People - The policeman who dug out the horrors of Srebrenica

PARIS: There are cops who enjoy the limelight on television, and then there are the ones who do the work. Jean-René Ruez is the second kind. He went in with his own shovel to search for evidence - "multiple human remains" - while chief investigator in Srebrenica, where thousands of Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered in July 1995 in the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.
Ruez, a senior French police officer, was the central figure in establishing the facts about those murders. He knows better than anyone how as many as 8,000 men and boys fleeing Srebrenica were rounded up by Bosnian Serb forces, shot, buried and then reburied in mass graves to hide the evidence of what has been officially classified as genocide.
Since leaving the Bosnia investigation in 2001, Ruez has taken cases of videotapes, files and other evidence around the world with him to have proof on hand when called to testify against suspected war criminals. Today, although he has moved into a less harrowing line of police work, he continues to pursue what he sees as an unfinished quest for justice.
"One must not believe that it's an obsession for me," Ruez, 47, said in an interview. Nonetheless, he said, he is prepared to testify at any time against men wanted for war crimes at Srebrenica, especially Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb military and civilian leaders, who are still at large.
"It's totally unacceptable, once the evidence is out and the courts have ruled that the crime must be labeled genocide, that only the henchmen of Mladic and Karadzic are currently in custody and on trial," Ruez said. "I've been cross-examined I think five times. I have no pleasure going to testify. I'm not eager. I'm just eager for justice to be done. Not just for the victims, but for all Europeans - and all humankind."

Ruez was so marked by his experience in Bosnia that even his jaunty smile cannot erase the permanent shadow in his eyes. He asked that his current whereabouts not be disclosed out of concern that certain Srebrenica perpetrators might hold a grudge.
He is soon to emerge from the shadows, however, with the release this autumn of a French feature film about his work, "Resolution 819," directed by Georges Campana and starring Benoît Magimel as Ruez.
Before being named to head what became the biggest criminal investigation in Europe since World War II, Ruez must have seemed an unlikely crusader for justice. He was head of the crime squad in the palm-studded city of Nice, having learned during his police training "the incredible fun of chasing criminals."
Yet in many ways, he said, his early years prepared him for a broader mission. Although his father was French, his mother was German, and while raising him in the leafy Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud, she conveyed the guilt she felt about Nazi atrocities. Later, during military service in Germany, he had a taste of geopolitics when pacifists - "very aggressive pacifists" - beat up the young French troops to oppose the deployment of nuclear missiles on or near German soil.
After the army, Ruez studied law and entered the elite French police commissioners' school. He went to work for the criminal police, in Paris, Marseille and then Nice, where in 1994 he got word that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia wanted to hire police investigators.
"I signed up immediately," Ruez said, "because I had the strong feeling that this war would be investigated and that the war criminals would be punished. In Europe it was so unacceptable - with the experience we had of World War II - that such crimes not be investigated and punished. And I absolutely wanted to be part of that."
Ruez joined the tribunal in The Hague in April 1995 and was sent straight into the field.
"I was part of the group investigating the siege of Sarajevo in July 1995 when Srebrenica fell and the first press rumors came out of a massacre," he said.
In the chaos of the Yugoslav wars, Srebrenica had been designated a United Nations "safe area," but the West stood by as the mainly Muslim-populated town was besieged by Bosnian Serbs. When the town fell on July 11 and 12, panicked refugees sought shelter at a UN compound, but the Dutch UN forces in charge were overwhelmed by the advancing Serbs. Muslim men were separated from the women, tortured and shot. Separately, a column of men and boys headed north, but many were captured and killed by Serbs.

Media reports of the outrages being committed were minimal, with reporters unable to get to the rugged area and few survivors able to reach the outside world. By the time Ruez reached the Bosnian Muslim city of Tuzla on July 20, just one witness had come forward. That was his starting point.
"When the Srebrenica investigation began, the first phase was to reconstruct the events," Ruez said. He relied on witnesses. Photographs taken by U.S. U-2 reconnaissance planes were available, but virtually useless without help from survivors. "A U-2 picture is 30 kilometers square," Ruez said. "You can zoom into that picture, but you need to know what to be looking for."
Ruez and his multinational team of investigators - from the United States, Britain, Sweden, Norway, Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand - had to find proof of the reported slaughter: human remains, in other words. As more than 8,000 people were missing, the task was enormous.
The investigators located some burial sites, thanks largely to the accounts of witnesses. But just before the Bosnian peace process got under way in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, "the Serbs removed the bodies from the mass graves" and reburied them in secret new locations. This at first eluded the investigators.
"We were under the surveillance of Serbian intelligence in 1996," Ruez recalled. "They knew we had found the initial burial places. But they were laughing and drinking slivovitz in the evening because they knew that the evidence of the crime had been erased."
Gradually Ruez's team grasped what had happened. "For example, we would find only 110 bodies clustered at a site where our information indicated that 1,200 people had been murdered. And some of these 110 bodies had been sliced into with bulldozers. So it was obvious they had been moved."
Once the investigators were sure about the deception - "a crime within a crime," Ruez calls it - they used aerial images to try to locate the secondary graves. Experts went in with "pick-and-sniff" probes. When they scented evidence of human remains, Ruez got out his shovel.
The secondary graves "were disseminated in remote places littered with land mines," he recalled. "Every time I went in, I was astounded to come out with two legs."
When Ruez finally left the tribunal in 2001, he was so exhausted that he took a two-year leave of absence, moving to the Caribbean and taking his files with him. When he returned to police work in France, he brought them back.
"I carry my files with me wherever I go," said Ruez, who now works in a sunny, air-conditioned office and has a desk covered in papers - old newspaper articles about Srebrenica, but also a list of local restaurants and bars. He is posted at a French embassy annex, where he helps the local police fight everything from clandestine immigration to forest fires.
In his new incarnation far from the killing fields, Ruez has not given up his quest to remind the public that Mladic is still at large. For Serbia to join the European Union, he contends, it will first have to deliver the general who led the Bosnian Serb assault.
"Integrating Serbia with Mladic out there? I'm sorry. I won't feel European," he said, citing the slogan he used with his team: "No peace without justice."