By ROMEL REGALADO BAGARES
COTABATO CITY.–Peruvian forensic anthropologist Dr. Jose Pablo Baraybar didn’t like what he saw when he visited for the first time Sunday the massacre site in Barangay Salman, Ampatuan town.
“It reminded me of something—it’s just like Rwanda,” said Dr. Baraybar after spending a few hours in the area in the company of Commission on Human Rights Chair Leila M. De Lima, British forensic investigator Chris Cobb Smith and lawyers from the Center for International Law (Centerlaw).
Baraybar said the “topography of the crime” in Ampatuan town is eerily similar to that he had found as a United Nations expert serving in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
Barren hills, marked in places by an occasional clump of nipa huts, flanked a narrow dirt road that led to the scene of the carnage that claimed the lives of at least 57 people, including at least 29 journalists.
As he surveyed the area, Baraybar shook his head, remarking, “This is exactly the kind of topography that unfortunately provides an incentive for acts of impunity—its sheer remoteness keeps away public attention.”
In 1994, the genocide in Rwanda broke out and saw the systematic killing of some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in less than 100 days by the Hutus. The East-Central African country, known as the “land of a thousand hills,” has an economy supported for the most part by subsistence agriculture.
The Peruvian expert and his British counterpart—both of whom also worked on the same cases for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia—are doing a preliminary assessment of what still needs to be done at the crime scene, following the evidence-gathering already accomplished by police and National Bureau of Investigation investigators.
Baraybar heads a team of forensic investigators and lawyers deputized by the CHR to conduct an independent parallel investigation on the Ampatuan massacre. He also directed the Office on Missing Persons and Forensics of the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo.
He first came to the country to lecture in an international conference on the investigation and prosecution of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and torture held in Davao last year under Centerlaw’s auspices.
(Romel Regalado Bagares is executive director of the Center for International Law, a member of the Southeast Asia Media Defense Network.)