Fecha de recepcin: 20/07/2011

Fecha de aceptacin: 28/07/2011

dissolving in the first half of the 1990s: Termed ethnic cleansing, these official or
quasi-official campaigns targeted Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims in areas
controlled by the Bosnian Serb Army. And while murder, rape, torture, unlawful
confinement, and inhumane treatment of civilians were commonly reported in Bosnia,
Croatia, and Kosovo in the early 1990s; the massacre of civilians which took place at
Srebrenica is the only violence technically found to be genocide by the International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
In 1996, the author of The bone woman, Clea Koff, was asked at age 23 to join
the first scientific forensic team to unearth and determine the cause of the deaths of
bodies found in mass graves in the African country of Rwanda. Of the 16 member
scientific team, Koff was the youngest. During the next four years, she served on
seven missions to unearth the remains of humans whom it was believed had died
violently and illegally (in multiple or mass murders) at the hands of human agencies.
She served on these international scientific teams under the auspices of Physicians for
Human Rights, at the invitation of the first international criminal tribunals since the
Nuremberg trials.
Clea Koff shows herself to be absolutely determined, almost obsessed, with her
purpose and her quests in forensic anthropology: She takes very seriously her role in
studying what is left after a person's death to determine what happened before or
during that death. The author states: In addition to helping authorities determine
the identity of deceased people, forensic anthropology has a role in human rights
investigations, because a dead body can incriminate perpetrators who believe they
have silenced their victims forever (p. 8). Koff explains her incentive and enthusiasm,
combined with her dedication to spend hours of exhaustive digging in graves and
sifting through human remains, by the following: This is the part of forensic
anthropology that drives me, this kicking of bad-guy ass when it's least expected (p.
9).
The author views the bodies she excavates and studies with what she terms
double vision: She sees them both as objects of scientific study and as loved ones of
the living and grieving persons they have left behind. As a student anthropologist
working for the coroner's (chief medical examiner's) office in Arizona, U.S.A., she
found herself physically distant from the families of those persons whose bodies she
was sent out to retrieve: While she carried the bodies into the back entrance of the
morgue (mortuary); relatives came through the front doors of the coroner's office.
Therefore she never met the relatives of the persons whose dead and decayed bodies
she studied.
In Rwanda and the former Yugoslavian states however, the forensic teams
upon which Koff served were often in close proximity to the relatives and neighbors of
the dead whom they were disinterring and scientifically studying. Early on this
caused some strain for the author due to the fact that she and her scientific cohort
were not expecting to have to interact with the living while handling their dead, and
brutally murdered, loved ones. Early in her first forensic mission to Rwanda, Koff and
a colleague set up the body of a supposed priest (according to his dress) for a viewing
by his teenaged niece: Since they were scientists who attempted to keep their
emotions at bay, they did not expect the reaction of the girl when she fainted
immediately upon her first glimpse of her uncle's body in its advanced stage of
decomposition.
The forensic team found conditions quite different in their mission to Kosovo a
few years later: There, the murdered bodies were found lying about the countryside
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by family and neighbors, and many of these had been buried in cemeteries by those
who knew them. Still, many relatives and friends wished to be present at the
disinterment of their loved ones. Thus in Kosovo, the forensic team was assigned a
local and international team of doctors, medical students, and psychologists, the
Transcultural Psychosocial Organization (TPO), to collect antemortem data for
presumptive identifications of bodies both in advance of us and as we worked (p. 207).
It was this TPO team which was also tasked with the assessment of what each
grieving relative could handle emotionally relative to witnessing the disinterments
and to viewing the bodies: Viewings were therefore set up by the forensic team to be
handled according to the TPO evaluations and suggestions.
The author also explains that the findings of forensic scientists can alter the
memory of the living: For example, the women she termed the mothers of Vukovar (in
eastern Slavonia, Croatia) opposed the work of the forensic teams in their area;
furthermore, they inflexibly argued that their husbands and sons were being held
somewhere alive, and insisted that the United Nations should find where they were
and return them to Vukovar. Only after the scientific identifications of the bodies of
many missing men from Vukovar, did the women acknowledge the deaths of their sons
and husbands.
At first glance, the artifacts found with the bodies in the mass or multiple
graves seem relatively unimpressive: Such items as house keys, cards, jewelry,
photos, or bullets -- none appears to be significant. However, Clea Koff states that
early in her work in Rwanda, she came to the realization that the artifacts were signs
of life in the grave: These spoke to the individual person's identity and individuality,
if only the right person can listen (p. 62). As an example of the significance of
artifacts in helping the dead speak, Koff explains that in a particular trench in Kosovo
she unearthed the body of a juvenile male with a trouser pocket bulging with its
contents: The boy had a pocket full of marbles, which testified to his age and argued
in behalf of his total involvement in the youth culture of that community.
Since her youth, the author has felt challenged to strike out to seek exciting
and fulfilling tasks wherever in the world she might sense the need: When she was a
child, her parents took her travelling around the world as they made documentary
films about human pathos and human rights issues. The author was challenged to
prepare herself for the practice of forensic anthropology through her reading of
Witnesses from the grave: The stories bones tell. The book tells about the career of
Clyde Snow who developed the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team which
discovered and identified the remains of many Argentines who were murdered during
the military junta of the 1970s and 80s. Snow thus became Koff's scientific hero, and
her inspiration to pursue a profession in forensic anthropology.
The author's experiences and observations on her seven United Nations
forensic team missions to Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, left great impressions
upon the her: At first she could little understand why noncombatants and civilians
were murdered in such great numbers. It was in Kosovo that she first seriously
became aware of the systematic destruction of entire neighborhoods, including their
people, the houses, and the businesses. In each of the four countries of her missions,
Koff found that governments had consistently lied about the contents of graves, of
their complicity in the killing of noncombatants, of their active planning in the
destruction of neighborhoods, and the relocation of populations whom they considered
unwelcome. It was government bullets which killed the civilians and noncombatants
whose bodies the forensic teams studied. And government arguments about the
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causes of the genocide and ethnic cleansing were shown to be clearly untrue: It was
not a history of ethnic competition or differences in race or religion which drove the
conflict and murders; it was the value of neighborhood property, the value of oil,
minerals, and other natural resources present, or the agricultural value of the land
which caused the greedy to kill the innocent.
In the process of working with the United Nations International Criminal
Tribunals for Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia Clea Koff changes and matures.
Always believing that she had a duty to help the dead speak, she now feels she has a
duty to share her knowledge with everyone: More recently, sharing her knowledge
and understanding has become her mitzvah, her commandment or divine directive.
The author states that she helped the victims speak:
Through working with Physicians for Human Rights and the UN tribunals, I've helped
their voices be heard in the courtroom and the history books, and it has been an honor
to do so. That was my primary duty, one that required detachment and discipline. But
my mitzvah requires me to get personal, so I can really link other people to those
events (p. 266).

When Koff began her career, she believed forensic anthropology and its related
sciences, when applied to the investigation of international human rights violations,
would lead to the eradication of state-sponsored murder of civilians (p. 200); later she
realized that her early belief was optimistic and naive, for when General LaurentDesire Kabila held power in the Democratic Republic of Congo from 1997 to 2001, he
mercilessly violated the human rights of Rwandan refugees and Congolese people: He
repeatedly imprisoned, tortured, and murdered en mass any whom he thought were
threats to his leadership or were simply undesirable as citizens. When the UN sent
the Argentine Forensic Team to the Congo to investigate, General Kabila stalled them
in western Congo while his troops in eastern Congo disinterred the bodies of those he
had had killed from their many mass graves and destroyed all evidence by burning on
carefully-tended pyres.
The bone woman: A forensic anthropologist's search for truth in the mass
graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo, is a meticulously researched,
rationally developed, and remarkably well written volume. This book is a critical
addition to the literature of mass murder and genocide: It is especially valuable due to
the insight, training, and youth of the author; who with a wholesome freshness shares
as she learns and becomes aware. Clea Koff has created a volume which is essential
reading for the science of forensic anthropology; and in doing so, she has created a
volume which is by every measure as valuable to the discipline as is the volume
Witnesses from the grave: The stories bones tell, which chronicles the early career of
Clyde Snow. Future research and practice will continue to rely upon this seminal
work. This text is indispensible, a must read, for the undergraduate and graduate
student of forensic anthropology.