Assistant Chief Medical Examiner honoured
for war crimes work in Kosovo

By Barbara J. Brown

Dr. Bernard Bannach, Assistant Chief Medical Examiner for Alberta, led a Canadian forensic pathology team to Kosovo in September 1999 to investigate mass war crimes and perform autopsies on victims of those crimes.

In September, Bannach was awarded the Canadian Peacekeeping Service Medal for his work. Calgary's former Assistant Chief Medical Examiner, Pauline Alakija, autopsy technician Ted Pretty (formerly of the Edmonton Medical Examiner's Office), and RCMP Cpl. Brad Siddell also received the award.

Canada was one of 13 United Nations (UN) countries around the world to respond to NATO's request for volunteer forensic teams to conduct the investigations, Bannach said.

The team packed 5.5 tonnes of equipment, including computers, scanners, photographic equipment, autopsy equipment, cameras, film, computerized mapping equipment and generators for power, into a Canadian military transport plane and headed for the Balkans to dig up bodies for post-mortem examinations.

The nine-man, two-woman team shared tent barracks throughout their seven-week mission in Kosovo.

The outside morgue facilities differed vastly from the city morgue they were used to working in. Wooden tables with collapsible legs were constructed to serve as autopsy tables. At the end of each table, a hole was dug in the ground for drainage purposes.

The forensic squad exhumed 68 cadavers in three villages, performed autopsies on them, and positively identified 67 of the victims and their causes of death. Each day bodies were identified and released to their families, who were then able to provide proper burials for their loved ones.

"Because the purported events that happened in these villages happened on three subsequent mornings in April 1999," said Bannach, "and because they were all within about 10 kilometres of each other, the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) figured it was the same group of Serb paramilitaries that performed actions in all three villages."

Bodies from the first village were buried about two metres deep, without caskets or boxes, in a large graveyard, Bannach said, and local villagers helped identify the fresh graves.

During the carnage, 25 young men between the ages of 18 and 40 were selected, lined up behind a shed and machine-gunned to death. One male victim escaped the shooting, but was later killed in a house that was burned down afterwards. This male was the only victim of the 68 not positively identified, but through process of elimination, Bannach's team was able to return him to his family.

The second village massacre was an indiscriminate act of violence. The local villagers had heard rumours about what happened in the first village the previous day, and when the military trucks appeared in sight they attempted to flee.

"The paramilitaries in this situation didn't select individuals, they just opened up with their machine-guns at long range and were dropping people in the fields as they were running for the woods," said Bannach. "It was only about half a kilometre across the field until they reached the woods."

Twenty-two people were killed, ranging from a seven-year-old girl to a 97-year-old man, Bannach said, and many of them were shot from behind. These victims were buried less than half a metre deep.

"Most of our identifications were done as a result of clothing," Bannach said. "Information of what the dead were last seen wearing came from the local villagers who had come back to this village."

The night before the killings in the third village, paramilitaries warned specific Serb villagers to protect their properties by putting the Chechigt symbol on their gates so their properties wouldn't be pillaged. The Serbian villagers who were made aware of the impending danger didn't tell their Albanian counterparts what was going to happen the next day, Bannach said.

Instead of randomly killing people, the local school principal, who was a Serb, pointed out certain Albanian individuals with whom he held a grudge. These people were taken down to the river and executed, said Bannach. Allegations were that the violence went further with this village because several teenage girls were raped and then shot, he said.

The bodies of the victims from this village were left for several weeks before they were buried. Mostly, their physical effects were again used to identify them.

Seventeen individuals were identified in connection with these crimes for indictment by the International Court of Justice.

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