Initially the 298 victims of the attack had been left to lie where they fell, but finally over the first weekend, beginning on Saturday 19 July, a chaotic clean-up operation began. Young men and emergency workers, armed with body bags and green plastic gloves, were sent into the fields to retrieve bodies. On Sunday 20 July, local rescue workers claimed that they had found most of the corpses—some of them largely intact, others mangled—and that they were now in the process of transporting them.
By early afternoon, the line of body bags had expanded from very few to very many. From a logbook kept by a Torez firefighter, Sergei Michenco, it became clear that most bodies had been found in the area of Hrabove. According to Sergei’s logbook, 282 more or less intact bodies were found at the three crash sites, plus an additional eighty-seven body parts. The remains of the victims were now lined along the roads at Hrabove, Rozsypne and Petropavlivka. The Dutch and Australians were frantically negotiating with the authorities to have the bodies transferred from the crash site to Ukraine-controlled territory so they could finally be brought home.
Later that day these bodies, wrapped in black plastic, were piled high onto the back of trucks in the sweltering heat before being carted off to a refrigerated train waiting at Torez, twelve kilometres away but still well within rebel territory. For the families, those scenes of the bodies heaped onto the trucks was the most undignified and painful sight imaginable. By now the news coverage of the disaster had become so upsetting that most families and friends had simply stopped watching it.
In Melbourne on Sunday 20 July, the International AIDS Conference was held. Some 12,000 delegates were expected to attend the three-day conference, but it soon became known that six delegates, among them the most brilliant minds in the HIV field, would be absent. On the Saturday night the names of those killed when their plane was shot down over eastern Ukraine were revealed: the former society president and professor of medicine Joep Lange, his partner and Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development public health official Jacqueline van Tongeren, AIDS lobbyists Pim de Kuijer and Martine de Schutter, director of support at the Female Health Company Lucie van Mens, and World Health Organization media coordinator Glenn Thomas.
Red HIV ribbons adorned the doors of buildings throughout the precinct and people wore them on their shirts; these symbols of the conference taking place had now also become a sign of remembrance for the six researchers. Distraught and teary-eyed delegates pushed past the cameras as they headed into the building.
During the minute’s silence that was held in memory of those who had died, the devastation and anger in the room became palpable, more so because what had happened appeared to be not just an accident. If it were established that the plane had been shot from the skies, that would turn the death of nearly three hundred people, including their six colleagues, into an act of murder.
Chapter 17
Outrage
Shortly after the crash, rumours started circulating in the news that the separatists controlling the area where MH17 was brought down had recovered its black boxes and were now considering what to do with them. For the investigators of the Dutch Safety Board, the black boxes were a crucial find. After any plane crash investigators always turn for answers to the plane’s flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR), known as the black boxes.
Because they did not trust the Ukrainian authorities, the separatists’ first instinct was to send the boxes to Moscow for further examination, but the Ukrainians protested that they in turn did not trust Russia. The parties finally agreed to hand over the flight data recorder and the voice cockpit recorder to the owners of the plane, the Malaysians.
In a bizarre late-night press conference on 21 July, Alexander Borodai handed the black boxes over to a Malaysian delegation at the headquarters of his self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in Donetsk. ‘Here they are, the black boxes,’ said Borodai, guarded by a group of Kalashnikov-wielding rebels, as an armed rebel soldier placed the bright orange boxes on a desk. ‘Today is a quite important day in the history of the Donetsk People’s Republic,’ he added.
The visibly uneasy and probably terrified Malaysians thanked ‘His Excellency Mr Borodai’ for agreeing to the transfer and Colonel Mohamed Sakri of the Malaysian National Security Council said the two black boxes appeared ‘in good condition’.
The voice recording could hold crucial information: the audio from the cockpit, in particular, might show if the plane had crashed due to other circumstances or, if it was indeed struck by a missile, whether the pilots knew their plane had been hit. The black boxes weren’t going to solve the mystery of who downed the Malaysian airliner, but the flight data recorder would give investigators information about engine settings, pressurisation and electronic communications, among other details. Handing over the black boxes was a significant step forward in an investigation that had been stalled for days.
After the handover the Malaysian delegation negotiated with Borodai into the early hours of the next morning. The result appeared to be a deal that secured the safe passage of the MH17 victims’ bodies out of the rebel-held territory and unfettered access to the crash site for international investigators. But in return the Malaysians had offered the rebels a semblance of legitimacy with their thanks to ‘His Excellency Mr Borodai’.
In spite of the progress made by the Malaysians, widespread international outrage continued to mount in Western capitals. The rebels and their suspected allies in Moscow were being accused of tampering with evidence and insulting victims’ families.
In the hours after the bodies arrived at Torez, it became evident that yet another delay had arisen. The separatists were refusing to allow the bodies in the refrigerated carriages to go any further. In the days to come this makeshift morgue—four windowless wagons housing hundreds of bodies and body parts—would become the scene of a tug of war in what evolved into an international squabbling match.
The pro-Russian separatists distrusted Ukraine’s authorities and wanted the train to head for a city under separatist control. The Dutch, Australians and Malaysians wanted the train to go to Kharkiv, which was under Ukrainian government control. The separatists, in turn, said they would hand over the bodies only to international representatives, not to Ukrainians. But the separatists also explained that letting the train head for Kharkiv meant that the bodies as well as the forensic team would be subject to dangers on the 128-kilometre route. There was still heavy fighting going on, one of them told the team, and the twenty-eight kilometres to the Russian border was a much safer and quicker option. From there the bodies could be transported to any destination, whatever the wishes of the forensic teams or their superiors.
Pierre Chardome, brother of the dead Belgian entrepreneur Benoit Chardome, accused the rebels of using the bodies as a means of blackmaiclass="underline" ‘How can you even consider such a thing?’ Jijar Singh Sandhu, the 71-year-old father of Malaysia Airlines flight attendant Sanjid Singh Sandhu, appealed to the rebels (‘I believe that they are all human beings with feelings’) and pleaded with them to ‘please let us have our loved ones’. Tracey Withers, the twin sister of WHO media coordinator Glenn Thomas, commented that: ‘We just want them to show some compassion and let people in to try and get the bodies back.’