THE idea that one person can kill another person and get away with it has always bothered me," says Clea Koff. "Removing a body from the ground after a killer has buried it there, quite sure no one will ever find it - that moment of unearthing is the most symbolic moment in what I do."
Dead things have always held a fascination for the beautiful 31-year-old forensic anthropologist. As a child she would bury dead birds in order to dig them up again; as a student her dream was to join a forensics team identifying the war dead - a dre
am she realised in 1996, when she joined the UN International Criminal Tribunal to Rwanda (ICTR) as its youngest professional forensic anthropologist, going on to work in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia over the next four years.
Koff has chronicled her experiences in her book The Bone Woman, a compelling debut that is remarkable for exploring such a harrowing subject in a detached yet compassionate manner, striking a balance between scientific observation and human empathy. While it is undeniably heavy with descriptions of maggots, merciless machete wounds and spongified bodies, it is more concerned with the redemptive search for justice.
We meet in a Brisbane hotel on the Australian leg of her international book tour. Slim, with dark almond-shaped eyes, her face framed by thick tousled hair, Koff, who is half-Tanzanian and half-American, has an accent that is difficult to place, but which occasionally betrays her English primary-school education.
"I wear my heart on my sleeve. I don’t have a poker face," she begins. "I feel that it’s one thing for us to have our macho scientific selves on display around the bodies; that’s absolutely normal - in fact, the bodies remind you of your scientific duty. You have a duty to the body, and if you get emotional you won’t be able to do what you’re supposed to do.
"Rwanda 1996 was the first time an international team had been called in to deal with mass graves of that size in modern times - the grave had been created after a genocide that killed a tenth of the population. There are going to be aspects of a grave that are interesting scientifically," she says, her eyes narrow. "There is also a human level on which you can respond."
Koff’s book humanises the unimaginable. It clothes skeletons with feelings, gives unidentified bodies a voice and pieces together the severed lives of the survivors trying to come to terms with the grief and pain. In this highly personal account, Koff lays bare her own vulnerability, naivety and, when she allows it, her fury against killers who could shoot men with their arms tied behind their backs, and hack children to pieces with machetes.
The atrocities in Rwanda began ten years ago, and over the course of three months, as the Tutsis were attacked by their neighbours the Hutus, 800,000 people would die. But this was no tribal or ethnic conflict that can only happen in a faraway country; it was a state-organised genocide, and had been months in the planning. The evidence of this, says Koff, was found in the graves, and it is this truth she wants to expose through her book. "Conflicts described to us as spontaneous ethnic violence are often developed at a policy level by those in power, who manipulate people into doing things," she says. "The haves promise the have-nots land, clothes, a television, if they will kill. Often it is portrayed as people killing people out of hate, as if they are crazy. They are not: they are regular people."
KOFF’S job begins at the point when somebody dies: her role is to examine a body "to deduce what happened before death" and, as far as possible, to determine the identity of the person. Trained as a post-graduate at the University of Arizona by Walt Birkby, one of America’s greatest forensic anthropologists, Koff became used to dealing with bodies - murder victims, suicides, overdoses - "in various states of decomposition" (fresh, mummified, moving with maggots) as a student intern at the medical examiner’s office.
Curiously, she seemed to get more spooked in Tucson than she did later in Rwanda and Bosnia. In the spring of 1994, Koff was living alone on the edge of the vast Arizona desert, and on the news one night she heard the voice of a woman whose body she had examined earlier that day. The woman’s desperate cries for help to the emergency services had been recorded. "I remember the beginning of stubble on her legs, her painted nails, the ragged bullet holes visible in her scalp," Koff writes. "But when I heard the 911 tape, it was more like hearing the voice of someone I knew, but who I also knew was dead. It scared the hell out of me."
At the same time, the Rwandan atrocities were taking place and Koff decided she wanted to put her academic training into practice. Late the following year she received a call to join the UN team of forensic scientists to investigate the mass graves. She was 23 and a diligent, idealistic student, determined to "kick bad-guy ass" in Rwanda.
Koff has the quality of a crusader, driven by a deeply held desire to expose human-rights abuses and a sense that a common humanity is shared by all. She learned this from her academic parents, David and Msindo, independent film-makers who made documentaries on social justice and political issues, taking Koff and her older brother, Jimera, with them around the world. Such an unconventional and peripatetic childhood - playing games with Somali children on the beaches of Mogadishu, and living in "fixer-upper houses" when finances were stretched - broadened her world-view. Some would consider her childhood a little odd and perhaps rather strict (sugar and television were banned), but Koff saw nothing unusual in moving from England to the "abandoned, haunted house of the neighbourhood" in Washington DC at the age of ten, when the family finally settled down.
With time, Koff’s childhood curiosity about bones and skeletons grew, and by the time she was a teenager she had decided to study human osetology, first in Washington and later in Los Angeles. Presuming her work would be focused on ancient sites, she studied anthropology at Stanford University, only later shifting to forensics when she read Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell, an account by Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover of forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow’s work in the field - including his tireless search for the Disappeared of Argentina’s so-called dirty war of the 1970s. Sharing her parents’ passion for human rights, Koff vowed to follow in Snow’s footsteps and "reduce oppression by making bones talk".
AT THE University of Arizona there was a back door to the medical examiner’s office that separated the students from the relatives of the dead. But as Koff was to discover, there is a lot less protection in the field. "I don’t know at what point you become capable of dealing with people who have survived a genocide or with the relatives of the people whose bodies you have exhumed. That is a very special relationship that hadn’t been explored and I felt that I was coming up short." She pauses. "Even though I was doing a very fundamental thing - bringing their relatives out of the ground - I didn’t have the words to communicate with them. That never got any easier with time. I always felt I was not doing or saying enough..." she says, faltering.
From 1996 to 1999, Koff combined her studies with UN missions, finally completing her degree in 1999 at the University of Nebraska. Her first job was at the mass graves outside the whitewashed church of Kibuye, Rwanda, where thousands of Tutsis were told to take refuge for their own safety. Two weeks later, the governor gave the order for the killing to begin, and over several days thousands were massacred, "their killers stopping only for meals", as they threw the bodies down a grassy slope in the shelter of dusty banana tress.
Koff’s team worked on a single grave of 500 bodies, of which more than half were children, and their evidence was used to indict some of the alleged perpetrators of crimes against humanity in the UN trials. "Those early stages of someone being apprehended and brought to court are part of an important process of accountability," says Koff. "In Rwanda, 100,000 people had been killed in 1959 and 1972, but never before had there been any accountability."
Before going to Rwanda, Koff had given scant thought to her personal safety. Then one night, as she had dinner with her colleagues on the hotel veranda overlooking a tranquil lake, the sound of gunfire shattered the silence and a bullet ricocheted off the table. Koff ran for cover. "I didn’t know what it was. I could just see a spotlight on a boat. People were being shot at, and then the people I had heard moaning just moments before were making no sound whatsoever."
She catches her breath. "After that, I had a total about-face with regard to my own vulnerability and realised how quickly life can end." Koff never discovered why the two men in civilian clothes who were rowing across the lake were killed by the military. It was a summary execution: they may have been Zairean insurgents, or it may have been a display to show the might of the Rwandan army. For Koff, it heralded weeks of "exhausting fear" when darkness fell.
In addition to coping with the stress of an environment in which reprisal killings were common, Koff also had to deal with unwanted attention from Rwandan soldiers standing guard over the graves she was investigating. "They would be telling me they loved me, trying to flirt when there was a skull at my feet," she says angrily.
By the time she was a deputy at the Kosovo morgue, in 2000, Koff had become outwardly hardened by the challenges of the job - although she could never stomach the mines "like little turds" that littered the Kosovan countryside (official methods of surviving lift-off trigger mines included standing on them for several days until someone comes to help).
She had progressed from working on individual case studies to training people in the morgue, and had learned to cope by bottling up her emotions, only "allowing the stopper out" when she was safely home, 7,500 miles away, sobbing into her pillow at night. That is when the recurring nightmares began - in which she found herself surrounded by body parts or with her foot on a land mine - and Koff would wake terrified, hardly able to breathe. Improbably, no counselling or debriefing was provided by the UN. The "problematic" nightmares lasted for years, reaching fever-pitch when she was writing the book in Los Angeles. Disturbed by the sound of gunfire and police helicopters at night, she seized the chance to move when a friend offered her a sunny room in a seaside town near Melbourne. She now divides her time between Australia and America.
While writing she would often be moved to tears, especially when remembering those relatives she had met - like the Kosovan man silently standing over the grave of his grandson, who "had been shot in the legs and, unable to run away, had then been shot in the back". She says quietly, "I can imagine him still looking over the grave. He is still there and I am not."
It is "the interrelationship of the bodies to each other", and to those still living, that haunts her. What does it feel like to know a person’s last moments before they are killed? A shadow passes over her face and she looks suddenly weary. "That’s actually more difficult than dealing with a body. Looking at someone who still has their shoes on and knowing that they laced them up… or where you see that people tried to defend themselves by holding up their arms. Those are the last moments that you are seeing in the bones, and your mind fills in the rest."
As we talk, I keep being struck by Koff’s fragile quality, a refined femininity that seems so at odds with what she does. She sips iced water and talks softly about surrendering to "the chemical decomp stench" of her work, which would cling to her skin and clothes for weeks afterwards. Similarly, out in the field she stood apart from her more clinical fellow workers, and in her book she exposes the fraught relations and petty squabbles among the team. Koff’s sense of enduring rightness emerges in her irritation at the behaviour of some of her colleagues, who treated bodies with disrespect. Their actions outraged Koff so much that, in 1999, when she was asked to join the mission again, she refused. "I thought they would never ask me again, but they did in 2000."
When Koff did express her emotions, she was teased mercilessly, particularly after one incident in Kibuye. She had been uncovering the body of a woman wearing a necklace, and later a visiting journalist had asked her what she had been thinking. She responded spontaneously: "We’re coming. We’re coming to take you out." The comment appeared in the Irish Times and for weeks afterwards Koff was the butt of her team-workers’ jokes.
So who was she talking to? Her hand instinctively goes to her heart. " The spirits left over in the people, some aspect of humanity still in them. You don’t want just to believe it is all over when someone dies, but… I don’t know how it works."
The content of The Bone Woman may be grim, but Koff’s sense of justice carries the narrative, together with her seamless weaving of horror and normality and the minutiae of her personal life - her "grave bra, which always stank", or bending "over three skeletons, [as] a butterfly passes your face in its erratic flight - almost picnic, but mostly grave-site".
Today she does have a life outside forensics, but refuses to give details about her partner, a solicitor, who "makes a big difference," she says, "as I don’t like to sleep alone or be in the dark by myself." Now she tries not to dwell on the sadness. She likes to dance, watches feel-good movies, eats chocolate (a reaction to childhood years of being denied sugar by her parents) and loves her food (there was never enough on the missions). Koff keeps a file "about places in the world where there isn’t violence", and for solace "reads about what led up to the genocide in Rwanda and the killings in Kosovo". She is clearly still trying to make sense out of the senseless.
With each mission, Koff refined her goals, and by 2000 she realised that it was the motivation to bring justice for the families that drove her to return. "Before a family can rejoice at a killer being taken to court, they have to know what happened to their loved ones. They suspect they’re dead but they don’t know for sure, so I am very motivated to get the remains back to the families," she says. "We get them out of the ground, using all our skills and training. That’s what makes me feel fulfilled, that the process will hopefully come full-circle for a family."
Now Koff is bringing that knowledge and passion to a new crusade: the backlog of unidentified, unclaimed bodies of missing people in American coroners’ offices. She is setting up a non-profit organisation to facilitate the identification of those bodies and liaise between forensics and the families to return them home.
She says she would go on another UN mission if asked, but no longer at the expense of her personal safety. "I don’t want to die in Iraq or live in fear of losing a limb. Is that selfish?" She shrugs, then smiles. "I feel I have contributed already. Now I can choose where to go."
• The Bone Woman is published by Atlantic Books (£12.99)
