May 2001

The Key to My Neighbor's House
By Elizabeth Neuffer

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.