Catching War Criminals

Every day at lunchtime this July, my coworkers and I overlooked the press camped out on our lawn, waiting for the arrival of a war criminal. Of course, this was to be expected; I was interning at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. “The Butcher of Bosnia,” Radovan Karadzic, was caught and turned over during my stay, making headlines all over the globe. Karadzic, the one-time president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was being brought to justice for his war crimes, particularly the decision to wipe out more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

I was on hand as Stojan Zupljanin, one of Karadzic’s allies, was finally brought before the ICTY. I witnessed his pretrial hearing in which he prayed for the other war criminals still at large, one of whom was Karadzic. Even more unnerving was the fact that he looked nervously at me even more than at the judge, perhaps because with my headscarf I was obviously Muslim, like his victims. I sat frozen in my seat and realized that if I had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time, I could have been among them.

My interactions with both these war criminals and victims made me realize that the press can only convey a portion of what these events really mean; they can’t capture all that lies behind the scenes. The media cannot escape a measure of abstraction however they approach these atrocities on the page or screen, as it isn’t until we come face-to-face with the people involved in the trials and statistics that we begin to comprehend the sheer scale of what has happened.

For example, I met one Srebrenica victim who seemed almost staid about her traumas, as if the loss of her husbands and sons was just a bad memory, like a bad grade on a test. This woman could not speak English, and of course I did not speak BCS (Bosnian, Croat, Serbian), so we greeted each other with “As-Salamu Alaykum” (Peace be upon you). She pointed to her T-shirt, which indicated that she was in the “Mothers of Srebrenica” group, and when I looked at her again I could see the sorrow of the thousands of victims concentrated in her eyes and the lines on her face. I found myself having to look away, too uncomfortable. It would have been so much easier to read about her in the newspaper the next day, cluck in sympathy for her loss, and turn the page.

In the ICTY, every case involves thousands of those pained or vindictive eyes. From a legal perspective and through the lens of the press, we are forced to consider the ethnic cleansing campaign’s 300,000 dead and 20,000 rape victims. But these numbers assume an incomprehensible scale.

During my internship at the ICTY, I was forced to confront victims and killers as people, to imagine how I would feel if I were in their situation. I was forced to wonder why Harvard Law Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz is representing war criminal Momcilo Krajisnik and why the international community at large didn’t do more to help rebuild the former Yugoslavia.

And I’m very grateful for the experience. I am now more intensely aware of others’ unspeakable distress than I was just a few months ago, less a victim to the desensitization that affects all of us as we see the news flashing dead bodies in front of our faces. Now it’s no longer easy to yawn or change the channel when the news turns to brutality far from home. Perhaps most importantly, I am cognizant of the need to break through the impatient flurry of 24-hour news, and I am driven to seek genuine human contact before finishing with a story.


Nafees A. Syed ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a government concentrator in Leverett House.