 |
Clea Koff (born 1972) is a British-born American forensic anthropologist and author who worked several years for the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR; 2 missions) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (5 missions) in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, and in 2000 in Kosovo.
Koff, who is mixed-race and Jewish, was born in 1972 to a Tanzanian mother, Msindo Mwinyipembe, and an American father, David Koff, both documentary filmmakers focused on human rights issues. Her parents took her and her older brother, Kimera, with them around the world. She spent her childhood in England, Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, and the United States. By the time she was a teenager she had decided to study human osteology, which she did first in California. She earned her bachelor's degree in anthropology from Stanford University. [1]
Koff went on to the master's program in forensic anthropology at the University of Arizona. She completed her master's degree in 1999 at the University of Nebraska, after combining her studies with working for the UN between 1996 and 2000. As a 23-year-old graduate student studying prehistoric skeletons in California, Koff joined a small team of UN scientists exhuming victims of the genocide in Rwanda. Her job was to find evidence to bring the perpetrators to trial, and to help relatives to identify their loved ones.
Koff captured the events in her memoir The Bone Woman: Among the dead in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo (Random House) which was published in 2004 in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, Argentina, and Canada, 2005 in France and Denmark, 2006 in Norway, Italy, and Portugal, and 2007 in Poland.
Koff's crime fiction debut, Freezing, part of the Jayne & Steelie Mystery Series, was published by Severn House in the UK in August 2011 and in the US in December 2011. French rights for the book have been acquired by Editions Héloïse d'Ormesson. [2] Passing is the title of the second book in the series, which is not yet published.
Koff is represented by Ellen Levine, Executive Vice President of Trident Media Group. [3]
Koff founded in 2005 The Missing Persons Identification Resource Center (MPID), a non-profit organization, based in Los Angeles, which is about "essentially linking families with missing persons [in the US] with the Coroner's Office which hold thousands of unidentified bodies". The center closed in 2012. [4]
When remains of Mitrice Richardson were recovered in Dark Canyon, Koff consulted on the case of the 24-year-old woman who went missing after being released from the Lost Hills Sheriff's Station. Koff raised objections regarding the handling of the remains during the investigation, and criticized the Los Angeles Sheriff's department suggestion that Richardson's clothing was removed by animals. Koff, with members of Richardson's family, found a finger bone of Richardson's at the site months after the coroner's second search of the area. [5]
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was a body of the United Nations that was established to prosecute the war crimes that had been committed during the Yugoslav Wars and to try their perpetrators. The tribunal was an ad hoc court located in The Hague, Netherlands.
The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place in the SFR Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001. The conflicts both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia, which began in mid-1991, into six independent countries matching the six entities known as republics that had previously constituted Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia. SFR Yugoslavia's constituent republics declared independence due to unresolved tensions between ethnic minorities in the new countries, which fuelled the wars. While most of the conflicts ended through peace accords that involved full international recognition of new states, they resulted in a massive number of deaths as well as severe economic damage to the region.
The Bosnian War was an international armed conflict that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The war is commonly seen as having started on 6 April 1992, following a number of earlier violent incidents. The war ended on 14 December 1995 when the Dayton accords were signed. The main belligerents were the forces of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and those of Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia and Republika Srpska, proto-states led and supplied by Croatia and Serbia, respectively.
Carla Del Ponte is a former Chief Prosecutor of two United Nations international criminal law tribunals. A former Swiss attorney general, she was appointed prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in August 1999, replacing Louise Arbour.
The Lion, the Fox & the Eagle: A Story of Generals and Justice in Rwanda and Yugoslavia is a non-fiction book by Canadian journalist Carol Off. The hardcover edition was published in November 2000 by Random House Canada. The writing was favourably received and the book was short-listed for the Shaughnessy Cohen Award for Political Writing. With numerous interviews and extensive research behind it, the book presents biographies of three Canadians in United Nations roles in the 1990s: Roméo Dallaire, Lewis MacKenzie, and Louise Arbour.
The Croatian War of Independence was fought from 1991 to 1995 between Croat forces loyal to the Government of Croatia—which had declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)—and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and local Serb forces, with the JNA ending its combat operations in Croatia by 1992. In Croatia, the war is primarily referred to as the "Homeland War" and also as the "Greater-Serbian Aggression". In Serbian sources, "War in Croatia" and (rarely) "War in Krajina" are used.
Jovan "Jovica" Stanišić is a Serbian former intelligence officer who served as the head of the State Security Service (SDB) within the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Serbia from 1992 until 1998. He was removed from the position in October 1998, months after the outbreak of Kosovo War.
Joint criminal enterprise (JCE) is a legal doctrine used during war crimes tribunals to allow the prosecution of members of a group for the actions of the group. This doctrine considers each member of an organized group individually responsible for crimes committed by group within the common plan or purpose. It arose through the application of the idea of common purpose and has been applied by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to prosecute political and military leaders for mass war crimes, including genocide, committed during the Yugoslav Wars 1991–1999.
David Richard Koff was an American maker of documentary films, social activist, writer, researcher, and editor. His interest in social and economic justice has shaped a career largely spent exploring human rights, colonialism, resistance movements, racism, labor unions, and the oppression and exploitation of undocumented workers in America. However, he veered from political concerns long enough to write and co-produce the film People of the Wind, for which, in 1976, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.
Ratko Mladić is a Bosnian Serb former military officer and convicted war criminal who led the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) during the Yugoslav Wars. In 2017, he was found guilty of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
EwaElvira Klonowski is a forensic anthropologist. She took political refuge in Iceland in 1981, following the declaration of martial law in the People's Republic of Poland. She has been living in Reykjavik, Iceland since 1982. In 1996, she began working on individual and mass graves exhumation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since then, she has been responsible for the excavation and identification of over 2,000 victims, and in 2005 she was nominated to the list of the 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Slobodan Milošević was a Serbian–Yugoslav politician who was the president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 until his оverthrow in 2000. Formerly a high-ranking member of the League of Communists of Serbia (SKS) during the 1980s, he led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990 until his death in 2006. Milošević played a major role in the Yugoslav Wars. During his reign, numerous anti-government and anti-war protests took place, and hundreds of thousands deserted the Milošević-controlled Yugoslav People's Army, leading to mass emigration from Serbia. During the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Milošević was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes in connection with the Bosnian War, the Croatian War of Independence, and the Kosovo War. He became the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes.
Amor Mašović, is a Bosnian politician and Chairman of the Bosnian Federal Commission for Missing Persons. During the Bosnian War, Amor Mašović was the person responsible on the Bosnian government side for negotiating prisoner exchanges and was involved in the ultimately fruitless negotiations for the exchange of Col. Avdo Palić, the "disappeared" commander of the enclave of Žepa.
The Doboj ethnic cleansing refers to war crimes, including murder, deportation, persecution and wanton destruction, committed against Bosniaks and Croats in the Doboj area by the Yugoslav People's Army and Serb paramilitary units from May until September 1992 during the Bosnian war. On 26 September 1997, Serb soldier Nikola Jorgić was found guilty by the Düsseldorf Oberlandesgericht on 11 counts of genocide involving the murder of 30 persons in the Doboj region, making it the first Bosnian Genocide prosecution. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) classified it as a crime against humanity and sentenced seven Serb officials.
During the Yugoslav Wars, members of the Serbian Radical Party conducted a campaign of intimidation and persecution against the Croats of Serbia through hate speech. These acts forced a part of the local Croat population to leave the area in 1992. Most of them were resettled in Croatia. The affected locations included Hrtkovci, Nikinci, Novi Slankamen, Ruma, Šid, and other places bordering Croatia. According to some estimates, around 10,000 Croats left Vojvodina under political pressure in three months of 1992, and a total of 20,000 fled by the end of the year. Between 20,000 and 25,000 to 30,000 according to Human Rights NGOs to 50,000 Croats fled Vojvodina in the 1990s in total. Another 6,000 left Kosovo and 5,000 Serbia Proper, including Belgrade.
Ethnic cleansing occurred during the Bosnian War (1992–95) as large numbers of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats were forced to flee their homes or were expelled by the Army of Republika Srpska and Serb paramilitaries. Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs had also been forced to flee or were expelled by Bosnian Croat forces, though on a restricted scale and in lesser numbers. The UN Security Council Final Report (1994) states while Bosniaks also engaged in "grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law", they "have not engaged in "systematic ethnic cleansing"". According to the report, "there is no factual basis for arguing that there is a 'moral equivalence' between the warring factions".
The war crimes trial of Slobodan Milošević, the former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) lasted for just over four years from 2002 until his death in 2006. Milošević faced 66 counts of crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes committed during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. He pleaded not guilty to all the charges.
Mitrice Lavon Richardson was a 24-year-old African-American woman who went missing on September 17, 2009, after police claim she was released from a jail at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station, where she had been taken after behaving erratically at a restaurant. She was missing for 11 months before being found deceased in August 2010 by park rangers.
Agnieszka Klonowiecka-Milart is a Polish judge and member of the United Nations Dispute Tribunal. She was formerly a judge of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and Supreme Court of Kosovo.
Erin H. Kimmerle is an American forensic anthropologist, artist, and executive director of the Institute of Forensic Anthropology & Applied Science at the University of South Florida. She was awarded the 2020 AAAS Award for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
