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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