Since then, she has been responsible for the excavation and identification of over 2,000 victims,[3] and in 2005 she was nominated to the list of the 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize.
[4] Dr. Klonowski has completed courses at the University of Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, France, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. She is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.
[5] In 1996, she began working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Hague in 1996[2][5] on individual and mass graves exhumation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Since then, she has worked with the Bosniak Commission on Missing Persons,[2] Physicians for Human Rights,[6] as director of the Monitoring Exhumations Project of International Forensic Program, and as a member of Forensic Experts Team of the State Commission for Tracing the Missing Persons, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
[7] In 1996, Dr. Klonowski left her position as a specialist in paternity inquiries[2] to work excavating mass graves throughout Bosnia.
"[4] Since beginning her work in Bosnia, Dr. Klonowski has played a critical role in helping many grieving families identify their missing loved ones.
[8] Klonowski explained to BBC that her interest in identifying the dead goes back to the exhumation of her grandfather from the Katyn Forest massacre in Poland, 1940.
When someone you love dies, you bury them or perhaps scatter the ashes (...) Our human reaction is to have a place to go and sit or pray or put a candle or a flower.
"[4] Klonowski's project, to attempt to exhume and identify all of the victims of the Bosnian war "was not an easy one to start nor has it been straightforward to carry out.
Once those carrying out the massacre realized that the outside world knew what was happening, they began moving bodies to more and more remote sites.
Of the two thousand bodies which Dr. Konowski has exhumed, she has "fished them out of wells, hauled them out of caves, dug them out of rubbish tips or from under piles of pig bones”[3] In his book Like Eating A Stone, Wojciech Tochman described one of Dr. Klonowski's excavations.
First, sappers and a speleologist enter the site - often a cave or open pit - in order to reconnoitre and to check for mines.
He said the pit was twenty metres deep, a beautiful chimney-shaped cave; it had honey-beige walls and was full of stalagmites.
[4] Eva (Ewa) Klonowski first worked for the US-based Physicians for Human Rights, a contractor for the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal.
The initiative receives significant external funding, and when asked, Klonowski said, "God forbid [that the excavations be completed].
She has found my son for me and has promised to find the other”[3] In Like Eating A Stone, Klonowski recounted the reactions of some family members which particularly stood out in her memory:"In one factory where we were examining bones, I heard a woman sobbing near a body bag.
The ambulance crew wanted to take it off her but I told them they would have to cut her hands off first.Another woman once sat quietly patting some bones.
She is unique in this respect - Tochman writes, "In the places where Ewa doesn’t go, no-one is particularly concerned whether a skull fits a spine.
[4] In 2002, Dr. Klonowski was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland by President Aleksander Kwaśniewski[5] In 2005, her name was added to the list on a joint application called 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize.
[12] Dr. Klonowski has published a textbook and over 20 academic and popular articles[5] including: Her most-referenced paper is Stature Estimation for Bosnian Male Population,[20] which developed new formulae to estimate the stature of Bosnian men by the length of the femur, tibia, and fibula.
[18] Published in 2006, the paper has since been referenced by numerous other researchers studying the prediction of stature based on ratio to other bones, in locations such as North India, Croatia, Malaysia, Japan, and Korea.