I spent most of Tuesday morning in an administrator’s office at the Court, receiving manuals and signing forms. Despite being a relatively new organization, the ICC had already developed an encrusted bureaucracy, albeit one fairly typical of Western Europe, where clerks often act as if history will stop if certain documents are not properly executed.
The most pleasant surprise was my salary—€152,800 with various cost-of-living adjustments—which, somewhat embarrassingly, I’d never bothered to ask about. I still thought of myself as a frugal person of modest tastes, but money had ceased being an issue in my life a while ago. For more than a decade, I had earned more than $1 million a year at DeWitt Royster—often much more—even though I never really understood what lawyers did that was worth that kind of money. When I divorced, Ellen got the larger share of our savings, but it was easy for me to be generous because my parents had left behind a fortune. The millions my father had silently accumulated through decades of adept stock picking stunned both my sister Marla and me, but by then we’d both come to recognize our parents’ intensely secretive nature.
In the afternoon, Olivier took me office to office, introducing me to colleagues, including the prosecutor himself, Badu Danquah, a former judge from Ghana, and Akemi Moriguchi, the porcupine-haired chief deputy, who barely seemed to speak.
Wednesday was dedicated to what little preparation I could undertake before the hearing the next day. I reread the petition the OTP had presented to the Court summarizing Witness 1’s prospective testimony, as well as the office’s internal file, compiled by the so-called situation analysts, which was not much more than a stack of articles about the political situation in Bosnia in 2004 and the history of the beleaguered Roma community there and in Kosovo.
Late that afternoon, I was finally able to meet with Esma Czarni. I had called her London mobile number right after receiving it from Olivier. She was in New York as it turned out, trying a case, and could not get to The Hague until very early Wednesday. She had already promised to spend most of the day with Ferko but agreed to see me afterward at 4 p.m. at her hotel.
The bright yellow Hotel Des Indes was a refuge of secure elegance. Square pillars of Carrera marble, along with dark wood and heavy brocades, dominated the lobby into which Esma bustled, a few minutes late. She came straight toward me.
“Bill ten Boom? You look just like your photos on the Internet.” There were zillions from my prosecutor days. She shook with a strong grip. “So, so sorry to have kept you. Have you been waiting long? Your witness was unsettled. First time he’s even been close to an aeroplane.”
She had not stopped moving, and waved me behind her to the elevator. She had a rich Oxbridge accent, like the older newsreaders on the BBC. Upper class.
“I have everything laid out,” she said. “We can work and I shall order dinner when you care to. My appetite is several time zones behind us, but regrettably, I know it will catch up.”
In Esma’s corner suite, she threw off her coat and took mine, while I admired the room and, to be honest, Esma. I had heard Olivier say she was very pretty, but when I’d looked her up on the net, she’d proved camera shy. In person, she was striking, not exactly a cover girl but quite good-looking in an unconventional way. Framed within a great mass of fried-up black hair was a broad face of South Asian darkness, with supersize features: fleshy lips, an aquiline nose, feline cheekbones, and huge, imposing black eyes. In her designer suit, her figure was shapely if a trifle ample, and her large jewelry jingled as she moved around the room.
Esma offered me a drink, which I declined, but she was still dopey from travel and called down for coffee, which arrived almost instantly. Esma poured for each of us, and then we assumed seats in little round dressing-room chairs with upholstered skirts, beside the small round glass-topped table where Esma had piled her files.
I took a second for bridge-building, asking about her offices in London—‘chambers,’ as the Brits say. It turned out, as I’d hoped, that I knew another lawyer there, George Landruff, whose voice, loud enough to shake the pictures off the walls, provoked laughter from both of us when I referred to him as “soft-spoken.” With that, it felt safe to ask about Witness 1 and what to expect with his testimony.
“Ferko?” It was the first time I’d heard his true name, which was blacked out in the situation analysts’ file. “He is a simple man.”
“Still terrified?”
“I believe I’ve calmed him.” With members of the Court’s Victims and Witnesses Unit, Esma had shown Ferko the courtroom and explained the basics. Judges. Lawyers. “You should find him well prepared to give evidence,” she told me. “I went over his prior statements with him quite carefully. He understands that he should listen to your questions and attempt to answer directly. The Romany people, you know, don’t like imparting information about themselves to the gadje—outsiders—so I expect you’ll get concise replies.”
“And how was it that you first met him?”
“With great persistence. I’ve been active with Roma organizations since I got to university. Self-interest, of course.”
“You are Roma?”
“Raised in a caravan in the north of England.” That meant she had exercised what the Brits regard as a right of the educated classes and had taken on today’s posh accent in school. “In 2007, I joined the board of the European Roma Alliance. By then, rumors had reached Paris of a massacre of Roma in Bosnia a few years before. I went off to Tuzla to find out what I could. People had heard this tale of hundreds buried alive in a coal mine. But no one seemed to know more. Or even if it was true.
“Eventually, I went to a Roma village and was informed that a single survivor of Barupra remained in the vicinity. I received Ferko’s mobile number, but he was too terrified to talk. I must have called him once a month for a year. I had all but given up and had decided to go to Kosovo, where the residents of Barupra came from. My thought was to prove the massacre circumstantially, by finding relatives who would confirm that all communications from Barupra ceased abruptly in April 2004. But I was spared the trip when Ferko at last decided to meet.”
For the next hour, as I tapped furiously on my tablet, Esma read me line by line the notes of her many conversations with Ferko since 2008. Over the years, he had contradicted himself on some minor details—the time the trucks appeared, or how he found his son. That was normal with witnesses. If they tell you a story exactly the same way time after time, they often prove to have been coached or lying.
Midway through this recitation, Esma kicked off her high strappy heels and plunged down onto a sofa nearby, perching her legs on the scarlet cushions. She said she was one of those people who can’t sleep on airplanes, and by now was going on roughly forty hours awake.
Esma’s suite, like the rest of Des Indes, featured horsehair furnishings the color of fresh blood, big mirrors with mahogany frames, and windows draped with French embroidery. It was a large room but without partition, so her bed was visible across the way.