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INTRODUCTION
Most
of the war crimes committed during the Bosnian war were carried
out either by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces or soldiers.
But at points during the conflict, Bosnian government forces
also violated the laws of war. This excerpt from The
Key To My Neighbor’s House focuses on what was
the exception rather than the rule: Serb victims of a concentration
camp manned by Bosnian Muslims and Croats.
Their
case was important to the International Criminal Tribunal
for the Yugoslavia (ICTY) for several reasons. First, the
tribunal was scorned by Serbs and Bosnian Serbs as an illegitimate
court which delivered anti-Serb, victor’s justice. Prosecuting
a case in which Serbs were victims would help convince Bosnia’s
Serbs that the court was not biased. Second, it was the Serbs’
own sense of victimization, suppressed since their sufferings
in World War II, that helped stoke the Bosnian conflict. It
was important that Bosnia’s Muslims not develop a similar
sense of victimization and recognize that people suffered
even at their army’s hands.
The
Celebici case, which began in March, 1997, pushed back the
boundaries of international law, becoming the first case since
the Tokyo military tribunal to test the principle of ‘command
responsibility’, in which civilian or military leaders
are held responsible for crimes of those in their command.
At the same time, the case — the first to put multiple
defendants on trial-- was beset by problems and delays, lasting
for 19 months.
Two
witnesses, Petko and Gordana Grubac, hoped the trial would
explain why, when war broke out in Konjic, a city south of
Sarajevo, they were imprisoned simply because they were Serbs.
Petko, a doctor, and Gordana, an accountant, had always believed
in Tito’s Yugoslavia, and their closest friends were
Croat and Muslim. Petko was imprisoned at Celebici, a camp
in a village south of Konjic, where he treated inmates who
were brutally tortured, beaten and raped.
Those
who committed such acts of brutality -- Esad Landzo, Hazim
Delic and Zdravko Mucic, all of whom had positions of authority
at the camp, were found guilty by the tribunal. Their sentences–which
are still under review-- ranged from seven to twenty years.
But the man in charge of military logistics for the region,
Zejnil Delalic, was acquitted. By the trial’s end, both
Petko and Gordana decided that justice would have been served
if they had participated in a truth commission, which would
have allowed them to confront their neighbors, rather than
a trial.
EXCERPT
from The Key To My Neighbor’s House
In
July, 1999, summer enveloped the town of Celebici, the arid,
unrelenting heat of Bosnia’s south. Each rise in degree
was signaled by the growing buzz of the cicadas. The air was
languid at this bend of the Neretva River, where young couples
lay on a muddy beach tossed up by the swift-running river just
outside the town. Bosnia’s war seemed eons ago.
Mention
the recent guilty verdicts in the Celebici war crimes trial,
however, and the Bosnian Muslim town angrily awoke from its
lethargy. "There were no killings in this area," snapped
Ibro Makam, deputy head of Celebici’s municipal office,
holding court at the local bar. "Most of the people here
have no idea about this supposed camp… It’s all lies.
The Serbs are responsible for what happened." Makam rocked
on his heels, a Bosnian version of a country sheriff with a
cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. The Serbs’
lies, he said, had cost the town humanitarian aid, jobs, and
a promising future. "Now that is genocide,"
he added, irately.
It
had been just a year since I was last in Bosnia — and four
since the fighting had ended — and amazingly, some corners
of the country looked as if war had never occurred. Along the
main streets of many cities, like Sarajevo, gleaming new gas
stations and shiny office buildings rose up, as well as billboards
advertising everything from Seimens electronics to Slovenian
shampoo. Out in the countryside, new red roofs shone amidst
the cornfields.
But
drive off the main routes and the rebuilding ceased. Bosnia,
disappointingly, proved something of a Potemkin village, a country
where change remained superficial and where the transition towards
peace, justice, and democracy looked better than it was. Rebuilding
was massive -- but still largely cosmetic -- and the same could
be said for people’s attitudes, despite efforts to do away
with ethnic propaganda. NATO soldiers, for example, had seized
radio and television transmitters held by hard-line nationalist
Serbs the year before, opening the way to long overdue media
reform in Serb-held Bosnia. No longer did official Bosnian Serb
telecasts refer to events in the Muslim-Croat half of Bosnia
as "foreign news" and even-handed broadcasts, not
propaganda, had been appearing on the nightly news.
Regardless,
Bosnia had yet to break free of wartime hatreds, corruption,
and infighting. And denial about war crimes, as reaction to
the Celebici case proved, was not unique to the Bosnian Serbs,
victims of the most pernicious propaganda. The Bosnian Muslims
and Croats were also still mired in their war-time hatreds.
Reconstruction — and the Tribunal’s justice —
had done little to curb nationalism and heal old wounds.
While
Bosnians freely crossed old battlefield lines without fear,
they continued to define each other as Serb, Muslim, or Croat
and as enemies. In the country’s parliament, leaders had
traded in battlefield arms for the weapons of bureaucratic infighting.
Despite the election of a few moderates, the same nationalists
who led the country into war still ruled it. Had it not been
for the international community’s power to dictate solutions,
little would have been accomplished. "Bosnia" reflected
Jacques Klein, head of the United Nations mission in Sarajevo,
"is a patient on life support."
Even
in Konjic — a city up the river from Celebici that the
U.N. had deemed an "open city", an area ethnically
tolerant enough to receive extra funds — war-time animosities
ran deep, as Gordana Grubac swiftly discovered when she returned
there.
Nearly
two years had passed since the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia had listened to Gordana’s testimony,
along with that of her husband Petko, a doctor imprisoned in
the Celebici camp. While the couple was Serb in origin, they
thought of themselves as Bosnians and Europeans; they gave their
children names that were Slavic, but not ethnically identifiable
in Bosnia. Yet once the war had erupted, Petko had been imprisoned
in Celebici for no other reason than being a Serb.
Their
case was the exception in Bosnia’s war, in which the majority
of victims were Bosnian Muslims. But war crimes had occurred,
nonetheless. For months, the judges in The Hague had listened
to testimony of gruesome beatings, torture and death of Serbs
at the hands of camp guards at Celebici. Petko himself had told
the court of how he tried to nurse the wounds of those who had
been deliberately set afire.
While
one of the defendants, Zjenil Delalic, the area’s tactical
commander, was acquitted, the camp commander Pavo Mucic, deputy
commander Hazim Delic, and guard Esad Landzo were all found
guilty of war crimes. Their sentences, which ranged from x to
y, were much less than Gordana and Petko had hoped for. Yet
the couple hoped that the Tribunal’s case — and its
resulting 483-page judgment --- would inspire the citizens of
Konjic to accept that in this corner of Bosnia’s war, it
was the Bosnian Serbs who had been victims of war crimes.
When
Gordana Grubac knocked on the door of her apartment from before
the war, however, she found herself not welcomed as a victim
of the war but reviled as an aggressor. "You Chetnik,"
spat the occupant, "what are you doing here?"
Fear
was one reason for this perception. The father of Hazim Delic,
the brutal camp guard convicted in the Celebici case, was the
powerful head of the local Bosnian Muslim nationalist party,
which still had a stranglehold over apartments and jobs. As
a result, few dared applaud the conviction. "Don’t use
my name," said a former Bosnian soldier, a youth familiar
with Delic, "he was a monster and deserved a longer sentence."
He added: "These men — nobody is defending them. People
don’t think they are innocent. But they don’t dare
say so."
Ignorance
was also fueling hostility. Across Bosnia, the Yugoslav Tribunal
and its cases remained shrouded in mystery, largely misunderstood
by the public and consequently manipulated by local leaders
for their own ends. While everyone knew about the verdict in
the Celebici case, for example — one man acquitted, the
others found guilty — no one knew the details of the powerful
evidence presented at trial that showed war crimes had been
committed at the camp. The Celebici trial had not been broadcast
on local TV, or its proceedings carried on the radio, and the
judgment was not readily available. All Bosnia.was largely ignorant
of the case. As a UN expert group assigned to study the Rwanda
and Bosnia Tribunals concluded in November, 1999 report: "
It is likely that, except for a very small proportion of the
populations of the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, there is
large-scale, if not total, lack of knowledge regarding…the
ICTY."
This
conclusion in the report surprised many at the Tribunal. It
was less of a revelation, however, to at least one person at
the court to whom questions of public outreach had become paramount:
Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald.
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