by Kim Echlin
I entered through the metal detector and slid my bag over a low counter toward an officer. At each metal and bulletproof threshold were young, scrubbed armed security men who spoke several languages. Their name tags: Adriaan, Cees, Karim, Lieven. I felt something in Lieven, caught his eye, as I passed by. Inside was a raised reception desk and a great hall and a wide staircase under the vaulted ceilings of last century’s grandeur. The building was a many-doored purple martin house where people from eighty countries worked together, lawyers and case managers and legal assistants and language assistants and witness assistants and librarians and forensics experts and security people flying in and out.
The core of Karla’s team would be three women and one man. She had already worked and travelled with Sue and Lise to build the case. Back in The Hague she brought in a crime analyst. Nita Tamang would oversee the database that linked witness statements to other evidence. The only man on the team was Jonathon Bailey, nicknamed Joop, a small-town Canadian who happened to be travelling in Holland when the tribunal was being assembled. He applied for a job as a clerk but Karla discovered his photographic memory and saw his computer skills and she learned he had grown up with three sisters. She said to him, as if joking, You must have sometimes had a problem to find a free bathroom. Joop laughed and said, I made a bathroom spreadsheet but they all ignored it. So I just went outside.
Karla knew she’d found her case manager, bright, organized, flexible, forgiving and funny. In her habitual way of making strings of words, she called the women and Joop her Foča-Frauen-team.
They began with a database to integrate witness statements from church and refugee groups, the International Red Cross, Edina’s group and others in the region. Karla and Lise travelled to meet women in exile in Vienna and Istanbul and Ankara and London and New York and Hamburg and Sydney and Toronto.
The women had precarious new lives. New languages. New jobs.
There was fragility.
I am afraid if I testify I will be killed.
I need my job. I cannot leave.
I am caring for my children, my old mother.
I do not want to remember.
Will he be in the courtroom?
Karla carried a soft, battered locked briefcase full of the women’s words. She studied the files, mastered their detail. Memory is most accurate about place. I was taken to Foča High School where I was a student the year before. A group of soldiers came into the classroom and picked eight of us. One took me to a small room and told me to strip. Karla understood that she was disturbing a lightless world. There were three hundred of us. I spent four months in that hall. It is a nightmare that cannot be understood.
After reviewing three thousand files, Karla and her team finally settled on sixteen witnesses. Their stories were linked, all in Foča, the same perpetrators. The women were chosen for their place in the pattern of attacks and for their ability to withstand questioning. Karla wanted to show that the perpetrators’ intent was to destroy a community by using women across generations. She wanted to begin her prosecution with Edina, her mother and her daughter. Three generations of the same family. The other thirteen women’s stories would corroborate times and places and demonstrate the scope of the crimes.
The witnesses worried about live transmissions. Many did not want their families at home, in whatever countries they were living, to know. I begged the soldiers to kill me but they laughed. They said, We don’t need you dead. You will have our babies. Memories of lost husbands stirred the women’s anguish as much as living ones. Some men supported their wives and some refused to live with them after the war. Some women did not want their children to know. No one’s peace was ever to be restored.
The voices of the witnesses would be altered on the transmission and their faces blocked with a pixelated mosaic. Only people inside the courtroom would see them.
Karla listened and absorbed the women’s suffering and rage. But never could she fully know what their torment was. No one could. And she could not predict what might happen when a woman sat under the gaze of three black-robed judges, rows of lawyers and assistants for the prosecution on her right and, unseen but felt, the public gallery behind her. How would a woman tolerate the eyes of the accused on her, with his lawyer and security officers on her left?
Women were reluctant to leave the difficult new lives they had painted over their old lives. At the last moment would they even show up? Who could say what would happen in this new court?
Karla told them, I refuse to allow your testimony to fall into silence, shame.
The women did not know how to believe her.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me?
Lawyers talk about the rich narrative of a story in court, but anyone who has participated in a trial knows there is no rich narrative in the way that storytellers think of one. There are really only fragments of a mirror selected for legal battle. Its reflections may once have been the life, but no matter how carefully the fragments are put back together there are cracks. We labour to understand what has been lost between the silvery shards.
* * *
—
One Sunday morning in The Hague I visited the Celestial Vault, an outdoor art installation, a peaceful, grassy crater that people enter through a curving underground tunnel. At the centre of the crater is a sloped stone bed with two rounded stone pillows on the bottom edge. I was lying head down and looking up to see the crater’s rim, to see the illusion of the sky as a vast sheltering dome. I wanted to bring Biddy here one day.
I was looking at the clouds when a woman approached quietly and said, Hello. Please, I do not want to startle you.
I sat up and recognized Karla.
I slid off the stone couch so she could try it. She lay down and said, Ah yes, I see. It feels like the sky is an umbrella.
We walked a little and chatted. She was curious about what I was doing and I told her I was writing about the trials and my friendship with Edina.
She said, I cannot talk to you.
We don’t have to talk about the trial, I said.
I cannot talk about it with journalists, she said.
I understand, I said. Well, I’m taking the bus back to town.
And then, surprisingly, she said, I have my car. Come. I will give you a ride.
This is how I came to know her. She liked people and wanted to know them and was prudent but generous. Later she would tell me that as the trial had dragged on, and she saw me day after day in the public gallery, she had experienced my presence as hopeful when it sometimes seemed that the world no longer cared. Or worse, when it scorned the work.
But that day in the privacy of her car, I asked her why she had come to work in The Hague.
She remembered, she said, when her war was over, when she was twelve, coming back to a flattened Hamburg and seeing only the spire of St. Nicholas Church still standing. Her home was gone, her father’s cobbler shop, her mother’s bank, everything destroyed in Operation Gomorrah. At first, while they were setting up schools, her parents taught her at home. They told her about the concentration camps and the transports. They told her about the woman they had hidden in their attic who Karla thought was a distant cousin but was, in fact, a former customer of her father’s. They had managed to keep her alive through the war.
In law school Karla fell passionately in love with Raphael, a survivor ten years her senior. For two years they were inseparable. He had been one of twelve people who showed up at the first meeting to rebuild the temple on Kielort Street. But he died suddenly, of a hemorrhagic stroke. Her beautiful Raphael, just gone. She was twenty-three years old and she was numb. After surviving so much, how could he die?
One must take things as they come, said her soft-spoken father, using the old German saying that she had heard since childhood: Man muss die Dinge nehmen, wie sie kommen.
When Karla met Andro, a quiet, ironic, r
ueful history professor from a region that had suffered war for centuries, she allowed him to love her. Andro was born in Croatia and educated in Hamburg. He loved music, the Beatles, opera. He had an academic’s soft hands and mild slouch. He was lean with a small, rounded stomach. There was a deep furrow between his eyebrows not from worry but from concentration. He favoured two grey cardigans. He loved Karla, her ambition and confidence. The first time they had coffee together she told him she wanted no children. She wanted to pursue international banking law. Over their years together Andro’s fascination for Karla did not wane. Her international work contrasted favourably with his own long days in libraries. She became expert in untangling secret accounts and tax evasion and businesses disguised inside hidden corporations all over the world. She joked, I am like an archaeologist brushing away layers of dust.
She said that on weekends she and Andro often went to the flea markets. He liked to collect small, lost domestic objects, old silver spoons, photographs, prints torn from books.
Karla stopped her car in front of my apartment building and I said, I hope the case goes well.
She said, It will. It will be like seeing the shape of the sky from a stone bed in a crater.
* * *
—
At the beginning of the trial there were unexpected delays and hours to fill. I installed a long telephone cord in my apartment so I could pace. I read international law history and old court cases. The new court’s Rules of Procedure and Evidence had taken nine months to write and I read them too. Everything was in the Peace Palace law library. I was much alone. I read about the presiding judge, Gladys Banda from Zambia, and about Judge Jack Smith from Australia and Judge Matteo Romano from Italy. In a world with few female judges I was especially fascinated by Judge Banda, who was the first woman in her family to be educated. She had switched to law school when she discovered there was no theology department at her university and found that she liked law. She was the only woman in her class. She taught, worked for the UN on the status of women, was a judge in Lusaka. I wondered who she was under the heavy gowns, under the rational reflection and tamped-down emotion. She had said in one interview that the reason she could have five children and her busy career was because of her husband. Gladys Banda believed every schoolchild should be actively taught how to make unpopular moral decisions, and to work through the logic behind them and to practise defending them. She said that her father, a villager with a grade-school education, always told her and her sisters and brothers, You have to look after wealth, but knowledge looks after you. I wondered how many rape trials Judge Banda had presided over in a place where traditional healers told men that sex with young girls, even relatives, would bring them health and success. Her favourite novel was Woman at Point Zero. I thought about the energy of this woman who had let nothing stand in her way, who had ruled on kikondo and witchcraft. She was ambitious. She would have to control a difficult and emotional courtroom. In another interview she had said, I am a good judge because I have been subjected to undue scrutiny. I am not talking about race but about being a woman.
Then the interviewer asked whether being a woman affected her views of areas of the law concerning women.
Judge Banda answered, Does being a man change his views on areas of law pertaining to men? The law is for everyone. A judge brings all their experiences to their work. If they have experienced discrimination—as a woman—they will be sensitive to its subtle expressions. A judge is the human conduit of the law.
* * *
—
When I tired of reading, I visited galleries, walked along the beach on the cold Atlantic, saw the abandoned bunkers in Scheveningen. Thirty-three hundred troops had lived in them during the last war, alien underground conquerors who controlled the city from below. Large signs forbidding entry, Verboden toegang, were loosely nailed on the bunkers’ doors and I easily stepped into the dank, abandoned place. Stretched ahead of me was a long, empty hall with stone walls, graffiti, the smell of dried urine and excrement and stale blood. I moved deeper into the tunnels, exploring rooms that were once offices and sleeping quarters for the young German men who had brought the country to its knees in a few days and forced the Dutch to build these bunkers with stone and shovels. The Dutch had to think of their conquerors eating and sleeping below them, as if they were enslaved by a city of ants. I entered a large room with a long, broken table and a cupboard that had once been a kitchen storage area. I looked for a cistern or some other way to collect water and then I saw a door, ajar, that opened into a high-ceilinged room. I pushed it open and saw hundreds of bats hanging from the ceiling, the floor deep in stinking guano, and I pulled back, startled. Was there a crack in the caves through which they escaped into the night air each dusk? Did they fly with their little human faces and hands outstretched through the tunnels I had just walked through? I examined the numbers and dates and caricatures young soldiers had scratched into the walls. And then I became aware of an odour and a movement behind me. A very old woman with tangled hair and dark eyes was staring at me. She wore a torn, filthy brown skirt and a purple sweatshirt. Her decayed teeth were brown under cracked lips but her eyes were oddly gentle. I said, Hello, excuseer mij, I do not speak Dutch.
I stepped back to show I meant no harm and then I said, Can you show me the way out?
She turned her back to me and began to walk away. I followed her through tunnels I did not recall and finally I smelled fresh air. In a few more moments I saw a slash of sunlight cutting across a corner and I realized she had led me to a different point of entry.
Why are you here? I asked.
She said, My daughter die. Here.
I am sorry. Can I see another’s woe, And not be in sorrow too?
Long time, she said.
When?
In war, she said.
I am sorry, I said again.
Soldiers, she said.
I walked into the salt air. There are memories people cannot recover from. I longed for Biddy, for Mam. I thought, I will find a way to go home during the breaks. Take on extra work. I will find a way to be in two places at the same time.
* * *
—
An abrupt shift took place in the prosecution only two weeks before the trial was to begin. The senior trial attorney for the prosecution would be not Karla but a Canadian named William Steyn. Karla later told me how this happened.
She said, When I learned that the court administration had assigned a Canadian criminal lawyer to take the lead on my case, I was very angry at the whispers that my expertise in international white-collar crime did not transfer in court to violent war crimes. Or that I knew only civil law. None of the excuses made sense. I was furious. I had built the case, read thousands of files and travelled to three continents. I had won the confidence of our witnesses. Now a man was to take over all my work? I was so angry that I would have left The Hague if it had not been for the trust the women had put in me.
Steyn had never lived in Europe and spoke no language but English. He was so new he got lost walking to meet the team to review the case. He was the least informed in the room. But he had been assigned to lead.
Karla said, I knew that he was impressed as he watched Joop pull up files and papers before I asked for them, as he saw Sue show each woman’s spreadsheets anticipating my next point. I had built a team that respected and liked each other and he must have felt my anger. But he only said, Thank you. Once I have read through the witness files, I will review with you my line of questioning.
I answered, This is not possible.
Karla had worked with many men like William Steyn, men accustomed to having authority. He said, It will have to be possible.
The witnesses expected to be questioned by her. They might not come at all if an unknown man would be questioning them. It had taken years to build their trust.
And then William Steyn did something she did not expect. H
e stood up and said he had a plane to catch. Karla asked where he was going and he said he was going to Foča and he would meet her again in two days’ time.
He was met at the Sarajevo airport by three vanloads of military police to accompany his armoured vehicle. After a winding drive through the mountains on the old Austro-Hungarian routes, he was protected by 250 men from the French army who appeared at every side road in more armoured vehicles. They drove him past the destroyed mosque, past the high school, and they went with him into the empty Partizan Sports Hall up on the hill across from the police station. They visited the Ribarski fish restaurant and inside he was flanked by armed soldiers. Old men smoked and drank coffee and stared at him with centuries-old suspicion. He got back in the car and felt embarrassed by the level of security around him.
When he had asked if the security was necessary, that it felt wrong, his military escort said, Yes, sir, it is. Whatever you’re feeling is probably right.
Hatred? he had asked.
Yes, sir, that might be right. We are not welcome. By the way, sir, here they do not call the town Foča. They call it Srbinje.
They drove him past two motels in town where women were imprisoned and then to Karaman’s house where Steyn was escorted down the steep driveway, through the iron gate and into the empty two-storey mountain house. The house was dirty, with old blankets in corners, dry garbage in the kitchen. Back on the road, he nodded up the hill and asked what the soldiers were looking for.
Snipers, sir. We have to leave, sir, if you want to catch your plane.
Arrests had been difficult. One accused had tried to drive his car straight into the Stabilisation Force soldiers and they shot him. The second blew himself up with a hand grenade before he could be arrested. William had worked with a lot of murderers but this was a different landscape. He asked his escort, What was your worst fear taking care of me today?
