Jolie to seek end to sexual violence as war weapon at London summit

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Bosnia, conflict, DRC, rape, Rwanda, Sexual Violence, shame, silence, soldiers, systematic rape, the UN, War Crimes, weapon of war

Jolie to seek end to sexual violence as war weapon at London summit

Angelina Jolie has said she hopes a global summit on sexual violence she will co-host in London with the UK government will bring lasting change to global peacekeeping and war crimes prosecutions, deterring the use of mass rape as a weapon in future conflicts.

The four-day summit, beginning on 10 June, will bring together governments from 141 countries to discuss how to improve and standardise the investigation of large scale sexual violence in wartime, to bring an end a culture of impunity that has severely limited prosecutions up to now.

Speaking to The Guardian during a visit to Bosnia, Jolie said: “I would hope that years down the line when war breaks out, people who are considering raping a man, woman or child would be very aware of the consequences of their actions, and that a woman crossing a checkpoint would be aware there was someone collecting evidence and that evidence would have a … result for her.”

“When that begins to happen on masse, then things will change. That’s why its important that this effort isn’t just one single [approach]. We are working with everyone who has worked on this issue for years, with every NGO and every government, to assist these people on all fronts.”

Jolie visited Bosnia at the end of last week with Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, as part of a two-year partnership aimed at preventing sexual violence in conflict. In the course of the trip they spoke in private to several women survivors of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, where the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys has overshadowed another crime against humanity committed at the same time, the systematic rape of women and girls.

The meeting with the Srebrenica women took place in a disused battery factory where in July 1995, thousands of Bosnian Muslims sought the shelter of Dutch UN peacekeepers. The UN promise of protection proved hollow and the factory is now echoing and empty apart from a sombre memorial – two black boxes each as big as a house. In a cemetery outside a stone monument records the names of the 8,000 men and boys slaughtered by General Ratko Mladic’s Serb army.

One of the women, Edina Karic, was taken from her family by Serb soldiers and held at a nearby lead and zinc mine, where she was repeatedly raped.

“I was taken to the mine, where I was raped many times along with two other girls. Then we were eight days in an abandoned house where we were raped again,” Karic said. “When these things were happening to me, it was as if I wasn’t there in my body. I was looking at it from outside.”

None of Karic’s rapists has been prosecuted, even though she could definitively identify at least three of them, and has followed their lives, in a town a few miles away, through Facebook.

More than 20,000 Bosnian women and girls were raped. Over a decade in the Democratic Republic of Congo there are thought to have been 200,000 victims. There were up to half a million rapes in Rwanda in 1994, and there are widespread reports of systematic sexual violence in Syria.

The silence surrounding rape as a war crime is deepened because the victims are often shunned by their own communities. Edina Karic is a rarity in that she is prepared to speak openly about what happened to her.

“I realised I’m not the one who should feel shame. It’s for the perpetrators to feel ashamed,” she said.

In Sarajevo, Hague and Jolie spoke to a hall full of Bosnian army officers who have, with British assistance, developed a training course meant to equip peacekeeping contingents from around the world to detect and prevent the commission of mass rape. As part of the Hague-Jolie campaign, every UN peacekeeping mission is now supposed to provide for the protection of civilians against sexual violence in conflict.

“At times, you may be all that stands between a child and violence that will scar him or her forever,” Jolie told the soldiers in Sarajevo. You may sometimes be the first person outside their family that a survivor of rape encounters. Your actions may make the difference between a successful prosecution, or aggressors going unpunished.”

So far, for the 20,000-50,000 wartime rapes in Bosnia, there have been 30 convictions at the Hague war crimes tribunal and another 33 at the Bosnia state court. Thousands more perpetrators, like Edina Karic’s rapists, remain at liberty.

“There is no forensic evidence, often no medical reports. All you have usually are witness statements, and in a very conservative society, most victims don’t want people to know what happened to them, so most rapes are not reported,” said Dubravko Campara, a Bosnian war crimes prosecutor.

The Bosnian state court has hundreds of open investigations on its docket and just 17 prosecutors. But with the help of UK funding, another 15 are going to be added to the staff to ease the backlog. The court now has a witness support unit to ease the pressure on women witnesses.

The global Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative was launched two years ago after Hague saw Jolie’s 2012 film about the Bosnian rape camps, Land of Blood and Honey. The hardest part of the effort is likely to be translating goodwill at the summit into real change in future conflicts. When Hague and Jolie visited Goma in DRC last March, they heard that women fleeing the fighting with their families were being frequently raped when they ventured out of refugee camps to look for firewood, despite the proximity of thousands of UN peacekeepers nearby. Keeping the women safe was not part of the soldiers’ mandate.

Hague conceded that progress in changing UN peacekeeping practices had been slow, but added: “The UN will be heavily involved in the summit. A big ally of ours is Zainab Bangura, the UN special representative on sexual violence. I think we are getting somewhere with that, but it means systematically building our objectives into all peacekeeping training.”

“There is a lot of goodwill,” Jolie said. There is a lot of understanding of what’s right and wrong, but there is a disconnect. So if we can try to put the pieces together and fill the holes, then maybe there can be a real change.”

War is over – now Serbs and Bosniaks fight to win control of a brutal history

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Bosnia

War is over – now Serbs and Bosniaks fight to win control of a brutal history

After survivors and bereaved families put up a memorial to the mass slaughter in 1992 of Muslims in Višegrad, the response of the Serb authorities in the eastern Bosnian town was as unsubtle as it was symbolic. They ordered the word “genocide” chiselled off the stone monument.

A group of Višegrad widows soon restored the word in lipstick, only for it to be obscured by municipal white paint a few days later. This is a battle the town hall is not prepared to lose. When it sent a surveyor and workman into the town’s Muslim cemetery with an angle grinder to erase the offending term on 23 January, they were accompanied by 150 policemen in riot gear. The message was clear.

The graveyard spat is a skirmish in a much bigger battle being fought in Bosnia – the continuation by bureaucratic means of the murderous four-year war of two decades ago. It is a struggle over collective memory and the power to write history.

“Those who committed the war crimes against us are still winning. They are killing our truth,” said Bakira Hasečić, a Višegrad survivor who was raped multiple times by Serb paramilitaries at her home and in the local police station in 1992. Her sister was raped and killed. Her 18-year-old daughter was raped and had her head smashed by a rifle butt, but survived.

Hasečić now runs the Association of Women Victims of War. She and other Višegrad rape victims tried to protect the monument last month but failed because the town authorities turned up an hour earlier than announced, and in force.

“The huge numbers of police in their uniforms and caps brought back the memories of 1992. You relive those moments. My legs were shaking. When we arrived, we had no idea they had already done that to the monument. People started crying when they found out. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.”

However, the same morning and less than 200 yards away, Hasečić and other Bosniak survivors were successful in stopping another act of demolition. The Serb authorities want to knock down a house on Pionirska Street, where 59 Muslim women, children and pensioners were locked into a single room and incinerated on 14 June 1992. Relatives of the dead, with Hasečić’s help, are trying to restore the house as a memorial.

The town council has countered by expropriating the building, claiming the road needs to be widened. Yet the house is set well back from the existing road and the immediate Serb neighbours – who have mostly been supportive of the Bosniaks’ restoration attempts, offering to help with water and electricity connections – say no other houses on the street have been targeted in the same way.

But no one in the neighbourhood believes the issue is really about town planning. Serb nationalists are striving to suppress reminders of atrocities committed in the name of separatism, mostly against the country’s Muslims (known as Bosniaks) and to construct an alternative history in which Serbs were the principal victims. Many Bosniaks and outside observers fear that this refusal to come to terms with the past means there are few guarantees that such acts will not be repeated.

Bosniaks and Croats have also been slow to allow memorials to civilian victims from other ethnicities, but it is in the Republika Srpska, the Serb-run half of Bosnia, where the scale of the killing was by far the greatest, and where the culture of denial is now the deepest.

Višegrad is a grim example. An eastern Bosnian town set dramatically along a break in the white limestone ravines of the River Drina, it is home to Bosnia’s best-known cultural artefact, the 16th century Mehmed Paša Sokolović bridge, a graceful span of 11 masonry arches made legendary by the Yugoslav Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić.

In his 1945 novel, the Bridge on the Drina, it is silent witness to atrocities across generations. In 1992, it was spattered with blood once more. Serb paramilitaries calling themselves “The Avengers” and the “White Eagles” went on a killing spree through the town and surrounding villages, executing Muslims. Men, women and over a hundred children were slaughtered, many on the bridge itself, and their bodies dumped in the Drina.

The practice of barricading people into houses and setting them alight with grenades was reproduced several times. In another incident in nearby Bikavac, there were 60 victims, against mostly women and children.

A couple of miles outside Višegrad, young women and girls as young as 14 were held captive and repeatedly raped in the Vilina Vlas spa hotel. It was where the paramilitaries led by a pair of sadistic local cousins, Milan and Sredoje Lukić, made their wartime base. Muslim men were routinely tortured next door to where the women were raped and killed.

The estimates of the total number of victims in the Višegrad municipality range from 1,600 to 3,000. The rest of the area’s Muslims fled; most made their way south to Goražde, which became a Bosniak enclave and survived a three-year Serbian siege. Before the war, the Višegrad municipality had a population over 21,000, two thirds Muslim. Now the population is 12,000, 1,500 of them Bosniaks.

Today’s survivors are post-war returnees to the Višegrad outskirts, often living in villages or houses where their loved ones were executed. Twenty years after the bloodletting they remain a marginalised community, routinely denied the meagre social benefits doled out by Višegrad’s authorities.

After an interregnum in which slightly more moderate parties held sway, the Serb Democratic Party (or SDS for Srpska Demokratska Stranka) regained control of the municipality in October 2012. The extreme nationalist party of Radovan Karadzic, which hacked out the Republika Srpska and oversaw the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims and Croats, is back in charge in Višegrad and 24 other Serb towns with its own version of what happened between 1992 and 1995, and its own way of doing things. Hence the municipal use of angle-grinders and bulldozers.

“With the old mayor we could co-operate much better. We had different opinions but it was discussed in a more civilised way,” said Bilal Memišević, the head of Višegrad’s Islamic community council. Both his parents were murdered in 1992, when he was studying abroad. “Since the SDS came to power, they started ignoring us. They don’t mention employment, or the economy. It’s all about the war and the manipulation of 1992. They have been able to target a vulnerable population and they have been successful. They have built an alternative reality.”

That alternative reality is visible everywhere in town. In the main square, there is large statue of a knight bearing a cross and a sword, dedicated to “the defenders of the Republika Srpska, with the gratitude of the people of Višegrad”. Nearby a large swath of land had been expropriated for a literary theme-park, Andrićgrad, masterminded by Emir Kusturica, Serbia’s most famous film director, twice awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

The complex, a pastiche on the town’s history, due to be completed in June this year, is being built on the site of a former sports centre that was used as a detention camp by Serb paramilitaries.

In mid-March each year, hundreds of Serbs come from around the region to parade through the town to commemorate Draža Mihajlović, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Chetnik movement during the second world war, who carried out a series of atrocities against Muslims in the Drina valley. They come as Chetniks, with long wild beards, fur hats, and black skull-and-crossbone flags. Many of the killers in 1992 dressed exactly the same way. It is a terrifying annual spectacle for Višegrad’s remaining Bosniaks, all the more so in 2010 when Mitar Vasiljevic, a Lukić henchman sentenced 15 years by the Hague war crimes tribunal for his part in the 1992 killings, made a triumphant return after early release. He paraded in full Chetnik garb and was given a hero’s welcome, complete with patriotic music and a motorcade through the town.

Milan Lukić himself was transferred from the Hague this month to serve his life term in Estonia. His cousin Sredoje is serving 27 years in Norway.

The most powerful man in town now is Miroslav Kojić, a soldier and secret policeman for Republika Srpska during the war and now Višegrad’s SDS representative in the Republika Srpska parliament.

He provides a legal defence of the municipality’s actions, arguing that there have been no convictions at the Hague tribunal specifically for genocide that would justify the disputed memorial. (Višegrad was taken from the list of municipalities in Karadzic’s genocide indictment to slim the charge sheet and speed up his trial, but the tribunal has declared the town was subjected to “one of the most comprehensive and ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict”). As for Pionirska Street, Kojić says the issue is a long-running non-political town planning matter.

Of his own wartime role, Kojić – an energetic man with a piercing stare – is heated, launching into a strangely inverted version of Višegrad’s wartime history, in which Bakira Hasečić supposedly tortured Serb policemen and soldiers, and Višegrad’s Serbs withstood a brutal Bosniak siege in 1992 and 1993.

The narrative of Serb victimhood is pieced together from sporadic Bosniak acts of resistance during the war. After the former Yugoslav National Army bombarded Muslim areas of Višegrad at the outbreak of conflict in the first week of April 1992, a group of armed Muslims took some Serb policemen hostage and threatened to blow up a nearby hydroelectric dam if shelling continued. The dam was retaken by the army which then withdrew on May 19, handing the town over to Serb nationalists and paramilitaries that carried out the atrocities against Bosniak civilians.

In summer 1992, survivors of the concentration camps helped form a Bosniak First Višegrad Brigade which fought a guerrilla campaign for a year in the wooded hills on the west bank of the Drina, but never came close to surrounding or threatening the city before being driven back into the Bosniak enclave of Goražde in 1993. After surviving multiple rapes, Hasečić, did join the Bosnian army, but there is no evidence of her mistreating Serbs.

Today the Bosniak resistance effort is the justification for public memorials in central Višegrad for Serb soldiers and even Russian volunteer fighters on the Serb side, and the absence of equivalent monuments to Bosniak civilians. It is a pattern repeated around the Republika Srpska. Further up the Drina is the town of Foca which became a byword for mass rape during the war. Bosnian Serbs imprisoned Muslim women and girls and raped them on such a scale the town made legal history. As a result of what happened in Foca, such systematic rape was finally classed as a crime against humanity.

There is no sign of such a grim history in Foca now, just another granite and marble monument to the Serb fallen. There is also no plaque at the most notorious concentration camp at Omarska, now within an iron ore mine run by a Luxembourg-based multinational steel corporation, ArcelorMittal, which says it is a matter for the Serb-run local authority in Prijedor to decide. In the neighbouring camp, at Trnopolje, where torture and rape were rife and where hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats were killed, a concrete memorial to fallen Serb soldiers has been placed at the entrance inscribed with an ode to “freedom”.

In Višegrad, the remaining Bosniaks have become accustomed to the official state of denial. Omar Bosankić and Elvedin Musanović, two Muslim men in their mid-30s out strolling one recent afternoon on Višegrad’s bridge, insist that relations with their Serb neighbours are fine as long as the war is not mentioned.

“No one wants to admit anything. They never want to talk about it,” Bosankić said. As a 14-year-old boy, he helped fish bodies of murdered Muslims out of the Drina at night in his home village of Barimo, five miles downstream. “I still have images that come back all the time. There a woman with her hands tied behind her back and a man with a screwdriver still stuck in his neck.”

Musanović says that Bosniaks on the bridge were slaughtered with whatever the Lukićs’ “Avengers” or “White Eagles” could find, often blades of broken glass. A water tanker would come in the evening to wash away the gore from the ancient stones of the bridge where they now take their daily walk. In the absence of any jobs, there is not much else to do.

The two men are unimpressed by the municipality’s legal objections to the Bosniak memorial.

“What else happened here but genocide?” Bosankić asked. Twenty-six people were murdered in his village in August 1992, the youngest, Emir Bajrić, was only 12 years old. He points out that the fact that no one has so far been convicted for the crime does not mean it did not happen. “Everybody who lives here knows what happened.”

Netherlands to pay compensation over Srebrenica massacre

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Bosnia, Dutch

Netherlands to pay compensation over Srebrenica massacre

The Netherlands has been ordered to pay compensation for the deaths of Bosnian Muslims in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in a ruling that opens up the Dutch state to compensation claims from relatives of the rest of the 8,000 men and youths who died.

The judgment by Holland’s supreme court is the final decision in a protracted claim brought by relatives of three Muslim men who were expelled by Dutch soldiers from a United Nations compound during the Balkans conflict then killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

Although the case related only to the murder of three victims, it confirms the precedent that countries that provide troops to UN missions can be held responsible for their conduct.

The case was brought by Hasan Nuhanovic, an interpreter who lost his brother and father, and relatives of Rizo Mustafic, an electrician who was killed. They argued that all three men should have been protected by Dutch peacekeepers. Mustafic and Nuhanovic were employed by the Dutch, but Nuhanovic’s father and brother were not.

The men were among thousands who had sought shelter in the UN compound as Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladic overran the area on 11 July 1995. Two days later the outnumbered Dutch peacekeepers bowed to pressure from Mladic’s troops and forced thousands of Muslim families out of the compound.

Bosnian Serb forces sorted the Muslims by gender, then began executing Muslim men and boys. The bodies of approximately 8,000 were buried in hastily dug mass graves.

The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague has ruled that the killings constituted genocide and Mladic is on trial for crimes committed at Srebrenica. The atrocity was the worst massacre on European soil since the second world war.

The Dutch court ruling held that in the chaos of the Serb takeover of Srebrenica, UN commanders no longer had control of the troops on the ground and “effective control” therefore reverted to Dutch authorities in the Hague.

The human rights lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld, who represented the Bosnian families, called the ruling historic because it established that countries involved in UN missions can be found legally responsible for crimes, despite the UN’s far-reaching immunity from prosecution. “People participating in UN missions are not always covered by the UN flag,” she said.

Toon Heisterkamp, a supreme court judge responsible for briefing the media, insisted that the narrow focus of the case meant it was unlikely to have far-reaching effects.

Outside the courtroom Nuhanovic said he was stunned by the ruling, which ends a 10-year legal battle and opens the door to compensation claims against the Dutch government.

“I was thinking about my family, they are dead for 18 years,” he said. “It does not change that, but maybe there is some justice. It should have happened years ago. In the future countries might act differently in peacekeeping missions and I hope the lives of other people in the future will be saved because this mistake was admitted.”

The Dutch government resigned in 2002 after the National War Documentation Institute blamed the debacle on Dutch authorities and the UN for sending underarmed and underprepared forces into the mission and refusing to answer the commanders’ call for air support.

The government accepted “political responsibility” for the mission’s failure and contributes aid to Bosnia, much of which is earmarked for rebuilding in Srebrenica. But it has always said responsibility for the massacre itself lies with the Bosnian Serbs.

The three men were among the last to be expelled, the 2011 ruling said, and by that time the peacekeepers, known as “Dutchbat” for Dutch battalion, had already seen Bosnian Serb troops abusing Muslim men and boys and should have known they faced the real threat of being killed.

“Dutchbat should not have turned these men over to the Serbs,” a summary of the judgment said.

The Hague appeals court in 2011 ordered the families of the three dead men to be compensated, but no figure was ever reached, pending the outcome of the government’s appeal to the supreme court.

Zegveld said the amount of compensation the families will receive was not important. “It’s far more important what’s been decided today than any amount that will be established in the future,” she said.

The Srebrenica massacre has turned into a national trauma for the Netherlands. Dutch troops returning home faced accusations of cowardice and incompetence.

The Dutch soldiers, many of whom feared for their own lives, helped the attacking Bosnian-Serb troops as they separated Muslim men from women. The men and boys were then bussed to execution sites. A subsequent inquiry exonerated the ground forces.

“Dutchbat decided not to evacuate them along with the battalion and instead sent them away from the compound,” a summary of the supreme court ruling said.

“Outside the compound they were murdered by the Bosnian-Serb army or related paramilitary groups.”

Serbian president denies Srebrenica genocide

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Bosnia, Genocide, massacre, trauma, war, War Crimes

Serbian president denies Srebrenica genocide

Serbia‘s new president has denied genocide took place in Srebrencia, contradicting the international criminal prosecution of Serbian leaders from the Yugoslav wars and angering the Muslim co-president of Bosnia.

Tomislav Nikolic, the rightwinger elected as Serbian president last month, said on Montenegrin television: “There was no genocide in Srebrenica. In Srebrenica, grave war crimes were committed by some Serbs who should be found, prosecuted and punished.

“It is very difficult to indict someone and prove before a court that an event qualifies as genocide.”

The former Serbian general Ratko Mladic is on trial in The Hague accused of genocide in Srebrenica. Bosnian Serb forces under his command slaughtered around 8,000 Muslim men and boys after capturing the town, which had been declared a safe haven by the United Nations, towards the end of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. It was Europe’s worst atrocity since the second world war.

The Bosnian Serbs’ wartime political leader, Radovan Karadzic, is also on trial in The Hague accused of genocide.

Bakir Izetbegovic, who shares Bosnia’s presidency with a Croat and a Serb, said Nikolic’s comments were insulting to the survivors. “The denial of genocide in Srebrenica … will not pave the way for co-operation and reconciliation in the region, but on the contrary may cause fresh misunderstandings and tensions.

“By giving such statements Nikolic has clearly demonstrated that he is still not ready to face the truth about the events that took place in our recent past.”

Nikolic said he would not attend the annual commemoration of the Srebrenica massacre in July. “Don’t always ask the Serbian president if he is going to Srebrenica,” he said. “My predecessor was there and paid tribute. Why should every president do the same?”

Both the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the international court of justice (ICJ) have ruled that the Srebrenica massacre amounted to genocide.

Serbia wants to join the European Union. A spokeswoman for the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said her office would seek clarification of Nikolic’s statement but “would like to remind everyone that Srebrenica has been confirmed as genocide by both the ICTY and the ICJ. Srebrenica was the largest massacre in Europe since world war two, a crime against all of humankind. We should never forget and it should never be allowed to happen again.”

Nikolic’s win over the incumbent president, Boris Tadic, sent a chill through a region that still recalls his last spell in government – as deputy prime minister in a coalition with Serbia’s late strongman Slobodan Milosevic when Nato bombed Serbia to drive its forces out of Kosovo during a 1998-99 war.

Nikolic has split from ultra-nationalists, recasting himself as a pro-European conservative and saying he will pursue Serbia’s drive for EU membership.

Tadic oversaw the arrest and extradition of Karadzic and Mladic. He pushed an apology for the massacre through parliament and travelled to Srebrenica as part of a drive to foster reconciliation.

Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict

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Bosnia, Genocide, rape, Rwanda, Sexual Violence, Torture, War Crimes

William Hague: Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict

When we think of armed conflicts, we think of battlefields, of soldiers in arms, of trenches and tanks. But wars tragically are also about civilians, particularly women and children, caught on the margins of the battlefield yet at the centre of warfare.

The grave and regrettable reality is that rape and other forms of sexual violence have been inflicted upon women as weapons of war in battlefields the world over. In Rwanda alone, it is estimated that over 300,000 women were raped during the 100 day Genocide. In Darfur, Liberia and the DRC levels of sexual violence have been extremely high too, and horrific reports are emerging of abuses in Syria.

The human cost of these crimes was brought home to me most starkly when I met women in refugee camps in Darfur who had been raped when collecting firewood to cook for their children, and survivors of Srebrenica – the worst atrocity on European soil since the end of the Second World War.

Such crimes, especially if they are not addressed or punished, affect the victims and their families as well as their communities for years to come. This feeds anger, distrust and continuous cycles of conflict. It creates long lasting enmity between peoples, and makes it hard to bring peace. Degrading the dignity of women in such a way reduces their essential role and crucial ability to help build peace and holds back development.

It is the responsibility and duty of all states to take measures necessary to put an end to impunity and prosecute those responsible. There is a strong international consensus that more needs to be done. This has been reflected in the valiant work that the UN and its agencies numerous NGOs and frontline organisations have undertaken over the last decade. But more often than not, the perpetrators of sexual and gender based committed crime in conflict or post conflict situations still get away with it. Shockingly, they are neither held to account nor deterred.

As of today there have been only around 30 convictions for up to 50,000 rapes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This kind of record sends a clear message to the past and to would-be perpetrators to be: if you commit sexual crimes in conflict you are likely to get away with it.

As a community of nations we will not succeed in preventing conflict and building sustainable peace unless we give this issue the centrality it deserves; alongside the empowerment and participation of women at every level in all societies.

Our government is determined to bring new energy and leadership to this task. We want to use Britain’s influence and diplomatic capability to rally effective international action, to help find practical ways to ensure that survivors feel confident to speak out, and regain the dignity, rights, and restitution that is their due. Only a significant increase in the number of successful prosecutions will erode and eventually demolish the culture of impunity.

A key vehicle for prosecution is strengthening national and international capability to gather and preserve evidence, on a systematic basis, in a way that means such evidence is admissible in courts, and that allows victims to speak out and demonstrate the proof of their claims.

Above all, it is essential to ensure that the survivors have access to justice and are treated with dignity throughout the justice process.

We know that the problem is complex and that there is no single solution. We know that legal action to bring perpetrators to justice is only one avenue. That, however, should not discourage us. We are determined to act.

We will form a new team of UK experts to help deal with this problem by helping states, civil society and communities to build their capacity to prevent and respond to sexual and gender based violence, by increasing the ability of national governments, law enforcement agencies, judiciaries, human rights defenders and civil society to hold perpetrators to account.

We will seek to identify those countries and places at most risk of sexual and gender based violence. We want to strengthen our support for international efforts to build up a system of early warning indicators with the UN and other like-minded partners. We will draw on and seek to develop the UK’s own early warning analysis to support this.

And we will use Britain’s Presidency of the G8, starting on 1 January 2013, to highlight the need for stronger international action to deter and prevent sexual violence in conflict. We will use these crucial seven months before our Presidency to build real momentum around this initiative and to encourage other countries to work with us on this vital issue.

Ratko Mladic goes on trial for Bosnia war crimes

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Bosnia, ethnic cleansing, massacre, Tribunal, War Crimes

Ratko Mladic goes on trial for Bosnia war crimes

Ratko Mladic, the Serb military commander in the Bosnian war, has gone on trial for the worst crimes against humanity that Europe has witnessed since the second world war.

Facing 11 charges including two counts of genocide, the 70 year-old former general appeared unrepentant on Wednesday. When he entered the courtroom at a war crimes tribunal in The Hague, he gave a sarcastic thumbs-up and a slow handclap to the public gallery. At one point, he looked directly at a survivor of the Srebrenica massacre and drew his finger across his throat.

“We visited him before the trial and tried to persuade him to be quiet, not to say anything at all,” Branko Lukic, his defence lawyer said. “He told me he made that sign at a woman in the gallery who provoked him by showing him the middle finger. He is like that. He does the same to me.”

After the break, Mladic complained about gestures from the public gallery. The judge told him to focus on the trial while warning the gallery he would put up a screen up around the court if there was any further “interaction”.

For more than four hours, the prosecution at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, outlined its case. Dermot Groome, one of the two senior prosecutors, said that the evidence would show that Mladic, as the head of the Bosnian Serb general staff, was directly responsible for the atrocities committed. More than 100,000 people died in the conflict, mostly Muslims and Croats, including tens of thousands of civilians.

“The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr Mladic in each of these crimes,” Groome said. In his statement, he drew on the defendant’s published directives to his troops during the war, as well his wartime notebooks seized by Serbian police in a Belgrade flat where he had been hiding during his 16 years on the run.

Groome’s also highlighted the individual tragedies that lie beneath the statistics, like the 14 year-old boy whose father and uncle were among 150 men from the same community murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in November 1992. He also told the story of a seven-year-old boy in Sarajevo killed by a Serb sniper while out with his mother gathering firewood. The bullet passed through her stomach and into his head. Lying wounded on the street, she thought her boy was simply following her instructions to take cover. It was only when UN soldiers lifted up his limp body that she realised he was dead.

Groome said that by the time Mladic’s forces stormed the supposedly UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in 1995, killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys, “they were well rehearsed in the craft of murder.”

He added that Srebrenica was “different in scale, but no different in intent” from other atrocities carried out by Bosnian Serb forces. “It was no different in its utter inhumanity.”

One of the survivors in the gallery, Zumra Sehomerovic, said: “I am proud when I see Mladic finally behind that glass, in front of the court. It has come after 16 years but there is no statute of limitations on the crimes he committed”.

Her husband and three other family members were killed at Srebrenica and she said she saw the general up close when he appeared at the scene to “reassure” the terrified captives.

“When I look at him today, I see the man I saw then in 1995. I was standing a metre from him,” Sehomerovic said. ” There he was with his sleeves rolled up, and he was telling us everything would be OK. He was giving chocolate to the children and said he said he just needed to keep some of the men for a prisoner exchange but that everybody would be together again soon. And then he killed them all.”

Groome said the documentary evidence pointed to an “overarching” plan, set out in a list of six war aims drawn up by Mladic, aimed at ethnic cleansing hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats and carving out an ethnically pure Serb homeland in western and eastern Bosnia.

The prosecution statement also focused on the 44-month siege of Sarajevo. Groome quoted Mladic from wartime documents and interviews in which he appeared to boast about “putting a ring around the dragon’s head of Sarajevo”.

At one point the general is quoted as saying: “I have blocked Sarajevo from all four sides. There is no exit. It is in a mousetrap.”

Lukic said that he intended to cross-examine prosecution witnesses carefully, but would let the prosecution present its entire case before making his own opening statement.

“Our strategy is not to reveal our strategy and to keep our cards close to our chest,” Lukic said, but pledged to present “new evidence” when his turn came. He predicted that the trial could take more than four years to complete.

In court, Mladic cut a much diminished figure from the bluff, stocky and ruddy-faced military commander he was in the war. He survived for 16 years on the run, at first with the help of the Serbian army and the Serbian government in Belgrade, but since the election of a reformist president, Boris Tadic, in 2004, the layers of protection fell away. Mladic was cut off from funds and had been reduced to hiding in the garden shed of a relative in a Serbian village when he was caught last year.

The Bosnian Serbs’ wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, was caught in 2008, living under a false name and posing a new-age healer. He is already midway through his trial at The Hague. Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president who orchestrated the Balkan wars from Belgrade, died of a heart attack in his cell in 2006 before a verdict could be delivered in his case.

At the start of Wednesday’s hearing the presiding judge, Alphons Orie of theNetherlands, said the court was considering postponing the presentation of evidence, due to start on 29 May, owing to material omitted by the prosecutors when it disclosed evidence to the defence. Groome said he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment”.

Bosnia’s rape victims have their say

Tags

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

Face to face with Radovan Karadzic

Tags

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.

Television 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