a sexual act on myself. To say that I lost any scrap of sympathy I had for them at that moment would a huge understatement. I was determined that we would continue to protect the dignity of these remains and anybody who thought differently was in for a very long wait.
In making sure that imperative was met, I suppose I crossed a line from the professional to the personal. Maybe it was wrong, but I would do it again. There was no way they were going to get any images of these children leaving the mortuary if we had anything to do with it. Through our network of locals, we got a message out to the relatives who were due to collect children for the funeral, explained the situation and asked if they would be prepared to delay until later in the day. They readily agreed. It meant that we were not releasing the childrens’ remains until well into the afternoon, by which time a large crowd was already gathering some distance away at the cemetery. This presented the media with a dilemma: if they hung around at the mortuary in the hope of catching a small coffin being carried by grieving parents, they risked missing most of the mass burial at the cemetery. Any who took the gamble went unrewarded. The children left in unremarkable adult coffins, but nobody except the families knew that, and were the very last bodies to leave our mortuary. There are many pictures out there of that day at the cemetery, but none that even hints that any individ
ual victim was a child. A small pyrrhic victory perhaps, but it was one that really mattered.
The families were so appreciative that they honoured us by asking us to join the funeral procession. It was incredibly moving to walk behind the last trailer and to be gathered into the embrace of their collective grief. As we walked along, the women offered us tea and cool water. The tea we could take because the water had been boiled, but the water we just had to pretend to drink. So many wells in the area had been spiked with the dead that contamination was rife. We were a small team and we could not afford to have anyone succumb to illness, but at the same time we were desperate not to offend. They were offering us the only gift they had to give.
We came to witness these mass funerals too many times over the next two years as we worked through the indictment sites in Kosovo, but none was ever as personal as the first at Bela Cervka.
I made two more tours in Kosovo in 1999, each lasting six to eight weeks, and another four the following year. I was honoured to be a part of the first international gratis team to enter Kosovo, and just as proud to be a member of the last one to leave. We worked twelve-to sixteen-hour shifts, often seven days a week, and by the end of a six-week stint you were ready to go home – if you weren’t, it was a clear signal that you needed to go home.
It can be a strange and almost enticing experience to be so cut off from the rest of the world, and for some, those who were perhaps not happy in their job or personal life, it was an escape. We had little idea of what was going on anywhere else, who had died, the latest box-office release or the next development in a juicy scandal. By the end of a tour I couldn’t wait to get home to see my family and have a dose of normality.
We had intermittent access to a satellite phone, which kept us sane by allowing us to touch base just often enough with those we cared about. I remember feeling very homesick one night and calling Tom, lamenting how far away I felt from him and the girls. He asked me what kind of a night it was and I said it was glorious, the sky was clear and the moon so bright. He told me he was sitting outside our house in Stonehaven, on the garden bench, looking up into the sky at the same moon. So we weren’t actually that far apart after all, were we? I love a full moon and I really love my husband.
Every situation we experienced was different. Although there were general protocols to follow, every day brought some new challenge and some unexpected event. While we now had our mortuary with a roof, not every postmortem could be undertaken there. Often we would find ourselves tramping through countryside to reach remote crime scenes that were inaccessible to our vehicles. If we couldn’t transport the bodies to the mortuary, the mortuary had to go to the bodies and we would be literally working in the field.
One day we were led to an extremely isolated site, about an hour’s walk across rough terrain to an open patch of grassland up in the hills. Here, it had been reported, the elderly, women and children had been separated from the men in their refugee convoy, who had been moved on elsewhere to their own fate. The children had been taken to the other side of the meadow and told to run back to their mothers. They did so eagerly because they were so scared. As they crossed the open patch of grassland, with their mothers and grandparents forced to look on in horror, the captors took pot shots at the children. Once all the children were dead, they turned their guns on the women and the old people.
I don’t know how even to begin to articulate the cruelty, the inhumanity, the torture of such a cold and calculated murder of innocents. We knew this was going to be hard for everyone and as we hiked closer and closer to the grave site, our mood grew increasingly sombre. Sometimes you welcome the odd flash of humour to lighten the atmosphere, but there were no attempts at levity that day. This was a despicable place where unspeakable acts had been perpetrated for the sport of barbaric men.
We spread out some plastic sheeting on the ground and the bodies were exhumed one by one from their mass grave. Remains that have been buried are likely to be better preserved for two reasons: the temperature below ground is cooler, reducing insect activity and slowing down decomposition, and they will have been protected from predators. But sometimes their good condition makes them harder to deal with from another perspective. The bodies are going to be more recognisable, and that can make it more difficult for the members of the team to reach the dispassionate place their minds need to occupy.
At one point a two-year-old girl was laid out on the plastic in front of me, still dressed in her sleep suit and red wellingtons. My job was to undress her, to let the police officers seize the clothing for evidential purposes and then to begin the anatomical survey of her body, cataloguing the ballistic injuries that had so devastated her tiny form.
Suddenly, I sensed a change in atmosphere. We had all been very quiet that day anyway but a new, heavier blanket of silence had descended. I looked up and all I could see in front of me was a long line of black police wellies and white crime-scene suits. For a moment, I was puzzled as to why everybody was standing in a row blocking me from view. It was only when I got to my feet that I realised what they were doing. One of our team had made the cardinal error of mentally transposing the face of his own young daughter on to the mutilated body of this little girl and he was finding it difficult to cope. The only way my male colleagues knew how to help him was to shield him from the sight of the dead child while he attempted to compose himself.
The mother on a team can’t allow that to be the way to handle such a situation. So, without a word, I took off my gloves, rolled my suit down to my waist, walked behind the cordon of men and threw my arms around him until he had finished sobbing his heart out. I think it dawned on the men on our team that day that they didn’t always have to be tough. Sometimes, especially when it comes to the appalling death of an innocent, someone has to shed tears, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t be one of us. Having chinks in your armour isn’t always a sign of weakness. It is often a sign of humanity.
At the end of our last, and very long, tour in 2000, the police sent out a team of counsellors. We had been in Kosovo for eight weeks solid by then. Living cheek-by-jowl with your colleagues for that length of time, you get to know each other incredibly well and the team becomes a second family. Forged into a close unit by our common purpose and experience, we supported each other when the need arose, and the intervention of outsiders, though well intended, was not welcome.
The counsellors gathered us all together in a nondescript room and sat us in a circle. They asked us to wear name badges so that they could create a sense of intimacy. We all knew each other’s names, so it was solely for their benefit and we resented that. They were the ones who didn’t know who we were, and neither could they ever comprehend our shared experience. We had lived with each other, fought with each other and cried with each other; we had drunk together and worked ourselves into exhaustion. But we tried to do our duty – or at least, most of us did – obediently sitting round in a circle while our badges were written out for us and stuck on to our chests.
The counsellors asked us how we ‘felt’. How the bloomin’ heck did they think we felt? We were tired and we wanted to go home. We had just spent two months up to our elbows in the detritus of a war that had indiscriminately killed men, women and children and we didn’t take kindly to outsiders poking around inside our heads and rattling those cages.
Our mortuary technician, Steve, an outspoken Glaswegian, was the focus of specific attention. While the rest of us were sporting badges bearing our first names, his read ‘Alf’, which gave rise to some barely contained hilarity. Steve had been the tour prankster, and most of us had been the victims of his penchant for practical jokes. One of them had involved hiding a bright pink plastic novelty alarm clock – it was in the shape of a mosque and, instead of the usual beeping or ringing alarm tone, featured a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer – under the bed of one of the police officers, set to go off at full volume at 4am. As the muezzin got into his stride, Mick had shot out of bed, tripping ov
er his boots, and vowed revenge. This, it seemed, was it, because it was Mick who was in charge of the black pen and labels. Why Alf? It stood for ‘Annoying Little F**ker’. The mayhem that ensued every time the poor counsellor asked, ‘So, Alf, how does that make you feel?’ was simply exquisite and a much-deserved payback. Needless to say, the counsellors lost any hope of controlling this feral team.
These were the moments that counterbalanced the daily horrors, and they are the ones that stick with you. Moments shared in the private language of a camaraderie that only the people who were there with you can ever understand. It was a sobering time, but a precious one, and an experience I would not trade for the world. It tested me by teaching me how deep my abilities run, so that when I need to draw on them now, I know how far I can dig. In the process, I made friendships that have lasted for over twenty years. And irrespective of the passage of time, the unwritten team rule applies: when a Kosovo colleague needs you, you respond.
You cannot help but be indelibly marked by world-changing events such as the Balkan wars when they become your personal experience. You might come to count your own blessings more appreciatively, you might take up the cause and become politicised, you might immerse yourself fully in a new culture. Whatever you do, one thing is certain: you will never again be quite the same person as you were before. There are many things I would like to have changed about that time but none that I would swap. I learned a great deal about life, death, my profession and myself as a person. And one other vital lesson that will always stand me in good stead: never, ever cut the blue wire.