Belle River's Derek Congram says he cries when he watches documentaries about mass graves and ethnic cleansing but he's all business when he's the one at the bottom of a freshly dug pit surrounded by skeletons and rotting corpses.
Congram, 31, a forensic archeologist who toiled for several years in the former Yugoslavia before a recent, harrowing stint in Iraq, digs for truths in former conflict zones in a bid to bring war criminals to justice.
"When I see a documentary, it's hard, I cry," says Congram, who is visiting his family before returning for a second tour in Iraq.
"When I'm working, it's a different perspective."
EFFORTS YIELD RESULTS
His efforts with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have already brought murderers to justice, including Bosnian Serb Gen. Radislav Krstic, and Congram hopes his efforts in Iraq yield similar results.
Congram, soft spoken with reddish hair, clear eyes and a passion for science, opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq but the evidence he helped unearth this spring tells a tale of cruelty under Saddam Hussein more harrowing than even the bloodbath in the Balkans.
The graves Congram helped exhume in Bosnia and Kosovo predominantly contained the corpses of men — civilians deemed by their killers to be potential soldiers — but the graves in Iraq contained the corpses of women and children, says Congram.
A mass grave he examined with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this spring contained 113 bodies and one fetus. Only four of those bodies belonged to men, and the women's remains had bullet holes while the small skeletons did not, suggesting they were thrown into the pit and buried alive.
"You're a scientist and you're objective but you can't escape the associations you draw," says Congram. "It makes it more difficult to approach it as a scientist. It makes it more difficult but that gives you more motivation."
Like the characters on the television series CSI, Congram talks clinically of the evidence and the process but admits to a feeling of "gratification" when his spadework helps bring war criminals to justice.
"At the risk of sounding bizarre, I love the work," says Congram, who met his wife, a cultural anthropologist from Costa Rica, while toiling at a mass grave in Kosovo.
"Hopefully, it acts as a deterrent."
Congram, a University of Windsor criminology graduate who completed his masters in forensic archeology in England in 2000, says genocide investigations are having an effect because many graves in Bosnia have been moved in a bid to avoid detection.
A secondary grave uncovered in Bosnia contained labels from glass bottles that led investigators to a primary grave sight near Kosluk, where 600 bodies or portions of bodies still remained.
"It's not for everybody," says Congram. "There's a lot of elements about it that aren't attractive. It's unstable, it's potentially dangerous and, at it's lowest level, it can be messy work."
FUTURE PLANS
Derek Congram, who believes Canada should create a civilian task force of academics with expertise in exhumations, has applied to the PhD program in archeology at Simon Fraser University and one day hopes to teach.
© The Windsor Star 2005
