International Justice/ICTY: Oct/Nov ‘09

The moment the judges decided to adjourn for the day, dozens of women sitting in the public gallery cried out and shook their fists in anger.

It was the first day of the trial against former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic, and the public gallery was packed with journalists, diplomats and survivors of the Bosnian war, most of whom had lost husbands or sons in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. (See: Court Hears Karadzic Pre-War Rhetoric)

As I would learn later, many of the survivors had taken an overnight bus from Bosnia just to see the prosecutor’s opening statements and could not afford to stay another night. But since Karadzic had refused to appear in court, the presiding judge spoke for about 15 minutes and adjourned the proceedings until the following day.

The women were, not surprisingly, furious that the session had been cut short. But the sudden burst of emotion was still jolting. All of the journalists – including myself - had been sitting rapt, scribbling down everything the presiding judge said, and glancing up every so often at the empty blue chair where Karadzic was supposed to be sitting.

His absence lent the courtroom an oddly lopsided feel, since the entire half of the room reserved for the defence was completely deserted, and there were only a few members of the prosecution team on the opposite side, along with a few court officers and the judges.

As a journalist who almost exclusively covers war crimes courts, it is easy to be lulled into a kind of stupor. The proceedings can often be dry and excessively complicated, and when you want to make sure you have all of the details exactly correct, you sometimes pay less attention to your surroundings.

But when the group of middle-aged women jumped up from their seats and starting shouting at the judges, I quickly snapped out of my note-taking trance.

The security guards – perhaps sensing a potentially unruly situation – decided that everyone had to immediately leave the public gallery. We all poured out at once, and I managed to ask one of the Bosniak survivors how she felt.

“Like stone,” she said, adding that she had lost her husband and three sons in the Srebrenica massacre, which Karadzic is accused of planning.

“Why did the court say [the trial] would begin today?” she asked incredulously.

I was wondering the same thing. Karadzic had made it clear the previous week that he wanted more time to prepare and did not intend to show up for the first day of his trial.

The court had insisted that the proceedings would begin as planned on October 26, and over 160 women had come from Bosnia as a result. But now the women – many of whom wore traditional kerchiefs tied under their chins - crowded outside the tribunal, talking to TV cameras and threatening to camp out overnight in protest.

In writing about proceedings at the tribunal, I’ve spent much time listening to harrowing witness testimony, sifting though massive legal documents, and watching theatrical courtroom sessions.

Yet the spectacle outside the building that day was like nothing I’ve seen before. It was a combination of media frenzy and the frustrations of those who had waited years to see Karadzic stand trial.

Covering proceedings at the tribunal has made me think a lot about how people deal with the past and what the term justice actually means.

It is still a question I grapple with on a daily basis, but I’ve come to believe that justice is not only about seeking and presenting the truth, but about acknowledging how those truths – which are often unthinkably cruel - have affected human beings.

This was uppermost in my mind when I visited the eastern town of Visegrad last year, where about 3,000 Bosniaks were killed during the summer of 1992. Many of them were burned alive in barricaded houses, while others were allegedly driven to the 500-year-old Ottoman bridge where they were shot and thrown into the Drina river.

Before I went to Bosnia, I had been closely covering the trial of Bosnian Serb cousins Milan and Sredoje Lukic, who were charged – and ultimately convicted – of the house burnings, among other crimes. I had heard many witnesses testify about what happened in Visegrad that summer, but it is still difficult to express what it was like to visit the town for myself.

I traveled there with Edina Becirevic, my colleague in Sarajevo, and Mirsada Tabakovic, who fled Visegrad in May 1992. Soldiers took away her husband, who was later found in a mass grave.

We had spent the day interviewing various Bosnian Serbs who said they knew nothing about the crimes perpetrated in Visegrad during the war. When we mentioned specifics – people burned alive, women allegedly held prisoner and raped repeatedly - some residents labeled this as “propaganda”.

That afternoon, I walked with Mirsada across the Ottoman Bridge, which stretched majestically across the Drina river. The nearby cliffs reflected in the emerald-tinted water, and I remember being slightly alarmed by how beautiful it all was. This was, after all, a spot where so many people are said to have been murdered. I couldn’t reconcile the two realties in my brain, and I couldn’t even fathom how Mirsada was feeling.

What was it like for her to walk across a bridge that served as such a heavy reminder of the violence and loss which no one in the town would even acknowledge?

“At first it was if I was walking across some big graveyard, and I was walking with awe,” she told us later.

“I remember Rachel taking a picture of the river, and I looked in the direction she was taking the photograph… [and] the sun was mirroring half of the Drina, and the other half was in darkness, from the shadow of the cliffs,” Mirsada continued.

“As I was standing there, I realised that the Drina at that moment was similar to my thoughts: the part of it that was sunny was my life before the war, and the part that was in darkness was the war and all of its horrors. That dark part has stayed in me.”

Almost a year later, I couldn’t help but think of Mirsada as I watched the women protest outside the tribunal. For the survivors, the trial was not just about Karadzic – it was a way of addressing and recognising what happened to them and their family members. It was about grieving and finding ways to move forward again.

The women lined the path with their signs, demanding to see the trial start after traveling such a distance. As one woman had told me, “I came [all this way] to hear two sentences.”

When I arrived at the tribunal the next day, the public gallery was once again packed, and I found myself sitting next to Aysha Hadzimesic, a Bosniak woman in a black head shawl. Most of her husband’s family was killed in the war, she said, and she came to The Hague with several of the women’s groups from Sarajevo.

Before the prosecutor began his opening statement, she pointed to various women seated in the public gallery.

“You see that woman in the white scarf? She lost 32 family members,” she said.

When I asked her if she was disappointed that Karadzic was not in the courtroom, she said that she was glad he wasn’t there.

This surprised me. I thought that the survivors would want Karadzic to face the prosecutor’s charges – which include genocide and murder - in person.

But the same sentiment was echoed by Bakira Hasecic, a rape survivor and the president of the Association of Women Victims of War in Sarajevo.

“I’m not interested in seeing his face,” Hasecic told me during a break. “I’m interested in the process going on, with or without him.”

Back in the courtroom, the prosecutor showed graphic footage of emaciated prisoners in detention camps, followed by images of children being shot on the streets of Sarajevo during the 44-month siege of the city.

“We’ve been waiting 13 years,” Hadzimesic told me as the prosecutor wrapped up his presentation. “This is the last chance for everyone.”