JEAN-RENÉ RUEZ The following excerpts are from a May 1999 interview with Jean-René Ruez, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia's (ICTY) Chief Investigator for Srebrenica. This is Mr. Ruez's definition of a crime against humanity and the goal of those investigating the crimes. . . . A crime against humanity is a crime committed against every single one of us. It's not a usual situation, so indeed there is a lot of effort put in it by everyone who participates in such an investigation to make sure that the situation is dealt with properly in the interest of the victims, but also in the interest of everyone. To make sure that all these atrocities are indeed properly recorded and frozen into history before even expecting that some people will be held accountable for them and find their punishment once a trial has taken place. QUESTION What is the scope of your investigation? ANSWER . . . First [we need] to find out if indeed these people have disappeared. If their disappearance is connected with any criminal activity and then reconstruct what has happened. [The] circumstances of that time [and] the fact that all these events happened in [a] time of war . . . makes the situation very complex, and to reconstruct such events takes quite a lot of time and effort . . . . QUESTION What kinds of things do you have to do? ANSWER The first thing we have to do in these circumstances is try to identify as many important witnesses as possible. People who have [had] personal experience of the most horrendous crimes which have happened. You have to focus on the main events, you cannot be re-routed by 25,000 possible testimonies of people. You have to [be] very selective in where you put your efforts, so that is step one -- identify the witnesses, try to reconstruct [their] stories, [the] full story . . . and then identify the locations where these things have happened. [You have to do all this] in a country you do not know and in areas where [most of] these people also do not know the geography because they are [refugees] from other places . . . . Once you have identified these places then you have to do forensic activities to try to corroborate, independently, the stories told [by] these people. So that ranges from finding shell casings, finding some residue that is connected with [the] situations described by these people, and, at the end of the day, finding the bodies of victims. If not, you end up with what was already [a] sad genocide without bodies. So you need to find all the locations as well. QUESTION When did you begin the investigation? ANSWER Very soon after my arrival. I arrived at the Tribunal [the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia located in The Hague] in early April 1995. The . . . investigation [began on] July 21,1995. I had been [asked] at that time to go to [Tuzla, Bosnia] in order to assess the situation, which was reported by the press. As you know, the press instantly reported about [the] massacres of unarmed civilians, and some very important witnesses had already been identified by press persons before we could [even] arrive on the spot to start our own investigation on all these events. QUESTION Did you did you go immediately to Srebrenica then? ANSWER No way, it was totally impossible at that time for ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] personnel to access the area. In fact, no one could access the area at the time. So the main activity, at that moment, was to begin to [sort] through [the] 25,000 refugees, who were freshly arrived in Tuzla. Some 6,000 [of them were] on the UN air base, and all the rest [were] scattered in a number of collective centers inside Tuzla or in the [areas] surrounding Tuzla. So the first goal of the mission was to collect as many statements as possible from these refugees in order to begin to understand what kind of pattern of crimes might have been committed just after the fall of the enclave [Srebrenica]. . . . Access [to Srebrenica] for the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia] personnel was not possible before January 1996. QUESTION How big is the investigative team? ANSWER There has been an evolution in the numbers. As you know, in the beginning, . . . the resources were very limited in terms of personnel at that time. So the team was in fact a micro-team. It stayed like this for some time and slowly other team members could [begin to] participate in the investigation. And now, we are a team of eight persons working on this full-time. But there are also other people working who are not full-time team members. I mean, for example, the exhumation team is not part of the team, so I would not count them in these numbers. And also other departments of the Tribunal [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] support our activities, [but are not included] . . . in the total number of people who participate in this case. QUESTION So [do] you have to work with the exhumation process? ANSWER The exhumation process is totally inter-linked with the investigation. There could not be any exhumation without [the] preliminary, preliminary investigation to identify the location and then a preliminary check on the location to make sure that [it is] indeed . . . [the site of] a mass grave. So you have, in fact, to dig in the soil until you find multiple remains, which are indicative of a presence of a mass grave. Once this is done, an exhumation team has to take over and [complete] the exhumation. But the activity of [the] investigation team, depending on the circumstances, is totally inter-linked with the activities of this forensic team. QUESTION Do you try to attend the exhumations yourself? ANSWER Generally not, generally, I come for the beginning, when the exhumation starts, then we have team members present . . . . And then I generally come back when we start another spot. But this was the situation [in 1998]; in 1996, we were so busy that I didn't even have the chance to pass by an exhumation site. After we had found the places, the UN Commission for Human Rights started the exhumation, and I didn't even have the possibility to go and eyeball these sites. There were too many others that needed to be discovered to do that. QUESTION This is an immensely complex investigation, isn't it? ANSWER Yes. The complexity comes from many things: the number of victims, the number of survivors, the number of crime scenes -- the total crime scene is 70 kilometers long and 40 kilometers wide and scattered with concentration spots of [dead] prisoners. Execution sites [and] mass graves that have been disturbed by the perpetrators who . . . exhumed all of these bodies to scatter them in smaller mass graves hoping we would never find these sites. And then [this would] lead [us] to the conclusion that some survivors or some other witnesses [had] inflated the numbers. So [this] is an aspect of complexity, but there are also many other aspects of complexity, such as the number of sources we have to deal with and the lack of habit of everyone to work together on such a thing. We [do] have support from the [member] states [of the UN Security Council], intelligence agencies, a lot of possible sources who can be activated in order to provide some interesting and valuable information which can help us learn more about all what has happened. QUESTION It strikes us that you have to do tremendously painstaking, detailed work and that the standards of evidence you need to generate are tremendously high. This must be frustrating for the individuals on the ground who are longing for some results? ANSWER No, it is not frustrating. It is in the interest of justice. [When] such a situation is so, so grave, you have to really enter every single detail. The level of proof has not to be different than a crime committed in Paris or New York. The accusations are so heavy at the end of such an investigation that you can not play with the evidence. You need to have a lot of corroborative elements in order to make sure that these people are telling the truth and that the stories that they report are indeed real events.