“I am entirely knackered,” she said.
I apologized.
“My own fault,” she said. “I should have held off on that third glass of wine.”
As I was gathering my papers, I asked if she’d interviewed Ferko’s son. She had, but the young man remembered nothing of these events, which had occurred when he was only three years old.
“And what was the local scuttlebutt,” I asked, while I was zipping my briefcase, “when you first went to Tuzla about who was responsible for this massacre?”
“No more than idle guesses. The Serbs. The Americans.”
“Any mention of organized crime?”
“Once or twice. Supposedly a few Roma in Barupra were involved in a car-theft ring and the local mob resented the competition.”
“What about jihadis?”
Still prone across the room, she drew her hand to her forehead to think and said that had not come up.
“And what motives,” I asked, “did the Americans or the Serb paramilitaries supposedly have for killing four hundred people?”
She hummed tunelessly, trying to recall.
“There was always a bit of speculation that the Roma were slaughtered in reprisal for a bungled American attempt to capture Laza Kajevic earlier in April 2004. Do you know who he is?”
“The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs? Of course.”
A lawyer by training, Kajevic had the same talent as Hitler, making his gargantuan self-importance a proxy for his country’s and his rantings the voice of his people’s long-suppressed rage. Connecting Kajevic to the Roma’s murders, however, sounded a little like blaming the bogeyman. I said that to Esma, who nodded vigorously.
“Kajevic and his henchmen inflicted the only combat fatalities the US suffered in its entire time in Bosnia. But this is an old tradition in Europe: Something awful happens and the Gypsies are at fault. Certainly, Ferko has never mentioned Kajevic.”
She had propped herself on an elbow for my final questions, but now plunged to her back again.
“Bill, you must forgive me, but if you hear me say another word, I shall be speaking in my sleep. And we don’t quite know each other well enough for that yet.”
Laughing, I thanked her for dinner and promised to reciprocate. We talked momentarily about having another meal after tomorrow’s hearing.
Outside, I strolled in an oddly buoyant mood to catch the Sprinter, the train that would drop me a block from my hotel. The street, Lange Voorhout, was a broad avenue, with a center esplanade of tall old trees, and lined on either side by stately residences, many now converted to embassies and consulates, according to the big brass plates beside their large front doors. The Hague at 10 p.m. on a weeknight was quiet. A few couples huddled as they strode along in the fierce sea breeze, while isolated bikers whizzed by in their stocking caps, making only grudging allowance for pedestrians.
Leaving Esma felt a lot like coming in out of an equatorial sun, with my skin still tingling in the shade. She was very bright and disarmingly frank, one of those women whose native attractiveness I inevitably found magnified by her smarts and unapologetic self-confidence. She was sui generis, defiantly herself, which might have been due to her heritage. I hunched up my shoulders in the cold and laughed out loud. It was the first moment that week when I had a solid conviction that I had done the right thing by coming to The Hague.
II.
Moving
4.
The Order
COUR PéNALE INTERNATIONAL
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT
Original: English
No.: ICC-04/15
Date: 9 March 2015
PRE-TRIAL CHAMBER IV
Before: Judge Joita Gautam, Presiding Judge, Judge Nikolas Goodenough, Judge Agata Hallstrom
SITUATION IN THE REPUBLIC OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Public Document
Decision Pursuant to Article 15 of the Rome Statute on the Authorization of an Investigation
PRE-TRIAL CHAMBER IV (the “Chamber”) of the International Criminal Court (the “Court”), to which the situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been assigned, issues the present decision pursuant to article 15(4) of the Rome Statute (the “Statute”) on the “Request for authorisation of an investigation pursuant to Article 15” (the “Prosecutor’s Request”), submitted by the Prosecutor on 14 November 2014.
On due consideration of the Prosecutor’s Request, and the testimony of Witness 1, the Pre-Trial Chamber finds as follows:
There is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation of the Situation under the material temporal and territorial scope set forth in the Prosecutor’s Request.
Full opinion to follow.
This brief ruling was a departure from the Court’s usual practice, by which it wouldn’t say even hello or good-bye in fewer than fifty pages, with hundreds of footnotes. That long opinion with the intricate legal discussion would come later, but the quick turnaround acknowledged that too much time had passed in the case already and was tantamount to an instruction to the OTP, and me, to get moving.
This was hardly an unanticipated victory. No matter how much Judge Gautam disagreed with putting an American in charge, there was no doubt she would allow the investigation to proceed. Nonetheless, a win’s a win. My new colleagues in the OTP drifted by all day to offer congratulations, and I was briefly received in Badu’s office to allow him to pat my back as well.
Goos, my investigator, took it as an occasion to invite me out for a drink at the end of the day. He was a former Belgian policeman who had first come to The Hague to work for the Yugoslav Tribunal. From there, like so many others, he had recently migrated to the ICC and was assigned to my case the day after I arrived, because he had learned some Serbo-Croatian, which was bound to be of use with Bosnian documents or witnesses.
As a prosecutor, I learned quickly that I was only as good as my investigators, the cops or federal agents whose ability to uncover reliable evidence determined the success of my cases, much more than any of my courtroom performances. But Goos seemed entirely unpromising. He was about my age, tall and beer-bellied, with bloodshot cheeks and a blond thatch that stood straight up like the coat of a hedgehog. He wore a trim goatee fading to gray, which, being accustomed to FBI agents, I considered just a little unprofessional. In fact, the first time I visited his office to introduce myself, the day before Ferko’s testimony, I found him stuck to his computer, amusing himself with clips on YouTube. My years in the US Attorney’s Office had taught me that the comfortable nature of government employment often dulled ambitions, and on first impression, Goos appeared to be someone in search of an early retirement, bright and affable but thoroughly uninspired.
Around five that afternoon, we crossed Maanweg, the broad boulevard in front of the Court, and meandered to a stylish little bar in Voorburg. In a matter of two blocks, we traveled from a familiar Western metropolis of big sleek buildings and speeding cars to old Holland, with tortuous cobbled streets and chunky brick buildings with awnings protecting the storefronts.
Talking over our next steps, we agreed that we needed to go to the scene of the crime in Bosnia. Yet under the Court’s rigid rules, the ICC’s diplomatic arm, the Complementarity Section, was required to give the Bosnians thirty days to change their minds about conducting the investigation themselves. For the moment, we could only plan.
“First off, mate,” Goos said, “we’ll want a squizz at that grave Ferko dug for Boldo and his family. See if there’s forensics to be done on the remains.”
Given Goos’s name, and the bit I’d learned in advance about his background, I’d expected a Flemish accent when we met. Instead, Goos spoke Aussie English. He said he’d been raised in ‘Oz,’ where his father managed Australian operations for a Belgian coffee importer. In Sydney, he’d been known as Gus until he moved back to Belgium for university at the age of nineteen.
“What about exhuming the Cave?” I asked.