4 CGampus News

November Zist 2012 - Over the Edge

STUDENTS HELP T0 DISCOVER SOMALILAND'S TROUBLED PAST

Don Ireland and Melissa Simmill spent part of the semester unearthing mass graves

HANNA PETERSEN
NEWS EDITOR

Don Ireland and Melissa Simmill are
UNBC students who spent part of the
fall semester in Somaliland exhuming
mass graves as part of the non-profit
organization EPAF (The Peruvian
Forensic Anthropology Team)’s work
in the region. EPAF seeks to contribute
to the consolidation of peace and
democracy where’ grave human
rights violations have taken place by
working alongside the families of the
disappeared to find their loves ones,
and provide a sense of closure. For
one month, Don and Melissa worked
alongside EPAF’s executive director
Jose Pablo Barayabar (known as JP)
to discover and uncover the mass
graves that riddle the region. Their
trip is part of a five year project where
EPAF will work to unearth the truth
behind an estimated 60,000 civilian
deaths during the reign of dictator
Mohammed Siad Barre.

“It’s all about dignifying the
remains,” says Don Ireland, who is
an International Studies and Political
Science Joint Major. “Mass graves
are not dignified. People have just
disappeared and EPAF works to figure
out who these people are and give
them a proper burial.” Somaliland
is an autonomous region of Somalia

we first got to the site there were
cacti everywhere...it looked like it
was going to be a possible site. JP
hired some workers to clean out the
cacti and then we started doing test
pits,” adds Melissa. “One of our first
indicators that there was a mass grave
was that there was these big boulders.
This is really interesting cause JP said
that before decomp starts to happen
the gases inside start to expand. And
that’s where the old zombie myth
comes from because people wouldn’t
bury bodies properly and you would
have bodies protruding from _ the
earth. But if you do it low enough it
just looks like abundant mounding
which is a dead giveaway for mass
graves so they would put boulders
overtop of them to make sure that
wouldn’t happen.”

The team worked on two graves.
The first had 13 bodies found and
the second had 43. “We were all
students; we were all there on the
same level. Within the first week or
so we exhumed enough bodies that
we had more work in the lab then in
just the field. That is where Franco
promoted me to lab supervisor. And
Don helped me a lot with that as
well,” says Melissa.

“We worked in the lab reconstructing

6¢Dealing with remains, you would think
would be more difficult but it’s quite a
bit easier because, you can separate the
sad from the science.

that gained its independence in
1991. In 1988, the Siad Barre regime
committed massacres against the
people of Somaliland, which were
among the events that led to the
Somali Civil War. The war left the
economic and military infrastructure
severely damaged. After the collapse
of the central government in 1991,
the local government, led by the
Somali National Movement, declared
independence from the rest of Somalia
on May 18 of the same year.

Don, an International Studies and
Political Science joint major, and
Melissa, a psychology major, became
involved with EPAF’s forensic work
on a geography field school to Peru
conducted in the summer of 2012. In
Peru, the two students participated
in an interdisciplinary study on the
effects of a decade long conflict that
has left thousands of people dead and
missing. “Peru was structured in that
we did the course before going. It
was done as an interdisciplinary field
school. [Somaliland] was technically
a field school but more of a training
program. Somaliland was your being
trained in this and this is what we are
going to accomplish,” says Melissa.
The team’s first goal upon arriving
in Somaliland was to locate the
mass graves. “EPAF partly found
the graves through local heresy and
identified the site,” says Don. “When

bones, assessing clothing, teeth and
cause of death,” adds Don. “We were
working with fecal and brain matter.
We couldn’t do DNA testing because
it’s just not possible to bring that kind
of expensive equipment to a place
like Somaliland where people are

struggling for a decent living.” The
evidence that the EPAF team collects
in Somaliland in the course of the five
year project will be given to the War

time, but he was forcibly recruited into
them though,” Melissa recounts of a
particularly memorable interaction
with a local. “He was telling us about

66Mass graves are not dignified. People

have just disappeared and EPAF works
to figure out who these people are and
give them a proper burial 99

Crimes Commission.
“We had to do a complete skeletal
inventory first and then properly
package and box all of the remains.
Then they had to have chain of
custody forms filled out and the
proper inventories done for the war
crimes commissioner which we
handed off the remains to,” surmises
Melissa. “Dealing with remains, you
would think would be more difficult
but it’s quite a bit easier because, you
can separate the sad from the science.
You can look at it and you have a role
of agency in what is being done. You
are just dealing with a job and once
you are done one piece you move onto
another,” continues Melissa. “There
is a role and there is a finish line and
once you reach that finish line you
have the knowledge that you were
able to change something. You were
able to do something about the fate
of these people. They are no longer
smooshed in one big grave, but they
have a proper burial.”

“We saw more trauma then most
people will see in their lives,” says
Don Ireland. “One of the remains we
found had over 20 bullet holes in his
clothing. You had to stop and pause
sometimes, but we had such a great
team that we avoided burning out, but
it was mentally draining.”

“He came in and he was working for
the Somali forces, I believe at the

what he had done and how he had to
escape. He came into the lab and was
looking at some of the remains on
the table. And he was certain one of
them was his friend because he had
to shoot towards his friend and he
knew that his friend died that day. It
was difficult because I didn’t want to
tell him that we pulled up 43 people
and it could be any one of them. But
he was so distraught you could see
from his eyes that he was definitely
harmed from that experience. He was
a broken person. It was very tough to
see that.”

“I’ve learned, coming back, that
not everyone could do these trips,”
adds Don. “It’s difficult work but
very rewarding.” While Don Ireland
and Melissa Simmill have returned
from the first month of the project,
the work is far from over. “In the
next trip, EPAF plans to do a public
event where people can look through
the clothing we’ve found. This may
help them to trigger memories of
their loved ones,” says Ireland. This
event may help connect people to the
victims that the team has unearthed.
“JP has contacted local schools to
bring in local students and train
them along side of us, that way when
we leave in five years they will be
able to continue the project,” notes
Melissa. “In Hargeisa alone there are
over 200 mass graves... The numbers