I arrived at BIRN, nervously punctual, just before nine on the Monday morning. I needn’t have bothered: there was no answer to my first ring of the doorbell, nor my second a minute later. Just as I was beginning to think I’d got the wrong building—despite the “BIRN” logo on the buzzer—a figure bustled past me and into the building.
“Oprostite,” I asked. “BIRN—do you know it?”
“BIRN? I’m a journalist there!” He shook my hand, and we went up the stairs—the first to arrive for the week. Perhaps everyone was hungover from the previous week’s regional meeting in Montenegro—who knows? As it turns out nobody really knew, about me anyway. The director, with whom I’d arranged my internship, was in a meeting all day; and so I was left somewhat in the lurch. Everyone was friendly and made polite introductions, but they had work to do, and I couldn’t impose; and so, after being given some books and DVDs from which to learn more about BIRN, I was sent on my way, only an couple of hours after I had arrived. It wasn’t the most glorious start, but it was a start nevertheless.
After a day of research on Tuesday, Wednesday was my first “real” day—my first visit to the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where war crimes from the 1992–95 war are being tried. A short trolley bus journey from the office, the court sits in a squat, orange-painted building surrounding by plain but well-tended gardens; in its former guise the site was, in an appropriately ironic twist, a barracks of the Serbian-controlled JNA (Yugoslav National Army), the military force that had—in tandem with various paramilitary and mercenary forces—wreaked such havoc across the region in the 1990s.
The court lies ringed by a tall, metal fence; entrance to it is via a small security outpost, manned by unfailingly jovial guards and containing an X-ray machine and metal detector. Somewhat disconcertingly, I set off the metal detecter every time I went through it, but each time I was waved through with a smile. Perhaps it was the press badge; perhaps there is no real threat. The court has, after all, been running for five years now without serious incident, and if anything the public’s interest is waning: even the most controversial trials attract crowds only to sentencing, and the others do not even attract media coverage. In every trial I went to during my first week, BIRN—who cover every trial as a rule—were the only media organisation present.
Santayana’s famous remark—that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it—has become the most trite and overused of aphorisms, but it seems genuinely appropriate here: it is only fifteen years after this particular past, and already it is being wilfully forgotten. It an often well-meaning amnesia, of course. Why dwell on the trauma of history? Why resurrect the ghosts that seem finally to have been vanquished?
It is a dangerous attitude, though. Already there are adults, people in their twenties, who have no memory at all of the realities of the war, but who are subject to precisely the same rhetoric that began the conflicts of the 1990s. As Šešelj, Milošević, Tuđman, Karadžić, and their ilk appealed to a distorted false memory of the crimes of World War II, so nationalists now appeal to their own twisted truth of the 1990s in justifying further tension, further ill-feeling.
How, without truth, can we avoid the fatalistic and disgusting assertion that the Balkans somehow, inevitably, is subject to some fifty year cycle of bloodletting? This is why the court is so important: to smash the idea that their are three truths, truths to which one subscribes by means of ethnicity. It is also why BIRN’s work is so valuable; it is the only organisation that covers every war crimes trial, and among the tragically biased Balkan media it is the only organisation to maintain a rigid code of impartiality and objectivity. Even so, the twin organs of the judiciary and the responsible sectors of the media are fighting a losing battle; let us hope that they can do enough.
On 12 July 1995, a unit of the Republika Srpska special police travelled around the villages of the fertile Drina valley, in the east of Bosnia, near the Serbian border. Calmly and methodically, they rounded up those civilians who were Bosniak; they took them to Potočari, a small village north-west of Srebrenica. Those who had tried to flee through the woods were also captured, their valuables seized; they too were taken to Potočari with the others. There, the one thousand prisoners were herded into a warehouse, formerly an agricultural cooperative; it is not a large building, and there must have been little room. The police unit formed a semi-circle around the main entrance to the warehouse; several of its members moved to the back, surrounding it. Then, for approximately half an hour, they fired into the building, with machine guns and automatic rifles, sending bullet after bullet into the packed mass of prisoners. Any who tried to escape through the back of the warehouse were killed instantly. When the shooting subsided, hand grenades were thrown into the warehouse to ensure that all were killed; in the end, just over 1,000 people were murdered that day, buried ignominiously in two mass graves, killed for the sin of merely existing in defiance of an ethnically pure Serb state.
On Wednesday, I sat approximately three metres from a tall, stocky man, bald-headed and broad-shouldered, his arms thick as tree trunks, his body straining in his plain white t-shirt as he walked. He seemed too big for the room, let alone the female police officer who led him by his cuffed hands into the courtroom, and when he sat down his chair sank visibly under his weight. This was Željko Ivanović, commander of the “Skelani” platoon of the RS special police; it was he who, according to his indictment, led the search for Bosniak civilians in the villages around Srebrenica, who stood behind the warehouse and made sure none escaped with their lives.
It is a curious feeling, sitting so close to someone who has allegedly done such evil; breathing the same air as him, hearing the same conversations, exchanging glances before the proceedings began. I had expected—partly through my experience at the ICTY and through seeing photos of the defendants at this court—some vision of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, a normal citizen swept up into a warped time and a warped system. Ivanović cut a more conventional figure, though; he looked a thug, one capable of violence, and I had no trouble imagining him committing the crimes of which he is accused; he was not, it seemed, a figure like Arendt’s Eichmann, merely incapable of understanding the consequences of his actions in a human sense; he seemed well aware of them, remorseless, cold.
As the prosecution continued to read out its list of material evidence linking Ivanović to the crimes—on the day I was at the trial, they had reached four hundred pieces with no sign of stopping—it seemed so unreal still. This man who sat here in front of me had committed these acts? Had been responsible for the deaths of a thousand people in a single day? A thousand? It defied comprehension. I still cannot conceive of it properly; it is destruction of human life on an intangible, unreachable scale. A thousand people killed, just part of a week of massacre in a single village that saw eight thousand murdered, itself just part of a war that killed 55,000 civilians and 45,000 soldiers.
