smith-wagner

DNA Identification

Lindsay A Smith
Sarah Wagner
Harvard U

From Tsunami-devastated nations to New Orleans, from El Salvador to New York, DNA identification has become an important tool in the aftermaths of disaster and conflict. Once at the center of debates about genetic reductionism and racial essentialism, DNA testing now serves as a standard part of international responses to large-scale “missing persons” cases and as a core component of reconstruction and repair. The hype of its reparative potential, however, often exceeds or misreads the technology’s actual impact.

Excessive confidence in genetic identification technologies comes as no surprise, at least in the US. Primetime shows like CSI thrive on the public’s fascination with the seemingly magical crime-solving powers of forensic science, and they help construct the assumption that DNA testing will deliver unequivocal truths in a messy world. Far from such sci-fi portrayals, some American courtrooms provide juries with special instructions about the processes of forensic science to counter-exaggerated expectations fostered by the so-called “CSI effect.” Undoubtedly, DNA has entered the mainstream American lexicon, regularly cast as the definitive resolution to profound moral dilemmas of truth and justice.

Founded in October 1977, the Association of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo seeks the return of children who disappeared during Argentina’s dirty war. Photo courtesy National Security Archives

Yet the use of genetic testing to resolve missing persons cases has a history that extends far beyond the US. In places as distant as Argentina and former Yugoslavia, forensic experts have incorporated DNA-based identification systems into larger projects of post-conflict reparations and social reconstruction. The results of these costly tests, however, have not translated into stabilizing narratives of past violence or uncontested claims of biological identity expected by advocates. Its failure to act as a technology of repair in such contexts suggests that DNA testing, like other mechanisms of restoration and reparation, is socially constituted and deeply politicized.

Producing the “Facts”
In former Yugoslavia, proponents of the DNA-based identification efforts have promoted the technology as an arbiter in debates surrounding numbers and types of victims of the region’s armed conflicts during the 1990s. Samples collected from surviving family members become another means of tabulating missing persons. Only relatives of the missing, the logic goes, would venture to dab their pin-pricked fingers onto bloodstain cards in asserting the disappearance of loved ones.

Bodies recovered and bone samples tested lend credence to these same claims. In the case of Srebrenica, the largest massacre of the Bosnian war in which some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed, DNA matches have identified the remains of over 2,500 victims. Bosnian Muslims hold these numbers up to their Bosnian Serb and Serb counterparts, demanding recognition of their losses. But the increased focus on counting the Srebrenica victims has led other ethno-national groups to compile their own casualty lists. Rather than assuaging tensions, facts and figures generated from the DNA technology have added grist to the mill of ethno-nationalist politics within the region.

Identifying Argentina’s “Living Disappeared”
At the height of the 1976–83 Argentine dictatorship, when 30,000 young adults were “disappeared,” a group of women known as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo mobilized to recover their kidnapped grandchildren, born in captivity to their disappeared daughters and sons. Working with international scientists, the Grandmothers were the first group worldwide to organize around genetic identification technologies to prove relatedness in the absence of the parental generation.

In over two decades of transitional justice, and despite tremendous scientific advancements, only 85 of the 600 missing grandchildren have been identified. This failure of a seemingly straightforward scientific test suggests how questions of individual identity, notions of family and state accountability are integral to the technology itself.

Among activists, DNA identification speaks of true identity; in the courtroom, that same result proves the democratic state’s commitment to redress; and for the kidnapped child, now an adult, this knowledge of biological identity often results in the only parents she had ever known being immediately arrested for crimes against humanity. Thus DNA is not a deus ex machina able to provide unmitigated closure, but rather a scientific technology incapable of answering the central questions in a post-conflict society.

Lessons for the Future?
As reports of mass graves periodically surface in Iraq and commentators draw parallels to past conflict zones such as former Yugoslavia, expectations about how best to respond to victims of mass violence also arise.

If Argentina and former Yugoslavia’s DNA identification efforts can provide any lessons, they illustrate the need to check assumptions about the technology’s impact. While the importance of identification to surviving families should be recognized, expectations of “closure” or the potential for reconciliation are often misplaced if not misguided. “Truth” in the form of matching DNA samples does not equal nor guarantee justice in the minds of many surviving families, their communities and their political leaders.

Lindsay A Smith is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Harvard University. Sarah Wagner is a lecturer in anthropology at Harvard University. Both are involved in an ongoing project exploring the theme of “technologies of repair.”