Yale Bulletin and Calendar

May 7, 2004|Volume 32, Number 29|Two-Week Issue

Margaret Samuels

Yale counselor helped ease grief of
war-torn families in Kosovo and Iraq

In what is called Europe's worst massacre of civilians since World War II, some 8,000 men and boys were slaughtered when Bosnian Serbs overtook the U.N.-protected zone of Srebrenica, Bosnia, in the summer of 1995.

Before the massacre, in a scene reminiscent of the Holocaust, the men were ordered into a line that separated them from the women and children in their families. As they were being hauled away, many tried to flee through the woods, but few survived. The others were shot and dumped in mass graves throughout Bosnia.

Three years after the massacre, social worker Margaret Samuels discovered that many of Srebrenica's women clung to the hope that their loved ones were still alive, thinking they might be in hiding or in prison.

Samuels, now the clinical administrator of the Yale Child Study Center's Childhood Violent Trauma Center and a clinical instructor in social work, went to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1998 to help prepare family members for the grimmer but more likely reality: that their missing husbands, sons, brothers and grandsons were dead.

She was then a psychosocial director for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), working as part of a team of international and local professionals and volunteers that included forensic investigators.

Samuels met with individuals and families to collect information that might help identify the bodies being exhumed from the mass gravesites in Bosnia. She supported the family members as they were asked what clothes their loved ones were wearing when last seen, whether they had on jewelry, had tattoos or had ever broken a bone -- anything that might help identify their corpse. Information gleaned from these conversations was then matched with a database on the exhumed bodies.

Putting to use her training in trauma counseling, she then delicately explained to the family members what they might experience as part of the identification process, which sometimes involved viewing their loved ones' remains. She also advised local teams on how best to help surviving family members through the traumatic process of learning the fate of the missing, and counseled the grieving when positive identifications of bodies were made.

"It was quite overwhelming for everybody," says the Yale social worker. "Most of the people killed were non-combatants. Some were as young as 13 or 14. ... In some cases, we were thrown out of the homes we visited because people didn't want to accept the likelihood that their missing loved ones were dead."

About a year later, Samuels went to Kosovo, where she spent a year doing similar work. This time, she arrived just days after the cease-fire, and the exhumation of mass gravesites was just beginning. War crimes investigators had estimated that more than 10,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed in a Serbian campaign to decimate the population.

Samuels was working as part of a project to collect and document ante mortem data, undertaken jointly by PHR and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

In Kosovo, the Yale social worker provided crisis counseling for traumatized family members, many of whom were on hand as decomposed bodies were being lifted from mass graves. As in Bosnia, there was not yet a procedure in place to perform DNA matching to identify the dead.

"It is a very heartbreaking process," says Samuels, who developed psychosocial protocols in both Bosnia and Kosovo for the international effort to document the war crimes and identify the victims of mass murder. She also helped train staff members involved with the projects, including those working for various non-governmental organizations.

Her concern for the families of mass murder victims in war-torn nations has since taken her to Iraq, where she traveled last summer -- in the thick of the war -- as a Yale faculty expert and part of a PHR team to begin assessing the psychosocial needs of families there with missing persons. These include many Kurds in northern Iraq believed to have been killed by nerve and mustard gas in a campaign perpetrated by Saddam Hussein, as well as those who met their death in Iraqi prisons, which are renowned for human rights abuses.

"Having seen Bosnia, you think that Srebrenica might be a lesson, that it would prevent a similar widespread demonstration of -- to use a cliché -- 'man's inhumanity to man,'" says Samuels. "Well, it happened again in Kosovo, and in Iraq, and we're now hearing about massacres in the Sudan. So it continues to raise the question: How do you stop it before it starts?"

In Iraq, Samuels' team began to assess the existing mental health infrastructure and its capacity for handling the needs of traumatized families.

"Traumatic events generally involve threats to life or to body, or to close personal encounters with violence and death, including witnessing the death of others," explains Samuels. "The common denominator of psychological trauma is the feeling of intense fear, helplessness and loss of control, and threat of annihilation. In Iraq, many individuals, families and communities are suffering the effects of cumulative trauma. Over many years the Iraqi population has lived through three major wars, the threat of execution, religious and cultural repression, and various other threats. These traumatic events must be examined within their context."

While in Iraq, Samuels and the PHR team visited a site that was identified as a mass burial ground for young Kurdish infants and children. Their parents were among several thousand expelled Kurds who in 1988 were put in prison and denied food and water. The witness reported that as the children died, their mothers would throw their bodies over the gate so individuals outside could bury them. Sometimes, more kindly prison guards would allow those individuals to come inside the prison to take the children's corpses. They would then wash and bury the bodies in secret.

"If exhumed, this grave has the potential to have a major psychological impact on families, the communities, and the war crimes and humanitarian workers in Iraq," Samuels says.

The social worker notes that the work of documenting mass murder and identifying the dead takes its toll on the professionals involved, who can also experience personal grief during the process.

"Professionals -- including forensic and mental health workers and others working with the families involved in the exhumation and identification process -- want to help the families very much, but at the same time they can only do what they can," Samuels comments. "It is important for professionals to be aware of their own feelings around death and grieving. Many professionals have suffered loss. We must be aware of our suffering and how it impacts us, in order to be helpful to others."

This fact was brought home to Samuels while she counseled victims, survivors, and recovery and relief workers following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Samuels was then the director of clinical programs for Safe Horizon, a mental health facility in New York. She lived in lower Manhattan and had relatives who lived and worked in the same area, including a brother-in-law who is a firefighter.

"The complete shock of the event mirrored my experiences in the former Yugoslavia but felt much more personal and close due to the proximity of it," says Samuels.

At the Yale Childhood Violent Trauma Center, Samuels, as a member of an experienced team of clinicians headed by Dr. Steven Marans, evaluates and treats children and families who have been exposed to a violent, criminal or other potentially traumatic event. The children and families are referred through the Child Development Community Policing Program, a partnership between the New Haven Police and the Child Study Center. The Childhood Violent Trauma Center is a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration-funded National Child Traumatic Stress Network initiative.

Her previous experience includes working with homeless individuals in Florida, serving as a social worker for children in foster care, and working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Romania.

"The resiliency of the populations both home and abroad that I have come in contact with continually amazes me," says Samuels. "When I think of the burdens they carry with them, whether it is surviving an abusive relationship or surviving torture at the hands of a sadistic ruler, it encourages me and gives me strength to do this job and assist future victims.

"With each event the hope is that through the prosecution of those that have committed crimes, and the education and support of the survivors, maybe the next event can be averted," she adds.

-- By Susan Gonzalez

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