How my summer at The Hague shaped a lifetime

In the summer of 2006, while working as a young lawyer, I accepted an internship at the United Nations International Criminal Court for former Yugoslavia (ICTY). As a public law lawyer, I left my job and left for the Hague with great ambitions to make a career in international law. Although I knew that ICTY’s work was important, I actually knew very little about the war in Yugoslavia. The siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of modern military history, had left the news for years in my high school, but the facts of this multilateral conflict were resistant to a simple explanation.

The ICTY was a temporary court established in 1993 with the decision of the Security Council and aimed at prosecute the army due to high -level positions and war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was the first proper international court of its species, and it was based on the principle of international law, and some crimes were so fundamental for our common humanity, and that a nation-state accepted themselves or agreed. Some said ICTY has heralded a new era in the field of international law and order, and that the persecution will never be unpunished. Considering the striking inertia of the international community during the war, others were more cautious.

In the mid -2000s, Slobodan Milošević was on trial for his role as a politician to participate in war crimes in order to realize his plan for the Great Serbia (he meant using force to relate Serbia to the territory of Serbia in Bosnia and Croatia). Former lawyer Milošević represented himself during these cases, constantly rejected his guilt, and refused to recognize ICTY’s judicial authority.

But after accepting my internship and before he arrived, Milošević suddenly had a heart attack while he was detained in court. His unexpected death meant that he had never been convicted of crimes he was accused. When I came to court two months later, the mood there was significantly gloomy; The court asked questions about how meaningful heritage could be in the absence of a final judgment against this man, which was considered the symbolic figure of the war.

July points to the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. In 2001, under the first conviction of the species since the Nürnberg cases, the court found that a genocide against Radislav Krstić, a military commander. This finding was particularly important, as Srebrenica was called the UN as a “safe area ve and was placed under the protection of the UN troops. Their duties were to protect approximately 60,000 Bosnian Muslims, many of which were displaced from other parts of Bosnia. In fact, the UN troops were so effective in demilitarization of the region until July 1995 that they could not largely defend themselves when the Serbian troops of Bosnian Muslims progressed and watched badly equipped UN troops to defend the town.

More than 8000 Bosnian Muslims between the ages of 16 and 65 have been systematically killed by Serbian controlled forces for less than a week. To avoid murders, about 10,000 Bosnian Muslim columns fled to the forest near Srebrenica, and those who survived these men – husbands, brothers, sons – never return from the forest. In some of the most sad statements in the court, witnesses identified Serbian troops hiding Serbian troops in the UN uniforms to attract themselves. Later, to hide crimes, mass grave areas were moved to secondary and even third places by excavators.

Although most of the world’s top conflicts are a place for the trial, The Hague is a calm, calm city. The weather was mild in the summer. I went to the beach on weekends and went to an ocean that gathered a barely swelling. The tulips at the time of the year bloom in vivid and dense colors. Every day, I passed different orange brick houses and channels to work in the court and rubbed a bike on the flat streets. I arrived at Churchillplein, which is appropriate to be appropriate to the flag poles based on the flag poles in a colorful order like prayer flags.

Although my expertise and expertise were in public law up to this point, something else quickly caught my attention. At every opportunity, I went to watch the court in the session and found myself fragmented between two contradictory emotions: on the one hand, the defendants looked incredibly ordinary, but was accused of unimaginable crimes; On the other hand, there was something entirely about the expression of witnesses who gave evidence against the people they lived together. For example, many women mentioned the last moments of seeing their young sons alive before moving to buses from the UN base. Despite the magnitude of their losses, these witnesses, ordinary people in most cases, found the words to talk about a compelling, unimaginable way about experiences that are not less than disaster.

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Although the discussions continued about the legacy of the court, especially due to widespread genocide denial, one of his valuable achievements was to provide a forum to talk about the experiences of survivors. While allowing more than 4000 witnesses to give evidence, the narrative of the war was very significantly shifted: the story of the war was described by survivors instead of mass violence and encouraging leaders.

When we look back, what I knew in the testimony of the witnesses was the most powerful language. In these witnesses, these witnesses were not defeated by the terrible events they witnessed, but they were able to make some meaning from the shocking violence and injustice they observed.

It was not an exaggeration to say that I was going back to Australia, but it was fundamentally changed with what I read and observed. After this experience, I found the shortcomings of international law much less meaningful than before. Soon after, I enrolled in the creative writing course and my whole life turned towards stories.

Gretchen Shirm’s novel From the forestFormer Yugoslavia is now outdoors who benefit from the statements given in the International Criminal Court.