How my summer at The Hague shaped a lifetime

The Age

a day ago

In Summer 2006, when I was practising as a junior lawyer, I was accepted for an internship at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). I took leave from my job as a public law lawyer and left for The Hague with lofty ambitions of pursuing a career in international law. Though I knew the work of the ICTY was important, in truth, I knew very little about the war in Yugoslavia. The siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege in modern military history, had peppered the news throughout my years in high school, but the facts of this many-sided conflict were resistant to a straightforward description.
The ICTY was an ad-hoc tribunal established by a resolution of the Security Council in 1993, intended to prosecute those who had held senior positions in the government and military for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was the first properly international tribunal of its kind and relied on the principle of international law that certain crimes are so fundamental to our shared humanity that they are binding, whether or not a nation-state has agreed to them. Some said the ICTY heralded a new era in international law and order, in which atrocities would never go unpunished. Others were more circumspect, given the international community's stunning inaction throughout the war.
In the mid-2000s, Slobodan Milošević was being tried for his role as a politician for participating in war crimes in an effort to realise his plan for Greater Serbia (which effectively meant using force to connect Serbia with Serbian-held territories in Bosnia and Croatia). A former lawyer, Milošević had, in a colourful fashion, represented himself during these proceedings, consistently denying his guilt and refusing to recognise the ICTY's jurisdiction.
But after I had accepted my internship and before I arrived, Milošević died suddenly of a heart attack whilst detained at the tribunal. His unexpected death meant he was never actually convicted of the crimes for which he was indicted. When I arrived at the tribunal two months later, the mood there was distinctly sombre; questions were being asked about what meaningful legacy the tribunal could have in the absence of a final judgment against this man who many regarded as the war's symbolic figurehead.
July marks the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. In 2001, in the first conviction of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, the tribunal found in the case against Radislav Krstić, a military commander, that a genocide had unequivocally occurred. This finding was particularly significant since Srebrenica had been designated a UN 'safe area' and placed under the protection of UN troops. Their mandate was to protect the roughly 60,000 Bosnian Muslims who resided there, many of whom had been internally displaced from other areas of Bosnia. In reality, the UN troops were so effective in demilitarising the area in the lead up to July 1995 that Bosnian Muslims were largely unable to defend themselves when Serb troops advanced and UN troops, ill-equipped to defend the town, watched on.
Over less than a week, more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men between the ages of 16 and 65 were systematically murdered by Serb-controlled forces. To evade the killings, a column of approximately 10,000 Bosnian Muslims escaped into the woods near Srebrenica and survivors refer to these men – husbands, brothers, sons – as those who never returned 'out of the woods'. In some of the most harrowing testimony given at the tribunal, witnesses described Serb soldiers disguising themselves in UN uniforms to lure them out. Later, to conceal the crimes, mass grave sites were moved by excavators to secondary and even tertiary locations.
Despite being the location for the adjudication of many of the world's highest-level conflicts, The Hague is a sedate, even serene city. In summer, the weather was temperate. On weekends, I went to the beach and waded out into an ocean that barely mustered a swell. The tulips at that time of year bloom in colours that are vivid and intense. Each day, I cycled along the flat streets, past the distinctive orange-brick houses and the canals to work at the tribunal. I arrived at the aptly named Churchillplein, where the flags of many countries were strung on flagpoles in a colourful row like prayer flags.
Although until that point my specialisation and expertise had been in public law, something else quickly drew my attention. At every opportunity, I went to watch the tribunal in session and found myself torn between two conflicting feelings: on the one hand, the defendants appeared so incredibly ordinary, yet had been accused of unimaginable crimes; on the other hand, there was something utterly transfixing about the testimony of witnesses who gave evidence against people who, up to that point, they had lived alongside. Many women, for example, spoke of the last moments of seeing their teenage sons alive before they were transported from the UN base on buses. Despite the enormity of their losses, these witnesses, ordinary people in most cases, found the words to speak compellingly, hauntingly, about experiences that were nothing less than catastrophic.
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Though debate continues about the tribunal's legacy, particularly because of widespread genocide denial, one of its very valuable achievements was providing a forum for survivors to speak about their experiences. In allowing more than 4000 witnesses to give evidence, the narrative of the war was shifted in a crucial way: the story of the war was told by survivors instead of by the leaders who perpetrated and encouraged mass violence.
In retrospect, I think what I recognised in the testimony of witnesses was language operating at its most powerful. In these testimonies, these witnesses were not defeated by the horrific events they had witnessed, but were able to draw some sort of meaning out of the shocking violence and injustice they had observed.
It's no exaggeration to say I returned to Australia fundamentally altered by what I had read and observed. In the wake of that experience, I found the strictures of international law far less meaningful than I had before. Not long afterwards, I enrolled in a course in creative writing and my whole life pivoted towards stories.