Ferko nodded.
“And on that night in 2004, when you saw these soldiers in fatigues, could you recognize the army or military branch they belonged to?”
Ferko again lifted his palms haplessly. “Yugoslav maybe?”
“But over the years had you noticed the fatigues of different countries sometimes resembled each other? Had you seen, for example, the similarity in the camouflage outfits of the Yugoslav National Army and the United States Air Force?”
Ferko gazed at the ceiling for a second, then waved his hands around vaguely.
“But in the dark, could you say whether these soldiers wore the Yugoslav uniforms or the American uniforms?”
Once the question reached him, Ferko shook his head and made a face.
“No,” he said simply.
Judge Gautam nodded sagely. “Now Mr. Ten Boom,” she said to me, “would you care to follow up in any way on my questions?”
On my notepad, Goos, who’d worked throughout the Balkans a decade ago, had written, ‘NO USAF in Bosnia then.’ Olivier Cayat, the law school friend who’d recruited me for the ICC, had briefed me on Judge Gautam. A former UN official in Palestine who had never actually practiced law, she was known to be part of the clique within the ICC disturbed that an American prosecutor had been assigned this case. But her insinuation that I might have been covering up for my countrymen was insulting—and unwarranted. She had just heard me go to considerable lengths to make sure Ferko mentioned that the gunmen were speaking a language he didn’t know.
Having resumed my seat during the judge’s questions, I took a second to adjust my robe as I again stood, preparing to ask Ferko if he’d seen even one member of the US Air Force on the ground in Bosnia at that time. From behind, Olivier discreetly pushed a folded note in front of me, which I opened below the level of the desk. ‘IGNORE her,’ it read. ‘A trap.’
The attention of the courtroom was already focused on me, and I stood in silence before I understood. If I asked that question, Judge Gautam, who was guaranteed to have the last word, would add some public comment branding me as an apologist for the US. I ticked my chin down slightly to let Olivier know I’d gotten the point. The formal air of the ICC felt genteel as velvet, but the currents below were treacherous.
“No follow-up,” I said.
“Well,” the judge said, “given the witness’s answers, and without objection from my colleagues, we will ask him to refrain from describing these men as ‘Chetniks’ and to refer to them simply as ‘soldiers.’ And would you do the same, please, Mr. Ten Boom?”
She attempted to smile pleasantly, but there was a lethal glimmer from her black eyes.
In the meantime, Esma slid her chair from the end of the desk and leaned close to Ferko again to explain the judge’s direction. I had first met Esma last night, when we’d conferred about what I could expect Ferko to say. At one point, I had asked her to limit her conferences with Rincic in front of the court. His testimony would count for little if it looked like he was merely the mouthpiece for an experienced barrister. She had reassured me with a tart little smirk, amused that I thought I needed to school her about the dynamics of the courtroom. She’d proven her savvy by leaving behind the designer attire she’d worn yesterday, coming to court in a simple blue jumper and only a bit of makeup and jewelry.
I turned again to Ferko.
“Now you said, sir, there was screaming?”
“The women were yelling and carrying on to have strange men see them when they were not dressed. The children began crying. The men were angry. They rushed from the houses, sometimes wearing only shoes and underwear, cursing at the soldiers.”
“And do you remember anything the people in Barupra said to these soldiers?”
“Sometimes the women cried out, ‘Dear God, where would we be moving? We have no other home. This is our home now. We cannot move.’ And some of the soldiers yelled, ‘Poslusaj!’”
With Goos’s help, I had Ferko explain that the term meant ‘Do as we say.’
“In each house,” Ferko said then, “the soldiers gave the People only a minute to leave. Then two or three soldiers would go in with their assault rifles pointed to check that the place was empty. Often they just tore the house down as they swung the light of their torches this way and that.”
I asked, “Now, had you ever heard before about any plans to move the residents of Barupra back to Kosovo?”
“When we came first, yes. But then, no more. Not for years.”
“Did you yourself—did you want to go back to Kosovo?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because the Albanians would kill the People. They had tried already. That was why we had come all the way to Bosnia. To be near the US base. We thought that close to the Americans we would be safe.” He stopped for a second to reflect on that expectation.
“And by that you mean Eagle Base, established near Tuzla by the US Army, as part of NATO’s peacekeeping efforts?”
A bridge too far. When the translation reached him, Ferko again stared comically and once more raised his palms, short of words.
“American soldiers. NATO. I know only that.”
“Now, as the soldiers cleared the houses and the residents gathered in various collection points, what happened?” I asked.
“There were trucks that drove up from below.”
“How many trucks?”
“Fifteen?”
“What kind of trucks?”
“For cargo. With metal sides. And the canvas over.”
“Did you recognize the make?”
“Yugoslav, I thought. From the shape of the cab. But I didn’t see for sure. They were military trucks.”
“Now, as the vehicles arrived, did anything else unusual occur?”
“You mean the shooting?”
“Was there a shooting, Mr.—” I stopped. I had been about to use his name. “Please tell these judges of this Pre-Trial Chamber about the shooting.”
With that, I turned to face the bench, the first time I had nakedly surveyed the court. Judge watching is usually a furtive exercise, since jurists, at least in the US, resent being studied for signs of their impressions. The three judges, all intent, occupied a bench raised only a couple of steps, a longer version of the Bauhausy yellow closed-panel desks in the well of the court. Beside Judge Gautam on her right sat Judge Agata Hallstrom, a lean sixtyish blonde who had been a civil court judge in Sweden, and on the left, Judge Nikolus Goodenough from Trinidad, the former chief justice of their Supreme Court. He never stopped scribbling notes.
“As they went from house to house,” Ferko said, “the People would argue. They would shout, ‘I’m not moving.’ The women especially. The soldiers grabbed them and forced them out, and if they resisted, the soldiers struck them with their rifles, the butts or the barrels. Twice, the soldiers fired their guns in the air in warning. Once, a soldier shot his rifle and a woman would still not move, and I then heard her scream as she rushed out: ‘He burned me with his gun. He put the muzzle on me while it was still hot. I am marked for life.’ There was much screaming and running about. But the soldiers, especially those in the outer circle, they remained—” Again a pause ensued as the translator searched for a word. “Stoic,” she came up with at last, probably a million miles from what Ferko had actually said. “They stayed in position with their weapons pointed. But near the privy, one man, Boldo, when they got to his house, he stormed out with an AK of his own.”
“Do you know why Boldo owned an AK?”
“Because he had the money to buy one,” Ferko said, which produced another ripple of laughter in the courtroom. Bosnia, even in 2004, was not a place where a person could be entirely sanguine about being unarmed.
“And did Boldo say anything?”