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Posted Sunday, April 20, 2003; 14.23 BST
She has fleeting moments in which she thinks "it might be better to work as an assistant in a perfume shop" and describes her current job as "grave-digger." A Polish-born Icelandic citizen who lives in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Eva Klonowski is senior forensic anthropologist for the International Commission on Missing Persons, which helps families to determine the fate of relatives lost in the 1991-99 wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Most days, Klonowski — a sensitive scientist with a winning smile — is up to her elbows in human remains, sifting through bones to try and identify the people they used to be. "Bones don't lie," she says. "They show you the truth of how somebody was tortured, killed and hidden in a mass grave." Her job is to "read" the bones, to determine the gender, age, height and manner of death of the victims found in such graves. In Bosnia since 1996, she is the longest-serving international forensic expert there, and even worked unpaid for a few years.
Klonowski, 56, knows about dislocation and separation. In 1981, martial law was declared in Poland when the University of Wroclaw anthropology professor was on an Austrian skiing break with her husband and baby daughter. They stayed with friends for six months, registered as refugees and soon were invited to settle in Iceland. An interest in forensics led to exhumation and examination work in the Balkans.
"I feel useful," says Klonowski. "People are identified because I put all these bones together." People like Hasan Ploskic. His widow, Jasna, says Klonowski worked tirelessly for a month to identify him. "She is human first, and then the expert."
Reported by Senad Slatina/Sarajevo
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