Archaeolog

The town of Batajnica (effectively suburb of Belgrade) lies off the road to Novi Sad, some twenty kilometers northwest from Belgrade city center. The mass graves were uncovered just a kilometer away from the highway, in the special antiterrorist unit (SAJ) complex in Batajnica just off the right bank of the Danube. All the pits are located at the north end of SAJ firing ranges three hundred meters long (ICMP 2002). This enclosed area was some seventy meters north-south and fifty meters east-west, delimited by a high improvised fence made of planks of wood, packed earth and trees.

Firstly digging through the sterile soil, the team soon uncovered raw humanity which gave off an unbearably strong smell. “The stench came from the bodies of what were believed to be Kosovo Albanians murdered during the conflict there with Serbian forces in 1999, and then shipped north as part of an alleged cover-up to make sure the public never knew of the atrocities” (IWPR, 2002). Digging up the very recent, decomposing past was a difficult job during the summer months. Apart from the visual dent that was rather powerful, it is the smell that would hardly ever be forgotten. The bodies had been underground for only two to three years at the time of excavation (ICMP 2004), so one could still very much feel the rot of the past - the residue and cue of life, people extinguished by one regime.

After I had been initiated in the minutiae of the recording process, the words of Jon Sterenberg, head of the archaeological group with experience from Bosnia, Iraq and Kosovo (and later Thailand) were the first thing I heard out in the field: “You have to take it as any other archaeology”. The standard procedure meant that we would take photographs and a point via an EDM Total Station for every joint and the head of each body where possible for the purposes of post-excavation geo-plotting. Tracks of heavy-duty machines and traces of back-hoe blades could be recorded near the surface and mapped so that a computer simulation of a grave could be made.

Excavating on the first four graves (footnote: Batajnica 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 were graves; pits 4, 6, 8 did not contain bodies, ICMP 2004) the team found bodies that were buried in layers, some of them had been driven into the grave by the weight of the mass, while others had been shoved in by diggers, or tipped in by camion. It was difficult to be aware of the stratigraphy at every instance and leave the bodies in situ at the same time. There were also attempts to burn the bodies before they were covered up that we recorded - as seen through firing events in the sections and across body remains.

At Batajnica 5 we found evidence of severe fire activity inside the grave, car and lorry tires together with human bones were placed at the bottom and throughout the grave to enable the cremation of the remains (ICMP 2004). The damage observed on the bodies was terrible.

War reporters informed on the nature of deposition in the first excavated grave: the method of burning the bodies used in Batajnica 1 was different from that used in the other graves. Car tires had been placed at the bottom of 7 meters wide 2.5 meters deep pit, and covered by planks with plastic sheeting on top. The bodies had then been thrown on top of the cover and drenched in petrol (IWPR 2002). These suggested attempts to conceal the evidence, but had not been successful. The corpses had previously lain in the water and become so waterlogged that the fire did not destroy them. It was later suspected that some of the bodies from the freezer truck that emerged in the Danube in April 1999 ended up in Batajnica 1 (IWPR 2002, Ciric 2001).

“Any other archaeology” from the very first day came to represent a curious reference system. I would dare to say that archaeology as a denotation was forever changed for me. Everything else outside the excavation ground bore no resemblance to the life within the compound, either.

For Serbian population, myself included, the Albanian population in the nineties was the immediate Other, and there is only so much we can know about the other. But definitely not the most intimate, illicit, personal parts of a life. The risk of sounding overly prosaic and plain stupid here notwithstanding, I have to emphasize that the work on the site had a profoundly revelatory quality for me.

We had to preserve the “liveness” of decomposing bodies before they would end up on autopsy tables, but the image was constantly being reconstructed. Furthermore, a corpse would be reconfigured - in visual (iconic) terms - as more and more analyses were performed. Gradually it would be less and less alienated and intimately, against all reason, I found myself hoping that it would somehow become alive again once its identity is reconstructed. This in-between situation and the images of a decomposing body (as in Blanchot’s (1982:257-9) insightful analysis of the image and cadaver) - let alone direct contact with the flesh, the fluids and the smell - constituted a strong framework for that kind of thoughts. Personally, it was extremely defeating to take for granted the fact that a year or two before, the same people could have walked down the streets of Belgrade. On the other end of the thought process, and ultimately on the tail end of the grim Batajnica reality, was the destroying of those bodies and attempts at destroying of the images and thus total eradication. The victims at Batajnica 7 only appear buried en masse, but were killed at different seasons as the clothes and soil samples suggest, possibly even reburied from the original graves (ICMP 2004).

As our aim was always to determine the cause of death, we paid special attention to recognizing bullet holes. Wounds caused by firearms were indeed found on a number of male bodies exhumed from Batajnica. We put together a photo-documentation and a video diary of relevant findings that would go to courts. One of the reasons for archaeologists’ presence on atrocity sites alike is that the Hague Tribunal accepts evidence recovered by professional excavators/forensic archaeologists – experienced in finding clues and establishing the correct order of events (ICMP 2004).

Before long, though, the recording process became too time-consuming as more and more bodies were excavated, and we had to do without extensive interpretations that one would normally offer on a context sheet. The project was hoping to get more data from the independent media, government and non-governmental organizations, and possibly from the inside of the SAJ complex. In order to start writing the history, however minute, reconstitution of events through narrators and (multiple) narratives was necessary. It was, and to the best of my knowledge still is, impossible to figure out the syntactical relationship of the events, what were the contexts and what connected the events. One would like to argue that from a heuristic point of view it is important to take a relativist stance, but even among us fourteen on site involved in the exhumations, there were many relativisms to choose from.

I clearly remember our amazement when a projectile hole was spotted in one of the bodies. Much like seeing a great find on your “regular archaeological site”, but we soon learnt that bullet holes and blanks were literally everywhere inside the SAJ complex due to the close proximity of firing practice ground. Excavation would sometimes be halted for brief periods of time, too – when it overlapped with firing drills. In the same vein, the cause of death became an elusive category because of the nature of data – tertiary archaeological context, multiple deposits, partially or completely burnt individuals, shot to death, hit with a blunt instrument; different soil types with bodies from the same deposit, etc. Among the recovered evidence of Batajnica 5 there were also remains of one coffin complete with a dislodged body (ICMP 2004).

The impression of a completely different, skewed reality was further aided by the fact that we would begin and end days at our homes in Belgrade. At 7 in the morning we would be transported in a nondescript SUV with shaded windows to the site, only to be back in Belgrade by 5 in the afternoon.

Mass graves in three locations in Serbia were found in 2001. At first there seemed to be a single grave with 36 bodies, then 50, and then the next figure was 305. Several witnesses, including security force members, drivers and gravediggers, testified that close to 800 bodies were taken to Batajnica in five or six trucks in April 1999, probably one vehicle for each grave (IWPR 2002). The biggest grave – Batajnica 5 – contained at least 287 bodies (ICMP 2004). International committee on Missing Persons in the 2004 reports the figure of at least 705 corpses coming from Batajnica in total.

But while a few bodies or body parts may “lend themselves” to easy removal from the side of the body mass, eventually one would have to climb on top of the mass to get to bodies – those key top bodies for establishing stratigraphy and contextualizing the whole event. Unfortunately, unless a suspension system is employed over the grave, the body mass often has to be stepped on (Tuller & Djuric 2005).

As the excavations progressed we would go deeper to recover all the bodies, but also effectively spend more time in the grave as stepping out of it became increasingly difficult. That way we would converse more among ourselves enclosed in the trench hole, as if that space became somehow more personal. One of the conversations engaged all four archaeologists present in the grave 5 – all four of us had dreams with haunting images of corpses in them. In the same vein, the stench accompanied sleep over night. And to me it seemed that that particular smell of decomposing bodies stayed somehow in the pockets of my nostrils and it would regularly cause panic when I would accidentally wake up in the middle of the night. On those occasions I would find myself trying to locate a cadaver in my bedroom before realizing that it was just a dream. The porosity between reality and dream was disturbingly fascinating.

What was equally horrific, in retrospect, even for senses accustomed to decayed and half-decayed bodies, were the personal belongings – artefacts found in Batajnica graves with or without relation to the bodies.

Some of the artifacts retrieved were (the list can be found at Skrozza 2003):

two baby pacifiers,
nail-clippers,
several bottle-openers,
marbles,
pencils and pens,
combs,
cigarette holders.
With many pieces of out-of-circulation former Yugoslav coins we found:
metal key rings,
cotton and paper handkerchiefs,
make-up mirrors,
“Bick” shavers,
several Hoxa’s (Muslim priests’) writings,
various pocket knives,
“Swiss Army” knife
battery powered radio transmitters,
an address book with phone numbers,
photographs of two young men and a girl,
buttons,
shoe-spoons,
a screwdriver,
a calculator,
torches,
business cards and amulets,
nails,
safety locks,
loose tobacco,
a bottle of whiskey
tire-valve caps,
power circuit testers,
bus tickets,
keys and key chains,
and dental prostheses (cf. Skrozza 2003 and Kaliterna 2006).

It is important to realize that among recovered artifacts personal documents were scarce given the number of victims, but were present nevertheless: IDs of the Berisha extended family, and various kinds of licenses. What in a particular way sheds light on the very crime, is the fact that not counting the local Serbian money, a considerable number of foreign currency notes was found untouched with the bodies – in the amount of several thousand today’s Euros (a fortune in those inflation-plagued days in Serbia). Some of the victims had exactly 1000 Deutche Marks (DM, German currency before Euro) on them, and the word in the antiterrorist units’ complex was that 1000 DM was the price of human life in Kosovo in 1999, only the money was still there.

This gives an impression of macabre rush killings – or like on an assembly line (Skrozza 2003), random so to speak. Was it because of rush or professionalism, still a police belt-buckle and part of “Socialist Party of Serbia” (Milosevic’s party) delegate’s card was also found (Skrozza 2003). This would in turn mean that the killers did not make much difference between “suitable and unsuitable” victims. The whole highly secretive crime scene conveyed a message of panic.

Where were the victims going or thought they were going is not known, but it is fair to say that they were ordinary people with ordinary problems and ordinary quotidian lives (Skrozza 2003). It is not the intention of this paper to fall into any kind of (inevitable?) pathos, but the very fact that twenty kilometers away from Belgrade, and my home at the time, these people just as ordinary as myself were hideously buried, again, profoundly changed not only my awareness of archaeology as a modern profession (Shanks & McGuire 1998, Lucas 2004), but also my ethical stance in the political climate of the day.

Few days prior to Batajnica excavations and immediately following the early revelatory newspaper articles in 2001, Serbian public was reacting slowly, but still somewhat justified the killings, as if unable to grasp the nature of the crime. In retrospect - I caught myself with an extraordinary capacity to rationalize – as if there was a tiny possibility for just about any approach to justify. When I took part in the exhumation process, however, the kind of questions that impinged on my Belgrade-Batajnica-Belgrade world were: where to draw the line between where I stand and the rest; how to disagree, how to protest, and what would be the etiquette of disagreement in Serbia of that day? The question of how to be responsible as opposed to be conformist haunted me with all the images and the smell. Ultimately, as I am trying to write this paper, I am asking myself am I really responsive after all to people’s actions and concerns or is it the nature of the paper and the conference that pushes me toward the kind of rhetoric that is encompassing empathy but also exoticism and objectification of victims (footnote: I very much thank professor Vincent Crapanzano’s compelling discussions at the Graduate Center in spring 2006 course for illuminating this complex issue).

The immediate result of the excavations was that in 2004 more than 700 corpses were exhumed at Batajnica (ICMP 2004). In the last three years the bodies were identified in numbers and returned to Kosovo. Corpses are being transported yet again, but this time for proper burial – for sadly the paths and shipments of dead bodies have been almost a Balkan privilege (Verdery 1999). In December 2004 Serbia's war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vuckovic in his statement aired on Radio B92 reported that there were still 3,192 people missing in Kosovo, and out of this number 2,460 Kosovo Albanians, 523 Kosovo Serbs and 203 members of other ethnicities. We are yet to see the tombs and monuments erected, as well as the ability of people to mourn the other’s victims.

Going back to “the regular archaeological” idiom and without the emotional baggage, working as a forensic archaeologist meant two things to me: the use of forensic science to examine and interpret archaeological finds, and the use of archaeological methods to investigate the crime scene. Now, the behavior of the agents of the crime could conceivably be attributed to anything from boredom to panic (Watkins 1986:103). Thus the assumption of purposefulness is constantly made by practicing psycho-analysts, who make enormous efforts for the most rigorous analysis of human behavior. If we are to “focus our observations on real people in real life situations” (Barth 1981:10), at least in the study of mass grave perpetrators and their reasons, we would probably need that kind of assistance. Psychiatrist Weine (1999: 77, cited in Weiss 2006) while discussing holocaust contexts stated that “[m]emories can be triggered by a sight, a smell, a sound, or a feeling…[they] can take over the survivor, hurling them out of their involvement in a current situation and dropping them back into the abyss”. I was certainly not the survivor in the described case of mass-grave excavations, but I did feel like a survivor (out of personal egotism maybe) of the whole project as it was difficult to see through the exhumation process. Reminiscence unwillingly takes me back to the trench sometimes, and I am definitely able to at least empathize with Albanian survivors, and mourn the victims of the atrocious Batajnica mass-graves.

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