"Opening the graves is not a priority"

Qantara: You have taken part in the search for missing persons in several different countries. What similarities do you see in Syria, and what makes it unique? 

Luis Fondebrider: Something that is similar in every country I have worked in is the families' desperation. They want to know the whereabouts of their loved ones, what happened and if they are alive or dead. These processes always take decades. 40 years after the end of the dictatorship in Argentina, my colleagues are still looking for and recovering the bodies of the disappeared.  

The most important thing is to manage the families' expectations. Some bodies will never be recovered, some will be recovered but not identified.  

Working in Syria is a unique challenge because you have 23 years of dictatorship under Bashar al-Assad, but even before that many people disappeared under his father. That is a huge amount of information. 

What are the first steps that need to be taken?

First, there needs to be a centralised institution leading the search for the disappeared. At the moment, the UN Independent Institution on Missing Persons in the Syrian Arab Republic (IIMP) oversees that. It would be good if Syrians created another institution, that is really by and for them. 

Secondly, these institutions have to receive all the available information. Different organisations have been collecting data for the last 13 years and they need to compile it altogether. 

The third step is to understand the modus operandi of the Assad regime. Who was doing what? Who was responsible? 

After that, in the case of the missing, we need to establish a map of possible gravesites and cemeteries in the country. And locals need to be trained for all the upcoming tasks. 

What kind of information needs to be collected, and how? 

If there was an air raid, for example, we have to find out who was responsible, what the date and location was, how many victims were there. Then you need to find information about the victims. For example, who, when, where and how someone disappeared. 

Much of this can be found in documents, videos and photos. Every state works with written orders and administrative procedures. There is always a bureaucracy of the dead. Sometimes these documents are not even secret—if a dead body was taken to a cemetery, we can check the records there.

Then there is oral information. This could come from a family member of someone who disappeared, someone who killed a person or someone who was present during a killing. it could come from gravediggers, people working as assistants in detention centres or people who lived across the street from a detention centre.  

In the end, you will amass a huge amount of data, so you need analysts with experience in this kind of investigation to sort through it according to a certain research framework. 

Why are all these details so important? 

We need to find out the context before opening a grave. I cannot take DNA, put it in a machine and have the name of the person. To identify a decomposed body or a skeleton is very complex. I cannot compare the information from one body to all the missing people in Syria.  

I need to have a hypothesis. If you are going to work at a gravesite, you need to have a theory about when these people could have been buried, and who they could be.  

In Syria, certain gravesites are known to belong to certain detention centres, and certain detention centres were where people from specific areas or political contexts were taken. 

With that kind of hypothesis, I can open a grave. But DNA can't work magic. Identifying a dead body means identifying different information. I need to compare age, sex and stature of the body. If it is a fresh body, I can look at tattoos, scars, eye and hair colour, teeth and clothing. Then I will compare this with information provided by the families. 

Some families are understandably impatient. They worry that the more time passes, the more difficult it will be to identify the bodies. Is that the case? 

The best place for the bodies now is inside the graves, because they are protected by the soil. If the body is in the grave and the grave is protected, the passing of time doesn't matter. A mayor in Syria could say: "This area is under investigation, no one can touch it." Usually, there are not enough police present to protect the site 24/7, but at least there should be an administrative order. 

What happens if the graves are not protected? 

In some cases, people have good intentions. Now in Syria, we see first responders doing exhumations. But those bodies that are exhumed without the presence of forensic archaeologists could get mixed up. Opening the graves is not a priority right now. Of course, it is for the families, but opening them without a proper investigation will lead to hundreds of bodies accumulated in mortuaries without identification. 

In other cases, there is an intention, usually by the perpetrators, to destroy the bodies. In Bosnia, the original gravesites were unprotected during the war. After Srebrenica, the perpetrators came back, opened the graves and moved the bodies somewhere else. Sometimes the graves are accidentally disturbed, for example by construction work. 

In any of these cases, analysis becomes more difficult. If the body is decomposed, it could be impossible to put it back together in anatomical order. It becomes unclear which bone belongs to which skeleton. In that case, you cannot give back the whole body to the families. In one hand alone, we have 27 bones. To get DNA for 27 bones is expensive, nobody is going to pay for that. 

When the grave is finally opened by a professional team, what does their work look like? 

Forensic archaeologists collect the whole skeleton and any evidence associated with a skeleton like personal belongings, bullets and clothing. The body and all elements are taken to the mortuary. A multi-disciplinary forensic team, composed of a forensic pathologist, a forensic anthropologist and an X-ray expert, try to establish the identity of the person and the cause of death.  

You have to lay down the skeleton and begin by establishing the age, sex and stature. If there is soft tissue you need a fingerprint expert. Then you compare that with the ante-mortem information about how the person was when they were alive. For genetic analysis, you cut a piece of bone from the thigh and send it to a specialised lab. 

What role do the victims' families play during this process? 

The families cannot do the technical work, but they can usually be present during those analyses. That is important because it gives credibility to the process.  

For example, when I work on a case, sometimes the families sit around the grave, a few metres away. And from time to time during the day, I explain to them what we are doing. When I finish the exhumation, I explain what I have done and answer their questions. I show them the mortuary and they see that I manage the remains with dignity.  

To what extent should Syria's interim leadership prioritise the search for the missing? 

I understand that the government must take care of basic services right now. But it also has the responsibility to give answers to the families of the missing. The issue of missing people is something that will persist forever within this society. There needs to be a law preserving the graves and the archives where the information is stored.  

How can international organisations and governments support this process?

Right now, the IIMP is the responsible organisation. All the other institutions should coordinate under its umbrella. They should not do things on the side, because that adds confusion and complications.  

Unfortunately, that happens often. When a dictatorship ends and investigations are suddenly possible, geopolitics comes into play. Every Western European country and the US send teams of people to advise. Everybody wants to use their own protocol and it becomes chaotic. This happened in the Balkans at the end of the war, this happened in Iraq after 2003, and this could happen in Syria, too.