The United States is refusing to comply with a request by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for U.S. Army records being sought as part of an International Criminal Court investigation of the alleged massacre of 400 Roma in Bosnia in 2004. U.S. troops who were acting as NATO peacekeepers in the area are potential suspects in the case.
The U.S. is not a member of the International Criminal Court, and U.S. law bars American cooperation in the court’s investigations, but legal experts say that American treaty obligations seem to require the Army to surrender the records to NATO. The U.S. has refused to do so and has reportedly made vehement protests about NATO turning over records from the organization’s own files.
The situation is said to have caused serious tensions within NATO’s multinational Central Command in Belgium, and considerable consternation at the International Criminal Court, which has no formal means to enforce U.S. compliance.
In March, a survivor of the massacre testified before the court, which is situated in The Hague in the Netherlands, that in April 2004, 400 Roma in the Barupra refugee camp at the edge of a U.S. base were rounded up at gunpoint by masked soldiers and buried alive in the pit of a coal mine. The witness could not identify the soldiers’ military affiliation, but said they were not speaking Serbo-Croatian, the language of the local armies and paramilitaries.
The alleged massacre occurred within weeks of the death of four American soldiers and the wounding of eight others during a failed attempt to capture the refugee Bosnian Serb leader, Laza Kajevic. According to NATO sources, the Romas at Barupra were suspected of providing some of the equipment used by Kajevic’s forces.
The second half of the article quoted a former general in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps and two law professors, all of whom had been asked whether the Army could refuse to provide the records, given the conflicting mandates of the American Service-Members’ Protection Act on one hand, and on the other, the NATO treaty, the Dayton Accords, and the NATO Status of Forces Agreement. The former general called it a “close question, but one where the Army might not prevail,” while the two law professors believed that the treaty obligations clearly prevailed, especially with regard to records not stored in the US.
I read the piece several times. It claimed to be based on multiple sources, and it was especially notable that someone at NATO, given the chance, had taken the opportunity to piss on the Americans. But there were also details concerning the Court—that there was consternation regarding how to respond to the US refusal—that left me with a nauseating feeling about where the reporter had gotten her start.
My phone rang as I was pondering. The caller ID was blocked, which was not an encouraging sign.
“Well, aren’t you a clever motherfucker.” It was Roger. By my calculation, it was a little after midnight in DC, which meant the alarm had gone out at State when the Times was posted about an hour ago. Roger was the one who’d convinced his colleagues that I was a square guy who’d do it all by the book.
“It wasn’t me, Rog.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” he said. “You’re too smart for that, Boom. It was that tramp you think is your girlfriend.” A couple of words resounded: ‘tramp,’ of course, and especially ‘girlfriend.’ Why hadn’t I bothered to wonder if the CIA was going to follow me around? Or was it Esma they’d been tailing?
Roger had done a lot of work in an hour and called in some favors. No one at the Times would give up Esma’s name, but he’d wheedled enough out of somebody—probably three or four people—that he could triangulate his way to an answer. I had a litigator’s response to his harsh tone and was unwilling to concede anything.
“Read the article again,” I said. “I have no clue what’s going on at NATO in Brussels. So go wake up somebody else.”
“Fuck you. Don’t play that game with me. You know how this works. One person talks, then somebody else spills so they can spin things their way. But the daisy chain started with Little Miss Gypsy Hotpants. I’ve got that nailed down. And I know how she works. I’m sure the whole activist network is set to squeal—Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, along with various leftie congressmen who hate having to pretend that they respect the military. But let me tell you right now: You won’t succeed. I didn’t think you were this low, Boom.”
One thing trial lawyers get used to is fierce fights with close friends. When I was US Attorney, I watched countless former colleagues march to the door of my office in fury, indignant about my decisions regarding their clients. It was part of the job.
“Stop the high-and-mighty routine, Roger. I didn’t do it. And it would be nothing compared to the changes you ran on me. You sent me over here with about one percent of the information you actually had. Did you really think I’d miss all the evidence that points at the US troops?”
He took a second. “And why do you say that?”
“Rog, you’re not asking me to break any rules about the confidentiality of investigative information, are you?”
“Oh, go fuck yourself.”
“Let me ask you something. Is this the first time you’ve heard that the Roma at Barupra supplied some of the equipment Kajevic used when he killed those four soldiers?”
He was quiet.
“Anybody ever say to you, Rog, that the Roma had actually set up the Americans?”
“You’re full of shit,” said Roger and hung up.
I phoned Esma next.
“How dare you,” I said as soon as I heard her voice. “After all the bullshit you gave me that you were choosing me over your involvement in this case.”
“Bill?” she asked. I’d clearly woken her.
“You took advantage of my confidence and our bedroom.”
I could hear her breathing, weighing her options. Assuming she’d been sleeping, she couldn’t have read the article yet, and thus didn’t know how much of her role was betrayed by what had been printed.
“I did what you wanted but couldn’t do yourself,” she said finally.
I hung up on her.
I pedaled to work feeling like I was going to my beheading. The only positive note was discovering that I really didn’t want to lose this job, especially not in disgrace.
I was in my little white office no more than ten minutes when Goos came in and closed the door. He rolled his lips inward, trying not to smile. He was happy, but looked a little haggard. I took it that Thursday was a drinking night in The Hague.
“I’d call that a ripper piece of work, Boom,” he said. “Brilliant.”
“It might have been, Goos. But I didn’t do it.”
“Of course you didn’t,” he answered at once.
“No horse hockey. This may be my fault, but it wasn’t anything I intended to set in motion.”
He let his head weigh back and forth. He was accustomed to the world of the Court, where there was so little formal power that you took advantage of whatever you had. In the case in Sudan I’d been reviewing, the investigator had smoked out witnesses with a false leak, bought by the papers, that an insider was cooperating with us. But that tactic had been approved at the top.
“Well, I think this will work out rather well, despite that,” Goos said.
“If I keep my job.”
“Keep your job? Mate, you still have no idea how this place works.”
Within the hour, I was summoned to a meeting of the OTP executive committee. We sat around the corner table in Badu’s office beside the large windows. As we gathered, the old man was reading what appeared to be a printout of the net version of the article. He set it down when all of us had taken our seats.
“Do we half any idea how this occurred?” Badu asked.
Octavia Bonfurts, a grandmotherly looking former diplomat, who was representing Complementarity today, spoke up before I could even clear my throat.