Nothing about the defendant suggests a sadistic guard, banal bureaucrat or psychopathic führer. Instead, Milan Kovacevic looks like the provincial doctor he is, taking notes as he sits in the dock of the most high-tech courtroom in the world.
Kovacevic is the first European to stand trial for genocide in an international court. You can imagine him ruing the irony of his life: born in a fascist death camp and now charged with running one. An anesthesiologist accused of inflicting pain. The head of the Prijedor hospital, a place of healing, on trial as a director of Omarska, a prison camp that became a place of genocide.
During a one-year sabbatical from my Colorado law firm, I have closely followed the Kovacevic case. Not long after Kovacevic’s arrest, I worked in Prijedor in the Republika Srpska for two weeks as a polling supervisor in Bosnia’s first municipal elections. Then I came to The Hague to consult for the former Yugoslavia’s news service, which broadcasts the International Criminal Tribunal’s trials – including Kovacevic’s – to the Balkans.
The courtroom in which Kovacevic is being tried looks oddly like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Uniformed court officers with headsets and mikes sit at monitors arranged around the witness box in a multi-level triangle. Testimony is simultaneously transcribed and translated into three languages. Tribunal staff refer to the tubular security doors as “transporters.” Lawyers wear black with white bibs; judges’ robes are trimmed in scarlet. The only one not in uniform is the alien in the dock.
In alcoholic withdrawal and suicidally depressed, Kovacevic must long for the lush bottomland of Prijedor’s River Sana, ringed by the blue Kozara range. It is a Shenandoah Valley peopled by peasants in horse-drawn carts and dotted with red roofs set among corn rows as far as the eye can see.
Until you get to the town of Kozarac.
What used to be a Muslim community of 20,000 just west of Prijedor is now 10 miles of unrelieved ruins. The Muslim quarter was razed to bare dirt. Once Muslim areas were “liberated,” more than a thousand community leaders were selected for summary execution. Over the months, many more died in prison camps from beatings, torture and starvation rations. Muslims who survived were forcibly expelled to Muslim Bosnia. Prijedor had 40,000 Muslims in 1992. It is all Serb now.
The Republika Srpska is surely one of the most nationalistic places in the world, and the Netherlands probably one of the least. The Netherlands, then, is a fitting choice for international law’s most ambitious enterprise.
The Bosnian tribunal was given a sweeping charter by the U.N. Security Council: “to restore international peace and security.” The goal is “to establish individual responsibility to avoid . . . collective guilt.” Justice for war crimes, in other words, to break the cycle of ethnic revenge.
As a test for prosecuting genocide, the Kovacevic case is a mess, veiled in cant and contradictions. The doctor is charged with command responsibility for the “cleansing” of Prijedor’s Muslims. He was vice chair of the ultranationalist Crisis Staff, which planned the Serb takeover, and president of Prijedor’s executive board. The prosecution only needs to show he was aware that subordinates allowed acts of genocide and that he failed to stop them when he could.
“I saw many bad things,” Kovacevic said in 1996. “I don’t sleep so well. . . . What we did was not the same as Auschwitz or Dachau, but it was a mistake. . . . Omarska was planned as a reception center, but then it turned into something else. I cannot explain the loss of control. . . . You could call it collective madness.”
In this, he foretold the issue for his trial: What are the responsibilities of local political leaders in a time of collective madness? The Serb leaders were intellectuals – Radovan Karadzic the psychiatrist; Biljana Plavsic the biology professor; Nikola Koljevic the Shakespeare scholar. How could seemingly civilized people do such terrible things?
Part of the answer lies in the troubled history of the area. Brooding behind Serb relations with Muslims was not so much ancient hatred as an almost liturgical sense of tragic destiny. The mythic Serb persona was conceived at the Battle of Kosovo, when the valiant were massacred by Turks in 1389. Over the next six centuries, the Serb prince who fell at Kosovo acquired Christ-figure attributes in epic folksong. Serb patriotism evolved a creed of victimhood and resurrection that was lashed to a fury by this decade’s ultranationalists.
Another part of the answer lies in envy of the Muslim elite and the crude opportunism that the war presented. Kovacevic became hospital director after the elimination of his Muslim colleagues. He was recently accused of having pocketed aid money for the hospital lab. But still the question of how shudders through us like self-doubt. Because war criminals aren’t like common criminals. Mostly they are regular people, which is why they fascinate and disturb. They betray the capacity for evil in each of us.
The pursuit of truth is what philosophy, not law, is for. Law is for regulating behavior, though truth is useful. Truth simplifies, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry chosen for the tribunal’s motto.
Ultimately, there may be no answer to how. With eight men on trial and 19 awaiting trial dates, the tribunal needs more resources and less bureaucracy. It may fall short of its ideals. But, this year, by passing judgment on genocide, this bold court will move our quarrelsome planet one step closer to peace through justice.
Baine Kerr, ’68, practices law in Boulder, Colo. His novel Standard of Care will be published by Scribner in April.
