By Alicia Nemiccolo MacLeay '97

For most Americans, massacres and mass graves are horrors from a world away. But forensic scientist William Haglund deals with them daily in an effort to provide their victims a voice. In August, Haglund was on campus to share his experiences working in human rights and mass fatality identification with the 100 medical examiners and coroners attending the New England Seminar in Forensic Sciences, held each summer at Colby.

Since 1998 Haglund has been director of the International Forensic Program for Physicians for Human Rights, working extensively on international forensic missions from Cyprus to Honduras. In 1996 he spent eight straight months working in graves as the senior forensic advisor for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Haglund exhumed and examined hundreds of bodies of genocide victims, advised the tribunals on forensic policy, analyzed results and testified on behalf of the tribunal. In 2001 he investigated the 1941 massacre of 1,600 Jews burned alive in a barn by their own neighbors in Jedwabne, Poland. This year Haglund's fieldwork included missions to Massar-e-Sheriff, Afghanistan, and to the Jenine refugee camp in Israel.

Though no forensic evidence was used at the 1945 Nuremberg trials, now it is relied upon to prosecute individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity. But acquiring that evidence has its own obstacles. These range from lack of safety (in some countries Haglund has to remain under military guard) to the logistics of flying a planeload of equipment to another continent. Once there, if you don't have a darkroom for x-rays you tear apart a toilet to use instead, as Haglund did in Rwanda.

Haglund advises international forensic teams to show locals what they are doing and explain the process rather than being seen as "just another official." Scientists must also be willing to accommodate religious and political concerns. That may mean allowing Nigerians to sacrifice a chicken before exhumations or letting Indonesian religious leaders say a prayer.

Ultimately "you can't create false expectations," said Haglund. In mass fatalities, not all bodies will be recovered and, even with DNA evidence, not all those recovered will be identified. Since 1996, 1,895 bodies and thousands of partial remains have been recovered in Bosnia. Of those, only 81 bodies have been identified.