"The dead are speaking to us, and they're telling us the same story as the living are telling the tribunal investigators," says William Haglund. "This is the first time on this scale that the dead have been allowed to speak."
Haglund, chief forensic investigator for the United Nations' slow-moving International Tribunal for Rwanda, is part of the 17-member team carrying out the tribunal's first exhumation of a mass grave in Rwanda."I just took out No. 467 from the grave," he says, standing next to the grave behind a Roman Catholic church built of stone, perched on a promontory in a beautiful inlet above Lake Kivu.
The grave looks like an archeological dig, but instead of marking Roman vases or objects of antiquity with small numbered flags, the team of diggers place them near femurs and ankle bones.
"The more you have of a body, the more of a story it tells," says Haglund, pointing to a skeleton laid out on a table. "This is a young man of 19-24 years old. You can see the sharp force injury across the hand, through the bone on the hip, the right shoulder, the left shoulder, and across the head into the eye. So that's a pretty dramatic story the skeleton is telling."
Among the stories told by skeletons in Rwanda are children's heads cut in half, fingers severed as victims raised them to their faces in futile self-defense and bones smashed close to the Achilles tendon, where the slain were hobbled.
More than half the corpses taken out of the grave, are of children under the age of 18, a rough reflection of the age pattern of Rwanda's general population.
It is a civilian, not a military population, they see in the grave - fetuses, infants, children under six, women.
The foreign scientists peel-off blood-stained T-shirts with the mottos of American universities and second-hand jackets and lay them out to dry them in the sun.
According to witnesses' testimony, the massacre at Kibuye's Catholic church took place on April 17, 1994.
Last weekend, survivors and relatives came to match the clothes of their loved ones to the still fleshy remains zipped into white, plastic body bags and stored in the chapel.
Because the grave was packed with bodies and sealed with damp earth, the corpses have not dried down to the bone. The stench of rotting flesh fills the air. Few of the investigators who spend their days brushing crumbs of soil from bones in the grave have the stomach to break for lunch.
Once a place of peaceful retreat, then of carnage, the large church with its broken stained-glass windows has become a morgue. Body bags lie on the floor under pews. An ante-chamber contains the X-ray machine which pathologists use to find bullets and bits of sharp metal - hard evidence left behind by the soldiers and militiamen who carried out the massacre.
"The investigators have witness testimony, and we need witness testimony held up in court with permanent evidence," Haglund says.
A little jewelry has been found, as well as some identity cards carrying note of a victim's ethnicity as Tutsi - the ethnic minority that suffered most during the three months of killings by extremists from Rwanda's Hutu majority.
For reasons he is not willing to discuss, Haglund is not seeking to establish the tribe of victims, although the tribunal needs to prove that genocide - and not just mass killings - took place in Rwanda, by a legal interpretation of targeting people for reasons of race, not politics.
"The injuries are close proximity," is all that he is prepared to say when the subject is broached. "You had to be basically looking a person in the eye ... It's hard to imagine the strength needed, in order to get to the bone, going through muscle and skin."
Because of old, racist ideas about features "typical" of pastoralist Tutsi, anthropological academia queries the possibility of establishing tribal identity with forensic evidence.
But a panel of judges isn't likely to dispute the fact that killings on such a scale had to be organized.
Eight suspects have been charged with genocide, complicity to genocide and crimes against humanity in the first indictment made by the tribunal for the killing of - as the indictment says - "literally tens of thousands of people in the Kibuye area.
As yet, there is no one against whom the evidence can be used in a courtroom, and - until courtrooms are built in Arusha, where the tribunal is based - no courtrooms in which it can be heard.
In the chain of evidence, the missing link is - almost predictably for a U.N. investigation - the suspects. They were indicted by prosecutor Richard Goldstone in December without being named.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)