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TOOLS PRINT E-MAIL JANUARY 8, 2009, UNCOVERING THE EVIDENCE BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Welcome to this week’s edition of Voices on Genocide Prevention. This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. With me today is Jose Pablo Baraybar who’s a forensic anthropologist. He has exhumed mass graves around the world, in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and has now returned to his native Peru to use his skills to help identify victims of the internal political conflict there. Thank you for being with me today. JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Good morning, Bridget. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So can you tell us how did you begin this work? What drew you to the field of forensic anthropology? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: That’s a very good question. As a matter of fact, it’s a question that I ask myself several times a day sometimes. I was an activist of Amnesty International for many, many years, maybe the last 25 years or so, in Peru of course. And by training, I was an archeologist dealing with pre-Columbian, I mean, things and remains and problems of the kind. I dealt, from very early on, with skeletal remains from archeological contexts. And by 1990s, by 1990 specifically, I decided to merge these two things, meaning my skeletal biology archeology knowledge to the issues of human rights. That is when I pretty much started. I mean, those years in Peru, I was in Peru, then we traveled some years. Fujimori had come to power. And we attempted to prepare a manual, I remember, on recovery of evidence. I mainly remember we had a decade, from 1980 to 1990, regarding missing persons and political violence in the fight of the state against the Shining Path. So we approach a local NGO, I remember. But shortly after a bomb in an envelope, as a matter of fact, was sent to a NGO, and one of the lawyers actually lost an arm. So it was a good message as to those kind of things are not welcome in the country. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And you then took those skills that you’d developed, both human rights and also the very technical skills of forensic anthropology, and you began working with the United Nations, right? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: That is correct. As a matter of fact, how it actually came to be is quite of a story. Because I never planned to work for UN in my life. I mean, I didn’t know much how the UN actually worked, I mean, only from what you read in the papers and these kind of things. But Ian Martin, who was, at the time, back in 1990, the secretary general of Amnesty International, came to Peru because the Peruvian section got another bomb. Another bomb was placed, I mean, in the office of Peruvian branch of Amnesty. And he came with a mission of solidarity and so on. And we befriended each other. I mean, I was his interpreter, at the time and that and for the section. And we were discussing the things and say, you know, whether he could give me some guidance and this and that. Back in ’94, I mean, years after, in ’94, I was in the Basque Country [Spain], as a matter of fact, in Bilbao. I was a visiting researcher of a university there, and I just got a phone call pretty much out of the blue, “Hi, this is Ian. Do you remember what we discussed in Peru? Well, are you still interested?” I say, “Yeah, sure.” And he said, “Well, I’m human rights director in Haiti. So you want to come over?” And I went. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Can you tell me a little bit about what it was like when you first went into Rwanda? Obviously, the scale and the size of the mass graves in Rwanda must have dwarfed what you had seen previously. JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Well, I always think of Rwanda as something really extremely difficult to put into words. Rwanda is something that is very, very difficult to actually explain in terms of-- not just in terms of what you feel, but what you see, what you breathe. It’s extremely difficult to explain. Indeed, the scale of it all is so enormous. Primarily, one of the main things I should say about Rwanda is that how the day-to-day things, in the micro-world where you, I mean, where you lived, meaning all these international ex-pats whatever world, got combined with the harsh reality of what actually happened. So, for example, just give you a very plain example, some people, I remember, in the office, I was in the office of the prosecutor in Kigali, would say, ”Hi, guys, you that deal with dead people,” that was really something quite stupid to say but it’s quite typical of how we are perceived by non-forensic people, ”Listen, I think I have some bodies in the latrine in my house, can you come and dig them up.” Can you believe that? BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: From Rwanda, you went to Bosnia or to Croatia? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Not to Bosnia. We were borrowed or lent, in a way, for six weeks, as far as I recall, to ICTY that had, I mean-- what happened actually is the following. I mean, in Rwanda, once there were two major exhumations and investigations done. One was Kibuye for indictment of Kayishema and the other one was the Amgar garage against Rutaganda. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So the exhumations that you were doing were tied to very specific cases that the tribunals were trying to prosecute. JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Absolutely. And as a matter of fact, there was no strategy regarding whether exhumations at all or whether forensic work at all would need to be incorporated into some kind of major process regarding victims and restitution issues regarding victims and so on. I understand that the problem and the scale was so big that, you know, a classical approach would not be possible. But, nevertheless, there was no strategy regarding that. It was very new. Pretty much nobody knew what to do. That’s the bottom line of it. I am a believer that forensic work is very important to put them in the record straight. It is very important in terms of making people remember. It’s very important to have it as a physical witness, as something you can actually see, breathe, touch, I mean, perceive. Books and pictures are not enough. The threshold of people being shocked by something has gone beyond the, I mean, the limits of imagination. If you look at TV, I mean, people even like fake real crime, if you know what I mean, like CSI, blood that looks like blood but is not blood. But this is just like… BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: …the sort of scientific analysis of fiction. JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Correct, correct. Knowing that it has an element and an answer to reality, in a way, somewhere there. But, I mean, at the same time, they know it isn’t. So there’s a very perverse, I mean, game of being horrified by things. So I do think that forensic work is very important in that respect. And I remember also that we went to the school, to a technical school, outside Kigali, Don Bosco School, where most of the people, you know, the people were working out of Kigali and found refuge there. The UN was there. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is the ETO? The Ecole Technique Officielle? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Yeah, that’s the one. And, again, there were a number of sites and killing sites. They should’ve been recovered but were not. And then they were destroyed. I remember the families were coming. Literally, they were like a bulldozer. They were just coming by literally exhuming, you know, as if they were working the fields. They were just like with the shovels and whatever. They were just like exhuming these pieces of people that were coming out. But anyway, so the story is that, in this messy thing, the tribunal, in ICTY, I mean, decided, well, maybe, after Srebrenica and so on, something would need to be done and they would borrow this forensic team that was in Rwanda to go there and work for six weeks or something. They thought, I mean, that can give you an idea of how-- BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Six weeks? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Yes. So we went for six weeks. We left our stuff in obviously in Rwanda. And we left for six weeks. And we just landed pretty much in Croatia. We spent some time in Zagreb. And from Zagreb, we went to Tuzla. And we started working on Srebrenica, on Cerska, the first exhumation, pretty much 11 month after the killings. And, yeah, then the circus started there as well. And I say the circus because, yet again, it was so strange to be—- the first mass grave was 150 people killed by a roadside. And then they scooped part of the hill, and they just threw it over. So they’re very shallowly buried as a matter of fact. We had to put, well, not us. But, I mean, the NATO IFOR troops at the time, had to put some kind of barbed wire. And you got this massive amount of journalists, massive. So you couldn’t actually move without having a picture taken of you. You couldn’t go to the toilet without having people from all sorts of bushes and things, coming, taking pictures. It was very strange. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Was it not also dangerous? Were the mass graves mined? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Well, obviously there was always the presumption that they were mined. We did never find a mine, as far as I recall, in any of the sites we worked. Doesn’t matter that they were not mined. Obviously, I mean, the first assumption, based on the information they had, is that there was a possibility of mines. It was taken very seriously. And you live with it. Because you know, not because we didn’t find them. It’s because they were not there. That’s what I’m trying to say. And, of course, you would not be doing stupid things like I did even years after, like looking for another grave through an area that was between the two front lines, between Serbs and Bosniaks-- BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Which almost certainly was mined if it was between those. JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Well, not just that, even worse than that. We got there with a Bosnian Intelligence Service guy that was working helping us out. And he knew where the place was, and we got to this bombed-out ghost town. And I asked the guy, “This place wouldn’t be mined, would it?” And he said, “No, of course not. It’s not mined.” So as soon as we got out of the car, there’s a sign that says “mines.” And I said, like, “So what about this?” “Oh, no, no, no, no, just people do that just to scare other people.” So we were walking in a line of one. It was November, in the fall with all the leaves on the ground. You couldn’t see where you were stepping. We were walking in a line of one. Literally, if I lost two kilos it was little, because I was really expecting somebody to blow up in front of me. And then I was asking myself, what the hell am I doing this what is the kick I’m getting out of this? I mean, the victims, the international justice, that’s very nice. But I had a daughter by the time. And it was like-- I never forgive myself for doing that anyway. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And at this point, you’re still working for the tribunal. Was there also an attempt to identify remains for the families whose loved ones were missing? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Well, the tribunal has always had a very clumsy policy regarding, or, not had a policy at all, as a matter of fact, regarding missing persons and the whole issue of categorical versus individual identification. I understand that it’s a tribunal. They’re not a human rights organization. But when you work in such a scale, you have to have a plan B of some kind to see how you’re going to be dealing with some of the things and how you’re going to be dealing with what things. The best example is Kosovo. I mean, Kosovo, the tribunal went in got evidence against Milosevic all the rest of it, but they created a humanitarian problem there. And why was that? Because all the people they exhumed, they were looking only for categorical identification, meaning, okay, let’s say Kosovar or Albanian because of an ID card, like in Srebrenica or something. I mean, an ID card, this and that, shot in the head or whatever, multiple gunshot wounds, in a grave, etcetera. So these were just numbers. That person, that John Doe that we’re recovering there, that was very practical and useful as evidence, had a name and had a family looking for it. And remember because of that and with what’s left over all these non-identified people or even bodies that were sometimes buried in places the tribunal did not know where they were. It’s just so stupid. It’s like, looking back at those times, it’s a world upside down. 1999 -- with thirteen teams that went to a tribunal. And they were all, I mean, roving around Kosovo. No SOP’s [Standard Operating Procedures] of any kind. No, I mean, no order, no forms, no nothing. Each of them in their own language, their own thing. Some of them buried bodies without telling anybody where they were. No records. Ridiculous. So my office, former office as a matter of fact, OMPF, the office of missing persons and forensics, was created in 2002 actually to address this problem. Because, as a matter of fact, an international justice approach, an international justice intervention has created hand to hand a humanitarian problem. And the little we normally overlook, you know-- we, as forensic people, sometimes we are very [indecipherable] minded, you know. Dealing with our little patch of grass and not looking at the forest in front of us. That’s a main thing. There’s a tremendous tendency at looking at the minutia of certain things and really thinking, oh, that’s not my problem, oh, I’m only a scientist, oh, I’m only a bone person, or my specialty is bone trauma or whatever else. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Do you think that the UN system and the tribunal systems got better? They were put together very hastily, with scrapping together teams and resources – did they get better over the time you worked with them? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Well, you know, I am not precisely the most-- I may be biased as well, because it was so many years. It was from day one to day-- not to turn off the lights almost with tribunal in terms of forensic work. I do not know. I would tell you, no. I tell you no, primarily because I think that a number of their things have to be resolved sometimes prior to and not as you go along. I presented a document to the ICC at the time when the prosecutor, I mean, was sworn in. There was this public, whatever, outreach thing, I cannot remember how they were called, in the Hague. And I went there, and I gave background paper warning the tribunal, the ICC, that, if they considered to do forensics, they should really think beforehand about these problems. Actually it should be very useful to have a small forensic unit more as a consulting and planning unit that would be actually outreaching to a number of all the groups, like families and so on, prior to conducting any other thing. Well, as far as I know, they created some kind of unit but a unit of one or something. I mean, very strange. And the problem is, I guess, a lot of the ICC people were ICTY people. They just went from one place to the other, and sometimes they didn’t get it. There were a lot of people who got it. That’s a fact. But many others didn’t get it. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: But there’s a difference between understanding it and making it an institutional priority. JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Well, the thing is that lawyers all throughout the world are pretty much like cops in many respects and may not like this. They’re looking at their own patch of grass. They want evidence. They don’t really necessarily care about what the families need or don’t need. That’s the other thing. They have more interest in scoring whatever they have to score for the cases. That’s a fact. And I’m not saying that is bad. But, I think that looking back at things, many things, that we did wrong, you know, that could be perfectable. I mean, up to a certain extent, I think they could be perfected more. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I want to ask you now about your work in Peru. After years of living in different countries and addressing human rights problems, you’ve returned home. If you don’t mind me doing this, I want to read back to you something that you’ve written about your work in Peru. You described it as, “The country is a cemetery,” and then wrote, “Only we can give it back the lost colors. Only we can give back the warmth to those who are trapped in that icy winter where the stoic grass grows. Only we can bring them back so they can meet again with those who have not yet lost the hope of their finding.” What’s the work you’re doing now? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Well, as I say in that text, it is actually very-- even when I listen to it read by somebody else, not by me, really gives me the shivers. In Peru, we have got some 15,000 people missing from 20 years of internal conflict. The war between the Shining Path terrorists and OMRTA terrorists and the state. Civil society was really in-between. These people went missing, although nobody goes missing. It’s a euphemism of people being killed, been taken and then just like dumped somewhere, tortured and maybe dumped somewhere, in a grave or down a river, whatever. These people have a lot of families certainly, families that have been looking for them for a very long time, for 25 years in many cases. The worst part of it is that these people are invisible and were invisible at the time they disappeared. And I would say that’s why they disappeared, because they were expendable. They were recyclable in many respects, as all invisible people in every country that have no rights, the people you normally find in the red lights cleaning your windshield or begging or working as maids in your house. We are a very racist country, although we don’t want to admit it. But we are a very racist country. There’s a tremendous level of racism primarily against not just the poor, but primarily also the poor are those people living actually in the highlands. An Indian majority we do have in this country, although we don’t want to accept it either. Sixty percent of the population is some kind of Indian. And then you got many other percentages of people of much more mixed background, but still. And the question is, who will, in a way, give answers back to them? I mean, who? Who has done so in the last 25 years? Nobody. That’s the worst part of it. Because if something would have happened by now, 25 years after, we should’ve been able to cut numbers down. We should have been able to give some people back for closure, even for the sake of closure. Because the thing is, it is unrealistic, sad, but unrealistic to think that of those 15,000 people missing or whatever you’re going to have 15,000 convictions that somebody will actually pay for it. I mean, this retributive approach is quite naïve to say the least. So in a much more restorative approach, what is there to be done with these people? Do we want to re-citizenize these victims? Do we want to bring them back to some kind of semblance of country from which they are part of, or we want to leave them there out in the, you know, in the bush, like kind of animals or unnamed people? And that is exactly the point. So our work is pretty much to try to bring these families, through giving them answers, through restituting the mortal remains of their loved ones, to bring them back home, in a way, and sending them home in this country. As theirs as it is mine. Although I have not obviously lived through what they’ve lived through, I have lived through that through another perspective. I was not the one who put the dead, in a way, in that war. In my case, for example, yes, there’s people that I know, that are acquaintances and so on, that were killed or went missing. But, I mean, nobody from my immediate family have gone, I mean, missing or been killed. But I can empathize with them. I definitely can empathize. And the thing is it is something that really makes me very angry, extremely angry as a matter of fact. There’s a lot of anger driving this too but not anger for revenge, anger for inactivity. Anger for the whole inaction that exist not only in this country but also international community by thinking, Peru, for example, is a country that the GDP is growing 80 percent a year. You’re now a middle-income country, therefore why deal with the past, why to remember? Let’s just forget, let’s just turn the page. Let’s just move along, whatever. But you cannot forget on behalf of anybody else, and that’s the most important thing. We remember so many things that are the basis for who we are now. I fight this selectivity that exists, about remembering certain things and forgetting some others, gets so bloody stupid. It is stupid. The whole world is built around remembrance, and that’s the whole issue. So I would say, in the same cynical tone, why should we remember the Holocaust? Why don’t just turn the page, you know? Why should we remember September 11, you know? It’s just seven years back. Why should we? Because we cannot forget on behalf of them and we should not. It is not possible. It is not possible, but not just possible. It’s not fair. It’s not honest. It’s not, I mean, I cannot even find a word. But it is not possible. Because by forgetting that, we definitely are able, and we will be able and next generation will be able, to repeat exactly the same mistakes of the past. And that’s the whole point. Of course, certainly, compared to a number of other tragedies, Peru may be insignificant. But what is it, a competition of who has the most number of missing or dead or whatever? It is not. I think that every case, even the most, the smallest, the most absurd case, whenever the family waiting, whenever the family not knowing, whenever there’s a family, grieving for something, we should be there. And we should be, we should understand that we have a mandate in a way, a universal mandate, as human beings to give them an answer. I mean, that’s it. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Jose Pablo, thank you so much for speaking with me. For people who are interested in learning more about your work, there’s information about your work on The Advocacy Project’s Web site at Advocacy.net. And I would encourage everyone to go and learn more about what you’re doing in Peru. Because as you say, there’s an obligation to remember, particularly as a country trying to build its way forward. So thank you very much. JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: Thank you, Bridget. Just to finish, I’d like to tell you, as last-minute news, that our Web site is actually up. It’s still prototype. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Is it up? JOSE PABLO BARAYBAR: It is up, believe it or not. But it’s still a prototype. I mean, we’re changing colors and content and things. But anyway, I mean, from now on, it will be up. And that is www.epafperu.org. NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you'll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.