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a1000shadesofhurt

a1000shadesofhurt

Monthly Archives: December 2011

Except this season’s most-wanted model isn’t, for once, a she – it’s a he

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Gender Identity

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androgenous

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8335719/Andrej-Pejic-Whos-that-boy.html

Tall and impossibly skinny, with impeccably arched eyebrows and cheekbones sharp as diamonds: on first impression, fashion’s latest darling looks no different to any of the other freaks of nature gliding through the offices of Storm model agency.

Except this season’s most-wanted model isn’t, for once, a she – it’s a he.

In an industry obsessed with the new, fashion has certainly found it with Andrej Pejic. Last month, the 19-year-old – already something of a name in menswear – caused a stir when he modelled womenswear for the Paris couture shows; he even wore a wedding dress for Jean Paul Gaultier.

Right now, Pejic is very much in demand. As well as editorials with prestigious photographers such as Steven Meisel and Mert & Marcus for Paris and Italian Vogue, he is the gender-bending face of the new advertising campaign for Marc by Marc Jacobs. Tonight he will be back in women’s clothing, modelling on the catwalk for Vivienne Westwood as part of London Fashion Week.

So which does he prefer – men’s or women’s? “I’m comfortable doing both,” he says, “although womenswear is more glamorous. The clothes are more exciting. In menswear I have to work more at having a masculine presence. But then that’s my job. If they put me in, say, a rubbish bag and I feel completely unattractive, I still have to show it to its potential.”

Pejic’s androgenous look is entirely his own creation – today, for instance, he’s wearing a light grey micro-mini dress, thick black tights and biker boots. “Around the age of 14, I decided to experiment with my look,” he explains. “As a kid, you get to the stage where you realise the gender barriers that exist in society and what you’re supposed to do and not supposed to do. I really tried being someone else during that period. It was hard for me – not being able to express myself and feeling I had to be someone else.

“But now I’m comfortable in my skin, and for my look to be celebrated is great. My look is very personal to me. When I started experimenting, it was a personal decision because I was unhappy. It wasn’t something I did for attention.”

Even on the closest of inspections, it is hard to discern Pejic’s gender: his complexion is a perfect peaches-and-cream, and there’s not a whisper of a five o’clock shadow. The only clue, perhaps, is his slightly protruding Adam’s apple.

Still, the female models he works with don’t seem too perturbed. “The girls don’t mind if I’m in their dressing room,” he muses. Neither are they annoyed that his flat-chested, snake-hipped figure is nigh-on impossible for most women to achieve. “Most of the girls are friendly. I guess they find me intriguing.”

What does remain intriguing, though, is why designers would want a man modelling women’s clothes.

“Andrej is the perfect coat-hanger,” says Clare Coulson, fashion features director of Harper’s Bazaar. “Clothes look best on someone who is tall and skinny, on a long and lean silhouette.”

Harriet Quick, Vogue fashion features director, agrees. “Andrej is incredibly beautiful with a very striking face – sharp angles and planes that look good on camera.”

Yet Quick believes his appeal goes deeper than that. “For the past decade, fashion has concentrated on the alpha male and alpha female stereotype. Now it’s all about questioning sexuality and blurring the boundaries. Andrej is reflecting our times – he’s what’s out there; he’s reflecting culture.

“It’s the same look we’re now seeing in music and with teenagers and twentysomethings on the street. He makes people open their eyes; makes them question how one presents one’s image. It’s attention-grabbing – it’s all about looking twice and asking questions. How? Why? And a good fashion image should hold your attention.”

Originally from Bosnia – his mother is Serbian, his father Croatian – Pejic was born shortly before the start of the Balkan conflict. His family moved to Serbia and, when he was eight, to Melbourne, Australia. “I had to learn a whole new culture as well as a whole new language,” he says. “At school, I was thrown in at the deep end. It took me a year to learn English.”

His refugee status has meant living as an outsider – and fashion is full of outsiders. “Fashion is quite inclusive and good at embracing different things and different forms of beauty,” he says. “It’s a very liberal industry. You can be yourself. Just not overweight,” he adds, drily.

Pejic was spotted shortly before his seventeenth birthday. “I was working in McDonald’s part time, and this guy came in – he wanted a cheeseburger. He then told me to see him at his modelling agency.”

Did he think you were a woman? “I don’t know, he didn’t say. Obviously, when I went into the agency, they figured it all out … But they signed me up right away.”

Initially, the agency was unsure about which direction Pejic should go. “In the beginning they wanted me to be more masculine – they told me to go to the gym because the menswear clients would like me more. That wouldn’t be such a good idea now because I wouldn’t be able to fit into womenswear.”

His friends and family have been supportive throughout. “Mum’s very proud. She finds every picture of me and has them on every wall. And my friends – well, since being a teenager, I’ve always been experimental. So they aren’t surprised. Obviously, they were surprised to see me in a wedding dress in a couture show. That was probably something they didn’t expect! But they’re all supportive.”

And how does the average Aussie macho male deal with his looks? “I’ve been getting chatted up by men ever since I was 14. In Australia, you’ve got your Greeks, and your Italians … I haven’t had any horrible experiences. Sometimes they’re shocked, but most of the time they still want to buy me a drink.”

Post-modelling, Pejic hopes to study either law or economics (before fleeing to Australia, his father was an economist and his mother a lawyer). “My favourite author is Leon Trotsky – the political philosophy and the way he writes is beautiful, and really relevant, too.

“But at this point nobody knows where this modelling is going. I usually have a plan in life – but this wasn’t planned. When I went to the agency, I was like, modelling’s better than a part-time job at McDonald’s. I thought I’d give it a shot. But it’s still going well so we’ll see. I would love to do Playboy with [the photographer] Terry Richardson. I love Playboy and Terry would be the person to do it.”

Along with the transgender model Lea T – the current face of Givenchy and Kate Moss’s co-star on the latest cover of Love magazine – Pejic is very much in demand. But fashion is a fickle business – something he is only too aware of.

“At this point, yes, everything’s going well. I’m still a sample size, so I can fit into designer womenswear. The only thing I have a problem with is my shoulders.”

Well, nobody’s perfect ..

 

How can rising suicide rates be reversed in the face of cuts to mental health services?

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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suicide

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/dec/15/suicide-rates-economy-cuts-mental-health

It is an inconvenient truth that the government has failed to address and the media have barely covered: the number of people killing themselves is back on the rise.

In 2008, 5,706 people killed themselves in the UK, an average of almost 16 deliberate deaths a day. After close to a decade of annual declines, recession triggered a sharp spike in suicide. Recent figures published in The Lancet show that the UK suicide rate increased 8% between 2007 and 2009. The latest Office for National Statistics figures suggest a similar rise.

The problem is predominantly a male one, with three times as many men killing themselves as women. It is also a trend not confined to the UK. Suicide rates have spiked across Europe since 2008, with Greece, in particular, experiencing staggering increases. 2010 saw a 25% rise in suicide, according to the Greek parliament. In October, the country’s health minister warned that early signs suggest a further 40% jump in 2011.

Stephen Platt, a professor at Edinburgh University who has been studying suicide behaviour for 30 years, fears a decade of unusually high suicide rates. “If you look at the research literature about suicide and economic recession, it’s pretty clear that there is a relationship,” he says. “The idea of a lost decade is quite possible.”

It is the instability of recession that creates this link, according to Richard Colwill, a spokesman for the mental health charity Sane. “No one should be surprised that factors such as unemployment and job insecurity can push people who may be already vulnerable to take their own lives,” he says. “Life events like redundancy, bankruptcy and the relationship breakdowns that often follow can cause bouts of mental illness. You expect to see all these issues start to rise.”

One person who knows first hand how damaging redundancy can be is Denis Robinson, a 42-year-old hairdresser from Waterloo, London. In June 2009, he was offered the perfect job: creative director at an exciting new startup. Robinson was promised control over training, staffing, budgets and the possibility of equity in the company. “It was everything I’d ever hoped for,” he says.

It wasn’t long after starting that he realised it was too good to be true. The company was riddled with hidden debt and struggling to ride out the recession. In June 2010, the salon was sold off and Robinson promptly dismissed.

“I was utterly floored,” he says. “I was broke. I felt no future at 42 years old. Having worked for 24 years towards this particular goal, I felt a complete failure.” Robinson’s hairdressing career had previously helped him through the trauma of becoming HIV positive in 2007 and being diagnosed with depression. Without a job, his source of pride was gone.

“The one thing that I had been defined by was taken away,” he recalls. “I was manic. I lost a stone and a half in four weeks. I wasn’t sleeping. I couldn’t even sit down and amend my CV. Just looking at it made me think: ‘There’s no point living.'”

In October 2010, Robinson gathered together a load of painkillers and cheap vodka, intent on killing himself. It was only the thought of how his mother would react, and the subsequent help of Maytree Respite Centre, that dragged Robinson back from the brink.

Maytree’s support was clearly crucial in saving Robinson’s life: listening without judgment, challenging negative assumptions and helping to create optimism for the future. But with the UK’s economic future looking ever bleaker after the chancellor downgraded growth and announced six more years of cuts, how will charities that provide such support cope?

“The big concern is the double whammy,” explains Colwill. “At a time when we would reasonably expect there to be an increase in demand for mental health support, we are seeing cuts to services across the board.” With stretched services already seeing people “fall through the cracks”, he fears the fault lines can only widen.

Platt believes that the key is to learn from the past and, in particular, start tackling people’s access to the means of suicide. In the 1950s, death by domestic gas accounted for around half of all suicides. But throughout the 1960s, the introduction of non-toxic gas into British kitchens saw thousands of lives saved.

“It’s as if when people consider suicide [they] think about doing it in a particular way,” Platt explains. “If you remove a culturally common method, there isn’t an immediate substitution and it tends to reduce overall suicide.” If paracetamol was only available in blister packs, making impulsive overdosing more difficult, or mental health clinics removed features that could potentially be used for hanging, the impact on suicide rates could be huge.

As the third sector strives to offset the rising suicide rate with diminishing resources, the government has remained alarmingly silent, having made no major announcement about how to confront this issue. The suicide prevention strategy for England, due to be published in early 2012, may change that.

If not, there is no guarantee that the support that saved Robinson’s life will in future be available to people having similar thoughts. “I chose to fight and I’m glad that I did,” he says. “Having got to the bottom, everything I now have that is good, I’m grateful for. I think I’d forgotten that.”

• The Mental Health Foundation provides information for anyone having suicidal thoughts, or who knows someone who is. To talk to someone urgently, the Samaritans is available 24-hours-a-day on 08457 90 90 90; or email jo@samaritans.org or visit the Samaritans’ website.

Bosnia’s rape victims have their say

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Sexual Harassment, Rape and Sexual Violence, War Crimes

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Bosnia, rape, trauma, war

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/dec/15/angelina-jolie-bosnia-rape-victims

“I first vomited, from the sheer force of my suffering,” Enisa Salcinovic says of her initial reaction to In the Land of Blood and Honey, Angelina Jolie‘s directorial debut feature film about the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Her reaction was so visceral, she said, because the film, which she watched in an exclusive preview for survivors of concentration camps, and victims of wartime rape and mass killings, so captured the trauma she experienced. “Angelina touched our souls,” she tells me several hours later, still clutching a wad of tissues tightly in her fist. Salcinovic is the president of the Women’s Division of Sarajevo’s Association of Concentration Camp Survivors. Of the 8,000 or so members, approximately one quarter are rape survivors.

The film portrays a romance between Danijel (Goran Kostić), a Serb man, and Ajla (Zana Marjanović), a Bosniak Muslim woman, which blossoms as the last nails are being hammered into Yugoslavia’s coffin. Torn apart by the war, they meet unexpectedly when Ajla is taken prisoner in a concentration camp and Danijel is her jailer. Since Jolie announced her intention to film, the plot has been a source of controversy in Bosnia, a country still struggling with the legacy of a war which pitted Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks against one another and cost an estimated 100,000 lives. The data on rape victims is not concrete: the United Nations estimates that “20,000 to 50,000 women and girls fell victim to what has been described as a ‘massive, organised and systematic’ use of rape as both a weapon of war and a form of ethnic cleansing”. The movie tackles questions that academics, activists, victims and a new generation continue to grapple with 15 years after the war’s end.

It has even exposed schisms between groups of female rape victims. Some activists, such as Salcinovic, laud Jolie for raising important questions about the still-taboo subject of wartime rape and ongoing marginalisation of victims. Others, such as Bakira Hasečić, president of the Women Victims of War Association, remain adamant that a “Hollywood outsider” could never be qualified to make a film about the war. This debate started last year when Jolie, primed to shoot the entire movie on location in Bosnia, was forced to relocate to Hungary when Hasečić lobbied the minister of culture of one of Bosnia’s two political entities, the Federation, to revoke the permit. Upon reading the script, he reversed his decision, but not before sparking a fierce debate between victims about who has the right to represent them.

Hasečić, who was not invited to the screening, continues to criticise the movie based on its trailer. “A love story between the captured Muslim and a Serb war criminal never happened during the war in Bosnia; it is impossible, a concept unthinkable, even as the idea that it displays,” she says. “And from the clips from the movie – and I could not even watch the full two minutes – what she has done is hard and disgusting,” she continues. “It became painful to watch, and still is. I felt like I was beaten, tortured and raped again, like I have once again returned to the camp. As if they raped me again. It is shameful!”

Survivors who watched the film acknowledge that it was painful, almost unbearable, to watch because of their personal identification with the plot. But this, they say, means the film is authentic. “I am Ajla,” Sadzida Hadzic, a member of Hasečić’s association, said following the screening. “This is what I went through in the rape camp in Vlasenica [eastern Bosnia] in 1992.”

“If the victims find themselves in the movie, they will agree with most of the things that they saw,” says Elmina Kulasic, who was just seven years old when she spent over one month in Trnopolje concentration camp, near the north-western Bosnian town of Prijedor. “For the victims, and for Bosnians in general, and even journalists, anyone who was in the country during the war, they will find themselves in [Jolie’s] movie,” she says.

But irrespective of the film’s resonance, many other survivors and activists say that the Bosnian government should not have given in to Hasečić’s original demands to halt the shooting because, they say, it gave her the exclusive right to speak for the victims, which she should not have. “No one has the right to say that they are the sole representative of victims,” Velma Šarić, founder and executive director of the Centre for Post-Conflict Research, which coordinated the screening, told me. “How the Federation government has allowed one association to dominate the discourse is just shocking. Who has the right to be a gatekeeper to people’s trauma?”

Belma Becirbasic, a journalist currently conducting research on war and memory as a Fulbright scholar at Columbia University in New York, says this downplays the experience of individual victims to their detriment, and could lead to government exploitation of their trauma. “A lot of women I know are not members of any organisations, and the pain and the trauma that they experienced is so strong, and it can only be intimate, personal and not collective,” she says. “But who can speak for them? The claim that Angelina has no right to tell a particular story about war rape is absurd. We can criticise the movie’s artistic dimension, its ideological dimension, but we cannot say she cannot tell a story about victims.”

Becirbasic says that by giving in to Hasečić, the Bosnian government essentially collectivised what should be individual memories of the war, which fosters a culture of collective victimhood to be used for ethno-national political purposes. “It means raped women are only embodied in national metaphors, which makes it easier to manipulate their experiences,” she said. “Unfortunately, I think this cements the trauma much more.” She says that allowing political interference actually took away victims’ sense of empowerment. “We can clearly see that politicians and clerics emerge as spokespersons for women victims, their stories and their rights, and that’s what I call the political exploitation of trauma,” she says.

Šarić and Becirbasic agree that rather than the question of whether Jolie can present a fictionalised narrative about war rape, the real discourse should focus on wartime rape itself, a topic they both agree remains taboo, which means women are still living in poor conditions. “Most of the women are completely marginalised, living below the poverty line, and many have not resolved their residential status. So they also face the stigmatisation of the community,” says Becirbasic.

What’s more, they say authorities do not help them, only meting out financial assistance through established associations, which means as few as 2,000 women have registered as rape survivors. “I have yet to see any campaign where anyone explains how to claim status as a civilian victim of war, or rape victim. Nobody wants to speak about it,” adds Šarić, who hopes that Jolie’s film will help bring these women’s struggles to the fore.

“Rape victims were recognised as civil war victims only 12 years after the war,” Šarić tells me when we meet in the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Grbavica. Occupied by Serbs during the war and notorious for rapes, the area lent its name to Jasmila Zbanic’s 2006 movie Esma’s Secret (Grbavica), about a raped woman who raises her child, which won the Golden Bear at that year’s Berlin international film festival.

“Only after the movie came out did Bosnian society start to talk about rape victims. Grbavica was a breaking point. Before then, there were sometimes sporadic efforts for others to do something. Zbanic’s movie changed the climate, it forced politicians to recognise the rights of rape victims, and I expect Angelina’s to do the same,” says Šarić.

What’s needed is an open discussion about the role of victim associations on one hand and the rights of women victims on the other. If it doesn’t happen, say Šarić, Becirbasic and other survivors who attended the screening, it could have dangerous implications for Bosnia and Herzegovina’s future. “The process of victimisation helps ethno-national elites (Muslims, Croats, Serbs) to be resistant to critics, thus enabling rampant corruption and self-interest,” says Becirbasic. “Victimhood is the main historical narrative that fuelled the ethnic conflict in the first place – you can imagine how dangerous the consequence can be, and that doesn’t contribute at all to the reconciliation process, but on the contrary undermines it.”

Another survivor, who at 26 has just returned permanently to Bosnia, says the dialogue generated by Jolie’s film is essential if her country, which still lacks state-level government 14 months after elections, is to move forward. “The movie will force us think of the future. Do we want our grandchildren to have the same conflict or a similar conflict because we have not resolved these issues?”

More (2005):

Bosnia’s rape babies: abandoned by their families, forgotten by the state

When Ruby Wax opened up about depression, so did her fans. Now she’s uniting them online

13 Tuesday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Depression

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/dec/12/ruby-wax-depression-online-website

Four and a half years ago, Ruby Wax found herself hospitalised with what she calls “the tsunami of all depressions”. After many months of treatment – sandwiched between sitting in a chair, staring catatonically into space – she recovered sufficiently to write a show, Live from the Priory, with her friendJudith Owen, which they performed in both private and NHS mental healthinstitutions.

For a couple of years it was all quite low key, until Wax inadvertently became the mental illness celebrity, after allowing her face to be plastered all over the London Underground on Comic Relief posters, with a caption saying that she suffered from depression. “I hadn’t quite anticipated the level of response,” she admits. After initially feeling rather overwhelmed, she soon came to embrace it, because for every one crass comment about her “looking too well to be depressed”, there were dozens more from fellow sufferers, thanking her for coming out the closet.

“There is still a huge stigma attached to mental illness in this country,” she says. “Being depressed has become the modern-day witch trials. People can’t see it and they don’t understand it: some are worried it might be catching. For those who do come clean about their illness, the consequences can be catastrophic. While some industries are now more relaxed about it, there are still many in which your career is effectively over. You can’t run a company once you’ve declared you’ve been diagnosed as clinically depressed. So the pressure to keep it to yourself, to try and tough it out, can be overwhelming. And, almost invariably, the longer you wait to get help, the worse the problem gets.”

Once installed as the poster girl for depression, Wax and Owen sharpened up their act and took it around the country, culminating in an extended runin London’s West End. The first half of the show was pretty much what you might have expected: a funny (mental illness is a much-underused comedy resource) and informative tour of depression, with a little Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) thrown in for good measure. The second half, a question-and-answer session with the audience, was anything but.

“We wanted to give people a chance to share their experiences and ask questions,” says Wax, “but we only imagined one or two people at most speaking out before it petered out with everyone making for the exit. Rather than finding it hard to get people to talk, our real problem was getting them to shut up. People shared the most extraordinarily intimate details of their lives.

“A man from Newcastle said he had been on antidepressants for 10 years and didn’t know how to tell his wife: she was sitting right next to him. A distraught mother blamed herself for passing on the illness to her child. A woman who had been driven to the show by friends said it was the first time she had been out of her house in 20 years. The theatre became a confessional.”

After a while, the venues in which Wax and Owen were appearing opened weekly forums where the public could listen to talks by leading mental health professionals and get information and help from the mental health charity Sane, but Wax was never under any illusion she was doing more than a sticking-plaster job. “One in four people suffer from mental illness at some point of their life,” she says, “so even if we filled every theatre in the country we were never going to reach everyone.”

At which point, Wax met up with another old friend, internet entrepreneur Nina Storm, and Black Dog Tribe, a social networking site where people with depression could chat anonymously and get information about where to get help, was born.

When I was institutionalised with depression, I wasted hours of everybody’s time in therapy sessions trying to find out whether anyone had the same symptoms as everyone else and becoming extremely anxious when they didn’t. Black Dog Tribe hopes to eliminate this kind of problem, by both reassuring people that their symptoms are normal and helping them locate others who are feeling the same way.

The beta version of the site went live last month – and promptly crashed on the first day. Not from existential ennui or depression but from overuse. “It’s still very much work in progress,” says Wax. “The aim is for everyone to be able to immediately find a like-minded sufferer. So there’s a place for everyone – from those who can’t get out of bed to those who are too ashamed to take medication – and you can switch tribes depending on your mood.

“When the website goes properly live in the new year we want users to shape it to their own needs. If there isn’t a suitable existing tribe for you, then we want you to create your own: a sort of non-sexual dating service, if you like. Eventually we’d even like the different tribes to meet up in person rather than online. If a bunch of drunks can take over the church halls and coffee bars of the world for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, then surely the combined forces of the mentally unwell can do something similar?”

National Audit of Psychological Therapies for Anxiety and Depressio

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Uncategorized

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http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/NAPT%20Report%20Exec%20Summary%20final%20-%20WEB.pdf

Nice’s New Guidelines on Self-Harm Management

12 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Self-Harm

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self-harm

http://www.nice.org.uk/nicemedia/live/13619/57179/57179.pdf

The fashion industry should not be allowed to sell us fake women’s bodies

08 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Body Image

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/shortcuts/2011/dec/07/fashion-industry-fake-women-bodies

Look closely at that curve in the waist, the arc of the hand: do these models look unnatural, not to mention surprisingly similar? It’s only once you see them lined up that it becomes clear – they are computer-generated mannequins with the heads and skin colour of real models added. Which makes dummies of us all for not realising sooner.

After Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet revealed that H&M was using plastic women to model its clothes online, the retailer retorted that the practice was “commonplace” in the fashion industry. It even sent a link to a websitewhere you dress fake models in your own clothing selections. Besides, it uses such lifelike mannequins to sell clothes to both men and women. So that makes it OK then?

Yesterday’s response from H&M, the world’s second biggest retailer, was particularly ironic given that youth groups and schools are today to give evidence to the all party parliamentary group on body confidence on why girls and women, and increasingly boys and men, are so distressed about the way they look. Several studies, including one on media influences on girls between nine and 12 by Marika Tiggemann and Levina Clark, indicated that nearly half want to be thinner, and as a result have engaged in a diet or are aware of the concept of dieting. Sexist imagery in advertising is nothing new: witness this season’s Harvey Nichols ad. In 2003, Teen magazine reported that 35 per cent of girls 6 to 12 years old have been on at least one diet, and that 50 to 70 per cent of normal weight girls believe they are overweight

Natasha Walter, author of the aptly named Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, says: “What’s so extraordinary about the H&M models is that everybody would just accept it. That says something about how normal it has become to use artificial images of women. We just brush past them. The worrying thing is it gets into your head, particularly the heads of young women.”

One way forward is for the Advertising Standards Authority to insist on a disclaimer in the same way it did with mascara companies pretending that fake eyelashes were down to the stroke of a brush. A spokesman for the ASA says all advertising has a “social responsibility” to resist any possible “mental, moral and physical harm”, especially on young minds. However, it can only act on complaints and so far it has received none.

Susie Orbach, psychotherapist and writer, sees a silver lining of sorts: “Perhaps this will expose the constructed nature of the images more graphically than all the critiques of Photoshopping. Perhaps it will be easier to say: this body does not exist, it is a fiction.” We live in hope.

Self-harm figures soar in a generation under pressure

05 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in Self-Harm, Young People

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Bullying, Children, mental health issues, Self-esteem, self-harm, Teens, Therapy, Young adults

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/selfharm-figures-soar-in-a-generation-under-pressure-6272072.html

More than 1,800 children aged under 10 have been hospitalised for self-harming in the past decade, sparking fears of a generation unable to cope with the pressures of childhood.

Last year alone almost 150 boys and girls aged 10 or under were admitted to hospital for intentional self-harm, including more than 80 pre-school children.

In a sign of a worsening problem, the number of girls and women aged under 25 admitted in the past 10 years has soared by 44 per cent to more than 26,270 in 2010-11. Among boys and men of the same age, the figure has leapt by a third to 11,656. The figures are for hospitals in England.

The Department of Health (DoH) admits that “only a fraction” of cases of self-harm are seen in hospitals, so the true scale of the crisis will be much larger.

“These shocking statistics should act as a wake-up call to everyone who cares about the welfare of young people,” said Lucia Russell, the director of campaigns, policy and participation at YoungMinds, a charity which is working with the Government to redesign mental-health services for children. “Self-harm is often dismissed as merely attention-seeking behaviour, but it’s a sign that young people are feeling terrible internal pain and are not coping.”

According to officials, an episode of self-harm is often triggered by an argument or another upset, but can also be linked to bullying, low self-esteem, and worries about sexual orientation. The Government has promised £32m to improve access to psychological therapies for children and young people over the next four years.

Paul Burstow, a Liberal Democrat health minister, told The Independent on Sunday that, for too long, mental illness among children was overlooked by the NHS. “It has really suffered from being the poor cousin of mental health, which was itself the Cinderella service. It was not a priority for the NHS.

“For half of all mental health problems in this country the symptoms first show during adolescence. Let’s look at the early signs and support families with proper therapies. It is about moving to intervene early.”

More than one in 10 children aged 15 to 16 report having self-harmed in their lifetime. However, the DoH insists it is “rare for very young children” to self harm. A million children will have a diagnosable mental-health disorder. Childhood mental illness costs up to £59,000 per child every year.

The rise in hospital admissions has been steepest among women aged 17 to 25, rising by 50 per cent between 2001 and 2011.

Separate figures released last week show 40,000 under-25s were rushed to A&E in 2009-10 after self-harming, up from 36,000 in 2007-08.

Earlier this year, the Government launched a new strategy, No Health Without Mental Health, to tackle the problem. Officials are working with young people, parents and YoungMinds to redesign specialist services for children, focussing initially on cognitive behavioural therapy and parenting therapy.

Ministers hope to reduce by as much as 40 per cent the number of people in adulthood who have mental health problems. The economic and social costs of mental health in the UK are almost £100bn.

Last month a study by the charity Mind warned that a combination of rising demand and spending cuts was threatening the viability of mental health services.

Laurent Gbagbo appears at international criminal court

05 Monday Dec 2011

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/05/laurent-gbagbo-international-criminal-court

Ivory Coast‘s former president Laurent Gbagbo has appeared at theinternational criminal court (ICC). The first former head of state to face judges at the world’s first permanent war crimes court vowed to fight the charges against him.

Gbagbo, 66, was calm and smiled at supporters in the public gallery as the 25-minute hearing opened. He told judges he did not need them to read the charges.

Gbagbo was extradited to the Netherlands last week to face charges that his supporters committed murder and rape as he rejected an election result and tried to cling to power.

Prosecutors say about 3,000 people died in violence by both sides after Gbagbo refused to concede. The president, Alassane Ouattara, took power in April with the help of French and UN forces.

The former president, speaking in French, said he wanted to see the evidence against him. “I will challenge that evidence and then you hand down your judgment,” he told the three-judge panel.

Gbagbo also complained about his arrest by opposition forces backed by French troops in April, saying he saw his son beaten and his interior minister killed in the fighting. “I was the president of the republic and the residence of the president of the republic was shelled,” he said.

He also complained about his transfer to The Hague last week from northern Ivory Coast where he was under house arrest. “We were deceived,” he said, adding that the official in charge of his transfer “did not have the courage to tell me I was going to The Hague”.

Monday’s brief hearing was to confirm Gbagbo’s identity and ensure that he understood his rights and the charges. According to court papers, Gbagbo is charged as an “indirect perpetrator” in a campaign of violence against supporters of Ouattara.

The presiding judge, Silvia Fernández de Gurmendi of Argentina, scheduled a hearing for 18 June where prosecutors will present a summary of their evidence and judges will decide whether it is strong enough to merit bringing Gbagbo’s case to trial. Before that, judges will schedule interim status conferences to discuss progress in the case. Gbagbo could challenge his detention at such a conference and seek to be released pending further hearings.

Even before Gbagbo was led into the courtroom, his lawyers attacked his arrest and transfer to the court as French neocolonialism. “It’s a neocolonialist trial,” Gbagbo’s adviser Toussaint Alain told reporters in The Hague. “The (ICC) has become an instrument of France … to empower friends and punish the ones who don’t follow along.”

Gbagbo’s lawyer, Habiba Toure, also challenged the legitimacy of the Gbagbo’s detention last week on an ICC warrant while he was under house arrest. “In principle, an arrest warrant is delivered to a free individual or a person on the run, which was not the case for Mr Gbagbo because he was already in the hands of Ivory Coast officials,” Toure said.

A handful of supporters outside court also condemned France’s role. “This is a masquerade by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy,” said Abel Naki, who travelled from Paris to be at the court. “Sarkozy orchestrated this coup d’etat.”

The protesters’ anger underscored lingering tensions between Gbagbo and Ouattara supporters in Ivory Coast. The court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, stressed last week that both sides of the political divide in Ivory Coast had committed crimes in the post-election chaos and that his investigation was continuing.

Human rights groups say grave abuses were committed by forces loyal to Ouattara, who enlisted the help of a former rebel group to force Gbagbo from office.

Gbagbo is the sixth suspect taken into custody by the court, which has launched seven investigations, all of them in Africa. A further 12 suspects remain at large and the court has no police force to arrest them.

Face to face with Radovan Karadzic

04 Sunday Dec 2011

Posted by a1000shadesofhurt in War Crimes

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Bosnia, rape, Torture, Tribunal, War Crimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/04/karadzic-bosnia-war-crimes-vulliamy

The white curtain behind the pane of reinforced glass is raised, and there he is on the other side, not four feet away: wearing a grey jacket and purple tie with a pin attached showing the crest of a double-headed eagle and crossed Cyrillic Cs that stand for “Samo sloga Srbina spasava” – “Only unity saves the Serbs”.

It is a tight fit, in the depths of the war crimes tribunal building in The Hague, in the tiny holding cell and visitors’ room. On the other side of the thick pane of bulletproof glass is Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the worst slaughter to blight Europe since the Third Reich, thereafter the world’s most wanted fugitive – and now on trial in The Hague. We speak through holes in the glass that he is squeezed against. His American lawyer, Peter Robinson, sits next to him.

On my side of the glass, I share a table with Ann Sutherland, a prosecuting trial attorney for the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), due to lead my evidence against Karadzic the next day before the judges, as well as another member of Karadzic’s defence team.

This is an interview requested by Karadzic before I give official testimony the following day in open court. Ironically, when the witness unit’s call came out of the blue in August 2011, saying that “the defence” had requested an interview, I was driving through pluvial mist up a mountain track in Bosnia to attend the consecration of a small monument to mark a remote mass grave: a crevice into which the bodies of 124 men had been dropped and concealed – a secret well kept by the Serbs for years. The men had been prisoners in concentration camps at Omarska and Keraterm in north-west Bosnia. They had been moved on the very day I arrived, and uncovered the camps along with an ITN crew – 5 August 1992 – to the forest above a hamlet called Hrastova Glavica. Once there, they were taken off buses in groups of three. They were given a last cigarette and shot one by one, their corpses dropped down the cranny in the rock and into the void, to be found and exhumed 15 years later.

I was in The Hague primarily to testify against the man on whose authority I had visited those camps that day: Dr Karadzic. I had also agreed to be interviewed by him – partly out of confusion at the witness unit’s phone call that misty day, and partly on the basis that a prosecution witness should be seen by the court to oblige the defence in its requests. And, of course, I was as curious as I was nervous. Somewhere in the back of my mind was the sheer surreality of this encounter.

Karadzic’s lawyer, Robinson, began proceedings in the holding cell by saying that, as Karadzic was tired after a day in court, he would ask the initial questions, and have me recall the details of a meeting between myself, the ITN crew and Karadzic two days before we walked through the gates of the Omarska camp. I recounted the strange road to Karadzic’s doorstep that summer, four months into Bosnia’s carnage, which had begun in April 1992 when the Bosnian Serbs unleashed a hurricane of violence against non-Serbs, carving out an ethnically “pure” swath of territory. In late July 1992, Karadzic appeared on ITN’s evening news during yet another fruitless “peace conference” in London, to discuss the slaughter in Bosnia. Karadzic had been questioned about reports of atrocities in concentration camps published in that morning’sGuardian. He retorted that they were false, and challenged the paper and ITN to come and see for themselves. I left for Belgrade the next day.

After a delay of several days (while, I now know, the camps were prepared for evacuation and the murder of many inmates), I met Karadzic, outside his headquarters in the Bosnian Serb capital, Pale, at lunchtime on 3 August. He had a weak handshake for someone so reportedly fearsome. Karadzic assured us we would see Omarska. It was, he said, “an investigation centre”, while another camp, Trnopolje, was a place where people had come of their own accord – “displaced because their villages had been burned down”. We spoke, too, about the camps where Serbs were being held on the other side by Muslim and Croat authorities. There was talk, too, of Serbian history, and its people’s long and “celestial” struggle.

We were then passed seamlessly down the chain of command: delivered first into the hands of Karadzic’s deputy president, Nikola Koljevic, an Anglophile professor who kept quoting Shakespeare. Koljevic escorted us as far as the largest Bosnian Serb city of Banja Luka, where we were passed on to a Major Milutinovic, who drove us past the incinerated and deserted Bosnian Muslim town of Kozarac to Prijedor, from where the camps were administered. There, we met with the “crisis staff”, led by Milomir Stakic and his deputy Milan Kovacevic. And from there we proceeded with the Prijedor police chief and camp commander Zeljko Mejakic through the gates of Omarska, to behold men in various states of shocking decay emerging from a great hangar, being drilled across a yard and into a canteen, where they wolfed down watery bean stew like famished dogs. “I don’t want to tell any lies,” said a man called Dzemal Paratusic, “but I cannot tell the truth. Thank you for coming.” (Paratusic survived, and now lives in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire.)

We were denied access to the rest of the camp despite Karadzic’s guarantee, because, explained our hosts: “We have our orders … you can do this and this and that, but not that.” And we were bundled out of Omarska and taken to Trnopolje camp, where we found, behind barbed wire, the remarkable sight of men, some skeletal, who had arrived from yet another camp – Keraterm – that morning. There, they said, there had been a terrible massacre one night, of 150 men in a hangar. One prisoner, Fikret Alic, said he had been assigned to loading the bodies on trucks, but had been unable to do so. We left having seen little, but enough to know that a dark horror of vast but inestimable dimensions was unfolding around Prijedor.

karadzic trial Bosnian prisoners at Trnopolje campTelevision news footage recorded by ITN on 5 August 1992 of emaciated Bosnian Muslim prisoners at Trnopolje camp in Serb-held Bosnia. Photograph: Reuters/ICTY

The war dragged on another three years, Karadzic’s hand eagerly clasped by British and other diplomats beneath the chandeliers of London, Paris and Geneva as he outmanoeuvred them, basked in their friendship and played with their impotence and cynicism, from one abortive peace plan to the next, while the killing on the ground continued. As war ended, in 1995, Karadzic was indicted for genocide and several counts of persecution and crimes against humanity; those same diplomats now baying for his capture.

With time, the awful truth about the camps emerged. Mass graves were uncovered, the bereaved located, and testimony at this tribunal laid bare Omarska’s and Trnopolje’s secrets: mass murder, and torture, beating, rape, prior to enforced deportation (I had accompanied one of the convoys). The trials at the Hague followed that chain of command down which we had been passed, in reverse: first, Dusko Tadic, a parish-pump killer and torturer who roamed the camps at large; then groups of guards, then Kovacevic, then Stakic – among many others. Koljevic shot himself in 1997. Now here was Karadzic.

For 13 years Karadzic was variously protected by both Serbia and his own Bosnian Serb fiefdom, and by sections of the same international community that were supposedly hunting him. The European Union made his delivery to The Hague a condition for Serbia’s consideration for membership and he was arrested in the summer of 2008 – a wild-haired practitioner of alternative herbal medicine hiding behind a false name and a beard, among friends in Belgrade. During my own search for him for the Observer, I had met and drunk with his entourage, a wild and eccentric bunch who compared his writing to Joyce and Dostoyevsky. Nerma Jelacic, now spokesperson for the tribunal in The Hague, and I had been harangued in my rental car as we reached the mountains in which Karadzic had been sheltered above the town of Foca.

But now I sit opposite him – a man charged with “personal” and “superior” criminal responsibility for genocide, extermination, persecution, murder, deportation, unlawful attacks on civilians, violence “the primary purpose of which is to spread terror”. In short, he is – allegedly – one of the most proficient mass-murderers of the second half of the 20th century. The prosecutions are roughly divided into three sections: the siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, between 1992 and 1995; atrocities and ethnic cleansing across the municipalities of Bosnia in that same period, and the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.

This investigation at The Hague – the cases against Karadzic and his military counterpart General Ratko Mladic – has been ongoing for 18 years.

On the other side of the bulletproof glass, Karadzic rouses himself. He is courteous, almost jovial, though not quite endearing.

He asks: “Did you get the impression I was accessible” during the war? On that day, yes, certainly. But after finding the camps, I had not been granted permission to travel in his territory. I tell him that “someone dear to you” had withheld authorisation – referring to his daughter Sonja, who ran the press office in Pale.

His initial line of questioning concerns the Omarska camp itself. Did I know it was a “temporary investigation centre” for suspected Muslim fighters? Yes, I know of this claim, I reply. Did I know that 59% of the prisoners in Omarska were sent to a camp for prisoners of war, and 41% were “released to Trnopolje”? No I didn’t, until we found the camp.

Did I investigate camps in which Serbian prisoners had been detained? Yes, I did, I reply. Within days of finding Omarska, I was heading for the town of Capljina, and revealed the camp nearby, called Dretelj, run by a Croat-Muslim militia called HOS.

Then, after an hour and a quarter, the “interview” reaches its intended climax. Karadzic produces an old revisionist chestnut of an argument, which claimed that ITN and I had fabricated our reports about the camp at Trnopolje, and that the pictures of prisoners behind barbed wire were those of refugees free to come and go. There was no point in going through it all again: this tired notion advanced by a “media expert”, Thomas Deichmann, five years after we found the camp, had been attempted and quashed by successive defendants convicted at successive trials, and had been the subject of a civil court action in London between ITN and the theory’s British champion, Living Marxismmagazine, in 2000, with the jury finding soundly for ITN.

This revisionist accusation was also endorsed in the late 1990s by British “intellectuals”, and has been raised again recently by the distinguished linguistics professor Noam Chomsky. Now Karadzic gives it a whirl: he plays a video of recut Bosnian Serb TV material to make his point. I reply that I was convinced then, and remain convinced, that the men in those pictures were prisoners arrived from Omarska and Keraterm, under guard, and that the camps were real.

I don’t sleep that night before my appearance as a witness for the prosecution. I hate doing this; it is disturbing, tremulous, humbling and formidable in its way. As I enter the courtroom the next day I exchange a nod of greeting with Karadzic, who puts on his headphones, raises his eyebrows and makes a facial gesture towards his computer screen, as though to say, “Let’s get to it”, with gladiatorial fraternity.

On the bench are four judges, with Korean Judge O-Gon Kwon presiding. Ann Sutherland submits evidence from a previous trial, that of Milomir Stakic – sentenced to life, reduced to 40 years on appeal – and outlines the meeting with Karadzic and the discovery of the camps, illustrated with ITN’s footage. Of Omarska, in an interview after our discovery of the camp, Karadzic says: “We have 13 prisons and the prison in Omarska is the worst one.” Karadzic boasts he could close Omarska “even in two days” if the Muslim side agreed to a prisoner exchange.

In Omarska, there is the film of us trying to see the camp properly – quarters in which we now know thousands of men were crammed, and from which they were called for torture and mass execution – on Karadzic’s authority; and being denied access. And now the judges turn to the man who allegedly gave those orders, that he might begin his cross-examination of the witness. Karadzic cuts to the quick: “Do you think that you managed to retain your objectivity?” I try to explain something to the judges: that in the past I have misused the word “objectivity” when I mean “neutrality”. “When something is fact-specific, I remain objective,” I say, but “I do not attempt to try to be neutral. I’m not neutral between the camp guards and the prisoners, between the raped women and the rapists … I can’t in all honesty sit here in court and say I am or want to be neutral over this kind of violence.”

Karadzic challenges my use of the word “racialist” to describe his programme – the Muslims of Bosnia are “Serbs who converted to Islam, and that is what Lord [David] Owen thinks as well,”, he says. I reply that “the inmates in the camps were either Bosnian Muslims or Croats, and the people running them were Bosnian Serbs … and where I come from, if one self-defined ethnicity seeks to obliterate or clear the territory of all members of another ethnicity and to obliterate any memory of them, that is racialism.”

There follows questioning that amounts almost to a general chat about politics: how both Serbs and Croats were, says Karadzic “in favour of a decentralised Bosnia consisting of three entities whereas the Muslim side wanted to have a unitary Bosnia”. I agreed with his analysis, but couldn’t resist an observation that “there’s a jump between the policy and mass murder”. Judge Kwon kindly puts an end to this meandering discussion; time for the first break. Then back into the arena. There is no gladiatorial camaraderie from Karadzic this time, as we re-enter the court; his face has hardened, his eyes steeled. And his voice too. Do I remember that Karadzic accepted some of the peace plans? Yes, I remember “endless plans, treaties, none of which amounted to very much on the ground. The killing carried on.” Do I know about the “fighting” around Prijedor? My initial article from the camps quotes a prisoner who had been involved. I say that what resistance there was had been subjugated by the time we arrived – this discourse continues a good while.

Then he asks about Omarska, quoting my article: “There was no visible evidence of serious violence, let alone systematic extermination.” I reply that we were trying to get into the hangar “where we had suspicions that appalling things were taking place. Hindsight has shown that they were”. “How do you know?” asked Karadzic. “I’ve heard from scores of people who were in Omarska that there was widespread and systematic killing… The tribunal’s own record over the years would, I think, suffice.”

Karadzic questions the veracity of a quote from a boy talking about a massacre of 200 men in the Keraterm camp. I reply that: “He got the number wrong, but the massacre did take place.” Then Karadzic insists: “If I told you, Mr Vulliamy, that none of this is true, and that all those who said anything about killings saw a single killing of a person who was mentally disturbed, would you believe me or would you believe them? … It seems you choose to believe things which are detrimental to the Serbs quite easily.”

A single killing? I have to let this sink in. Does he really believe this? “I don’t choose to believe things that are detrimental to one side or the other. I don’t believe that only one person was killed in Omarska and Keraterm put together … I do believe that very many more than one single mentally disturbed person was killed … Sorry, with respect, I have to say that if you tell me it is only one, I don’t believe you, sir. Nothing personal … And the detriment to the Serbs is irrelevant. That’s not how I measure these things.”

“With all due respect,” retorts Karadzic, “it would be relevant if it were true. However, I told you that they all saw a single killing. They all discussed killings, but only saw one.” Then we move on to Trnopolje. In my initial report, says Karadzic rightly, I said that Trnopolje could not be called a concentration camp, but I have since changed my mind. Judge Baird, sitting on the end of the bench, asks for clarification.

I try to explain that in the immediate aftermath of our discovery, I thought the invocation of the Holocaust by much of the mass media was not useful to our coverage, and use of the term “concentration camp” encouraged it. But that on reflection “I have decided,” I told the bench, “after consultation with people at the Holocaust museum and survivors [of the Holocaust] to use the term very much with reference to its proper definition which comes from the Boer war in South Africa. It’s fair to say that Trnopolje was exactly that [a concentration camp], where thousands of civilians were concentrated prior to enforced deportation and death.”

Karadzic pushes his theme. Did I know civilians had been “evacuated from a combat zone” to Trnopolje? “That was not deportation … this was evacuation … based on requests made by these persons”. I reply that I had been on a deportation convoy “of people who [had] told me something different … that soldiers and policemen had come around to their houses and given them ultimata to leave … The people on the convoy that I travelled with were leaving anything but voluntarily.” On the same route four nights later, “large numbers of people were taken off the buses and executed on Mount Vlasic, known to this tribunal as the Vlasic massacre”.

By now Karadzic’s tone is harsh, combative. He refers again to the accusation that ITN and I somehow “staged” the camp at Trnopolje. Karadzic plays a section of Bosnian Serb TV making a film about us. “Our thesis [is],” he says, “that the fence around the building tools is what we saw … You, in your turn, contest that, right?” “Yes I do. This thesis, as you call it, was advanced in 1996 or 1997, we heard nothing about it between 1992 and that year from you or anyone else … Those men were detained and under guard.” And on we go: “Do you see the wheelbarrows?” “I didn’t notice them at the time, there were other things to look at … I’m saying that my description of them as prisoners had been proved accurate over and over again.”

Karadzic produces the famous picture of the skeletal Fikret Alic behind the barbed-wire fence. “How can you be so certain that this is not just the way he normally looks?” “I know that’s not how he normally looks … I met him in Slovenia the following spring, and he was of normal build.” “Are you saying that within two months his condition deteriorated so much that he was on the verge of extinction?” “Yes … perhaps the conditions in Keraterm were so appalling that his condition had deteriorated in two months.” “Did you see him half naked when you saw him in Ljubljana?” “No, he was clothed”.

Karadzic questions my use of the term “mass murder”. “Did you establish it yourself, or did you hear it from others and believe it?” “I had met hundreds if not scores of people who have survived the camps, and hundreds if not scores of people bereaved by the camps.” “Do you believe that people were also killed in combat?” “Yes, I do, without doubt.”

Karadzic, justifiably, finds some of the sillier things I have written about him. The first is a headline in a Bosnian magazine: “I live for the day when I’m going to take the stand in The Hague against Karadzic”. He asks whether this makes me an impartial witness against him. I don’t recall if I had said that or not, but I answer: “No disrespect, I have not lived for this day.”

There’s another article, even more embarrassing, in which I called Karadzic a “tin-pot tyrant” with a “cocksure swagger”. “Do you have any proof that I was a tyrant?” he asks. I concede that he was, indeed, elected on his own territory, though not across Bosnia. And: “Forgive the cocksure swagger,” I reply, “You did have one at the time. The language is a little strong, I’ll admit.” Throughout the exchange, Karadzic pursues his theme of my being “anti-Serb”. “The Serbs consider you highly partial, most partial, isn’t that right?” To which I reply: “Well if so, that’s unfortunate. I am, as I tried to explain when we were talking about neutrality, highly partial about extreme violence. I’m not highly partial about any race of people or ethnicity or whatever. In fact, I’m highly partial against racialism. So I’m not anti-Serb, I’m anti what was done in the name, tragically, of Serbia”.

Later, I stress that I took “this allegation of anti-Serbian sentiment extremely seriously” and had “proceeded immediately to investigate camps with Serbian prisoners … and I made it my business to do so in the interests of impartiality, and partiality over the practice of putting people into camps”. Judge Morrison intervened: “As you know, Dr Karadzic … it isn’t the Serbian people who are indicted in this case, nor the Serbian state. It’s you, and you need to concentrate on that reality.” To which Karadzic replies: “Thank you, Excellency. However, as things stand, I have been indicted … for everything that every crook did on the ground. I am trying to prove that I had nothing to do with the system whatsoever.”

In his parting remarks, Karadzic insists that my descriptions of the terrible state of prisoners in Omarska were made only after President George H Bush had expressed his horror at our discovery. I reply that my original story described the inmates as “horribly thin, raw-boned, some almost cadaverous…”

I can see what Karadzic is driving at: I was glory-hunting, and cranked it up in order to give interviews on radio and win awards. This hurts, and I explain that I care not a damn about giving interviews or winning prizes, and: “Do I wish history had never had Omarska in it? Yes.” Complimenting my initial report from the camps, Karadzic adds, at an intense pitch, that “the rest is nothing but a big story, and I’m really sorry that you put yourself in that position and that you were finally proclaimed an anti-Serb”. This is searing stuff, and Judge Kwon rules it “necessary comment. Unless [he turns to me] you wish to comment on that.” Which I do: “Just to say that I have nothing against the Serbian people whatsoever, my complaint is against what was done in their name.”

The following week, I watch another witness facing Karadzic – a doctor whom I had met the day we entered the camps in Trnopolje. Idriz Merdzanic had tried his best to run a “medical centre” in the camp, treating beaten prisoners and raped girls with whatever medicines he could scavenge from surrounding houses. He had been transported to Trnopolje after attempting to treat the wounded, included a badly injured girl of 13, as the Serbs “cleansed” the town of Kozarac, near Prijedor. On the day we visited the camps, he gave ITN an extraordinary interview, on a knife-edge between what he wanted to say and what he felt he could say and live – much of it with a roll of the eyes.

The doctor was ITN’s only inmate witness when it sued and defeatedLiving Marxism at the high court in London over its thesis that Trnopolje was a lie. When I asked the doctor how he felt about those who followed Karadzic’s cue in saying reports of the camp were fabricated, he replied: “It’s hard to explain my feelings. I have no words for this behaviour. On one hand, we are trying to survive what happened to us, on the other we have these people telling us that it is a lie, that it did not happen. It is hard enough to find words to describe the camps and what happened, but there are no words to describe what these people do.”

For a book I am writing, I had visited Merdzanic this summer at home with his family in Kiel, northern Germany. Now working as a surgeon, he said: “I report what I have seen to The Hague, but I never relive it. We do not talk about it, it’s a defence mechanism, we lock it away. Everyone has their way of coping, and the experiences are different. Everyone in their own way tries to deal with their own experience of their contact with that hell.”

“It is with us all the time,” his wife, Amira, added (both her parents were murdered in Prijedor), “and it will be with us all the time until the end of the line. What we do to survive is to keep the door closed.”

When the tribunal was established by the UN security council in 1993, its mandate was “to bring to justice those responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed in the former Yugoslavia since 1991”. There was an additional charge: “And thus contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace in the region.” This second is an ambitious claim for a court of law, and begs the questions: what has been achieved, and what next, when the trials of Karadzic and Mladic are over?

The mandate is a statement of contrition as well as ambition. For three long, bloody years, Bosnia’s war was arguably one of the worst failures of diplomacy the UN has ever endured, along with its mishandling of the genocide in Rwanda, where it also established a tribunal. In its diplomacy, the UN did little more than appease – and often encourage – the pogrom Karadzic is accused of masterminding. UN “protection force” troops stood haplessly by as the slaughter continued, and their commander, General Bernard Janvier, took lunch with Mladic three days before the Srebrenica massacre, which Mladic and Karadzic are accused of ordering; 8,000 men and boys were executed after Dutch UN troops evicted much of the UN-declared “safe area’s” population from their compound and looked on as the Serbs separated out males from females, for brazenly obvious motives.

And there is a thread between these origins and what has become a weariness with the tribunal’s work on the ground, and among the victims themselves. After Karadzic’s arrest in 2008, the streets of Bosnian cities were lined with honking cars, but after that of Ratko Mladic last year, there was no such celebration. The chief prosecutor at The Hague, Serge Brammertz, echoed the wider brief when he said: “These victims have endured unimaginable horrors – including the genocide in Srebrenica – and redress for their suffering is long overdue … We believe that it can have a positive impact on reconciliation in the region.” While Sabaheta Fejzic, who lost her son and husband in the Srebrenica massacre, says: “I am not that happy. I was disappointed so many times by the work of the Hague tribunal.”

Certainly, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has become part of a burgeoning industry of war crimes trials – and a boon to those who would defend war criminals. One British defence lawyer, who had worked on two of the trials, was reported to me as making up to $100,000 a month advising and defending those accused of war crimes around the world. The practice of “fee-splitting” between lavishly paid defence counsel and their criminal clients became so widespread and lucrative by 2002 that it provoked a protest from the US state department. But also groundbreaking achievements are plain to see. Even apart from landmark legal successes, the narrative of Bosnia’s catastrophe has been told for history’s record by its victims from those blue chairs at the witness stands – even if only to empty press and public galleries. Leaders have been made accountable, international law developed, strengthened, clarified and made applicable to internal conflict.

Mark Harmon is a former public defender in California, who recently retired as senior prosecutor for the ICTY – having been with the tribunal from the start. He has worked on the cases that climbed the pyramids of crime and power in Bosnia, from the days he first muddied his boots on the soil of mass graves in Srebrenica to his work on the Karadzic case. Harmon knows better than anyone how the war Karadzic and Mladic are accused of masterminding was ordered and executed, and how they came to arrive at The Hague.

Harmon recalls the very first trial in 1996 – that of Dusko Tadic, who toured the Omarska and Keraterm camps, killing and beating. There was much criticism at the time about the expense of trying a minnow in the war, and disbelief that Karadzic or Mladic would ever grace the same dock. “Tadic was one of the most important cases,” reflects Harmon. “It established the existence of a large crime base, it confirmed the jurisdiction of the tribunal and it established that the violations applied to an internal armed conflict. Tadic shifted the paradigm of protections in international armed conflict to internal armed conflict. The law was set, the platform established that we were capable of trying the cases we were charged to try.”

As the crime base was established, and the tribunal scaled the ladders of command towards Karadzic and Mladic, the cases became more dependent, says Harmon, on “access to relevant documents, rather than blood and guts”. In September this year, the tribunal convicted Momcilo Perisic, former chief of general staff of the Yugoslav army in Belgrade, a case on which Harmon worked, “which showed a man directing the war from his desk in Serbia – no direct contact with victims at all. Building up the pyramid, the work was based less on the victim testimony of earlier trials than facing down the difficulties of direct government obstruction of our efforts…the trials become more sterile and lose the victims’ voice, because the trials at the top, with the likes of Karadzic, are all about proving linkages, with the atrocities already established”.

In his most remarkable case, Harmon led the investigation, prosecution and conviction of General Radoslav Krstic, General Mladic’s senior officer in command of the Srebrenica massacre. Krstic was one of the very few cases in which the prosecution had a penitent witness from the perpetrating side, a soldier in the Bosnian Serb army called Drazen Erdemovic, who came to The Hague remorseful at what he had done, pleaded guilty and was given a lenient sentence. Thereafter, he testified in numerous Srebrenica cases as a prosecution witness. Erdemovic told the court about unrelenting execution after the fall at Srebrenica, so that the death squads had to mass-murder in shifts. He testified to his wish that he be relieved of his execution duties. Most importantly Erdemovic gave information leading Harmon’s chief investigator on the case, Jean Rene Ruez, to an execution site about which the world knew nothing, at the Cultural Centre in the town of Pilica.

“Erdemovic, and the Krstic case, had a huge impact”, says Harmon. “This was at a time of total Srebrenica denial by the Serbs. And there was Erdemovic, saying he couldn’t kill any more, sitting in a café having a cup of coffee while over the road – closer than the wall of this café here – 500 people were being killed. We would never have known if Erdemovic hadn’t told us. As it is, Jean Rene Ruez went to the Pilica Cultural Centre and discovered a grisly massacre scene. Blood smeared the walls, and under the stage of the cultural centre, there were stalactites of coagulated blood”. At the same time, Harmon and the investigating teams began to trace the mass graves where the 8,000 executed around Srebrenica were buried, after US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright made the apposite satellite images available. “We were able to see the freshly dug holes – and trace how the Serbs had moved body parts from one mass grave to another to try and conceal the evidence, and lay the ground for exhumations.”

Harmon says the wider legacy of the tribunal, as a deterrent for future war crimes and criminals, “is hard to measure. You can’t measure deterrence, and we must not overclaim. But it was a pioneering institution; it took some baby steps towards holding people who commit war crimes to account. It developed and refined international law and criminal procedure. The international criminal court down the road is here today because of the success of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. If we had failed, it would probably still be in the laboratory. Out of that experiment, people have been trained – inoculated if you will – to become major players in these other tribunals, for the prosecution and the defence – because these cases are about doing justice.

“And I don’t think it ever occurred to Karadzic and Mladic, when they were doing these things, that they would be where they are today”.

Among the tribunal’s critics are people who have a didactic or political interest in undermining it, or like to jeer pointlessly. But there are others who wish it well and have followed its progress. Among the latter is the expert on the landmark trials at Nuremberg that were the ICTY’s inspiration – Peter Maguire, author of Law and War, a book about Nuremberg, and another on the genocide in Cambodia.

“The biggest problem facing all of the UN courts today,” he says, “is that they were so grossly oversold by human rights advocates during the 1990s. At best, a war crimes trial can convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent in a timely manner. To ask trials to teach historical lessons or provide some form of therapeutic legalism is asking too much of any trial. The idea that war crimes trials can ‘re-educate’ societies is based upon the assumption that the Nuremberg trials did more than punish the guilty and exonerate the innocent, they also transformed Nazis into law abiding democrats. The fact is that neither assumption stands up to analysis.”

Maguire argues that “by the end of the 1990s, ‘the legacy of Nuremberg’ had become little more than a rhetorical tool used to justify any and all war crimes trials and the long march towards an international criminal court with universal jurisdiction. My former teacher, the late Telford Taylor [a prosecutor at Nuremberg], taught me that war crimes prosecutions – under any circumstance – signified failure: failure to act, failure to deter, and finally failure to prevent. Simply put, trials never can make up for disgraceful inaction in the face of preventable atrocities. Nobody in their right mind opposes the punishment of war crimes perpetrators, but coming after the bloodiest century in the history of man, is it enough to seek salvation in new codes of international criminal law and world courts?”

The woman on whose shoulders much of the tribunal’s extra-legal mandate – its legacy on the ground – falls, is its head of outreach, Nerma Jelacic – also head of communications for the ICTY. She is from Visegrad, a town on the Drina river in eastern Bosnia, scene of horrific violence. Jelacic’s plans are to impact the tribunal’s work in a country more torn than at any time during the war: “They involve entrenching the current outreach offices and moving the operation and the defence lines from The Hague to the Balkans: not just to Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade and Pristina – but to the municipalities, the villages themselves.

“The work of the tribunal,” she says, “is still being undermined by elements of society which should and could have a healing effect, but they don’t: politicians, media, religious leaders – some still maintain the divisions in society. And that is one big machinery to fight against. These divisions are entrenched now and it will take many years for those societies to emerge even partially healed from the traumas they faced. The truth is that no people or nation in former Yugoslavia is ready to see its own reflection; to accept what they see and come to terms with its own past.

“What has happened at the tribunal,” adds Jelacic, “is that an unprecedented amount of work has been done by this tribunal and it has changed history. But if you ask anyone ‘Has the tribunal brought reconciliation?’ the answer is of course, ‘No it hasn’t.’ By itself, it never could have. But if you ask me whether I am going to get to work on unfertile ground and try to bring recognition of the importance of the enormous amount of work done by this court, especially if you compare it to other conflict countries and the attention they received in the 90s, the answer is, ‘Yes’.”

“What I want to do is to break down the barriers, on the individual basis that a raped Muslim woman has a lot in common with a raped Serbian woman. If people can one day recognise the commonalities between the people who were reaped, beaten, tortured and had their loved ones killed, something of what has happened here at this tribunal will have contributed to that recognition”.

Towards the close of our session in the holding cells it seemed churlish for there not to be a little banter with Karadzic. Talk turned to what a “fantasy” Yugoslav football team would have looked like at the next World Cup, had the country not torn itself apart: Vidic of Serbia in defence, Modric of Croatia and Dzeko of Bosnia in attack. “We’d win it,” Karadzic says, a keen football fan who was once a psychiatric consultant to the FK Sarajevo football team which now plays in what he calls “Muslim Sarajevo”.

Karadzic’s final aside in the holding cells is directed towards his prosecutor, Ann Sutherland: “Ah, you see how hard Miss Sutherland is trying to convict me. It will make my freedom even sweeter!”

The War is Dead, Long Live the War by Ed Vulliamy will be published by The Bodley Head in the spring

RADOVAN KARADZIC Biography

1945 Born in Petnjica, Montenegro, into the Serbian Drobnjaci clan.

1960 Moves to Sarajevo to study psychiatry.

1967 Meets Serbian writer and leader of the Serbian national revival movement Dobrica Cosic, who later persuades him to enter politics.

1970 Moves to Denmark to study neurotic disorders and depression at Næstved hospital.

1974 Attends Columbia University in New York, where he continues his medical training in psychiatry.

1975 Returns to Sarajevo to begin his medical career in various hospitals, and works as a psychologist for the FK Sarajevo football team.

1989 Co-founds the Serbian Democratic party in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

1992 Becomes the president of a Bosnian Serb-declared independent state, Republika Srpska, within Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the support of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, institutes a ruthless campaign (1992–95) to drive non-Serb Bosnians from the republic.

1996 A warrant for his arrest is issued and he goes into hiding for 13 years, escaping international calls for him to stand trial for war crimes including authority over camps and the siege of Sarajevo during which nearly 10,000 people died or went missing.

2008 Found and arrested in Belgrade, acting as a doctor of alternative medicine, with a heavy white beard and a new alias, Dr Dragan David Dabic. Appears before the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to face the 11 charges against him.

2009 Trial of Radovan Karadzic begins. He fails to show for the first hearing, saying he has not been given enough time to prepare his defence. The trial continues. Nina Kobalia

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