Book Review: ‘Where You Come From’ by Saša Stanišić

As I hunted through the symbols in Microsoft Word to find the correct diacritics for Saša Stanišić’s name, I wondered what he would make of that.  Every time I write about the Balkans, I am frustrated and more than a little outraged by how difficult it is to locate them.  In Where We Come From (2021), Stanišić refers to them as “little check marks on our names” and notes that they’ve been a hindrance to him over the years.  To me – an outsider – they have always seemed a powerful sign of regional identity.  Perhaps that’s his point.

Where You Come From is a book that’s hard to describe.  It doesn’t fit neatly into a one-line elevator pitch.  Broadly speaking, it’s a memoir of Stanišić’s childhood in Bosnia, his escape during the war of the 1990s and his life as a refugee in Germany.  It’s also a biography of his grandmother, capturing her descent into dementia, and - as the title might suggest – a discourse on whether or not where you come from really matters, at the end of the day.  But, as the author himself concedes, it is not entirely autobiographical, because he is, and always has been, a storyteller.

 

A review from the Irish Examiner on the dustcover of my copy calls Stanišić ‘offensively gifted’, which seems to me to sum up his writing style perfectly.  There are writers who experiment with convention and fail.  There are writers whose words roll smoothly through your mind because they follow an established consensus on how a sentence should be constructed.  And then there are those rare talents like Stanišić, who create flawless imagery by playing with language in ways you would never consider possible.

 

The passage where he riffs on the name Oskoruška – the small village where his grandfather grew up – and “hard Slavic endings” held me spellbound with its brilliant manipulation of the written word.  It was the distinctive sentence construction that drew me in from the first pages of this book – Stanišić is obscenely talented with words.  (Of course, my half-remembered AS level German isn’t good enough for me to have read it in the language Stanišić wrote it in (his second language), so much credit must go to the translator, Damion Searls.)

 

Stanišić spent the first fourteen years of his life in Višegrad, and his descriptions of the town and its surroundings are wonderfully evocative.  By coincidence, I was also in Višegrad in the summer of 2018, when the final passages of the book take place, and the descriptions of the trips to Oskoruška put me in mind of the cabin we rented on the banks of the Drina; the walk we took in blazing heat, up winding tracks into the hillside, past impossibly remote gardens laden with tomato vines and fruit trees.  (And I couldn’t help but laugh at his judgement of Andrićgrad.)

 

As a true Yugoslav, with a Bosnian Serb father and Bosniak mother, Stanišić does touch upon the senselessness and destruction of the Bosnian War of 1992-95, but it’s not the main theme of the book.  The narrative instead focuses on the experience of leaving a place and trying to fit in somewhere new.  Stanišić’s recounting of the refugee experience in Germany makes painful reading, perhaps because it still seems so relevant now.  We condemn the wars, we feel sorry for the people affected, but do we really want the reality of them living on our street?  Rarely has this sense of disconnection been written about so eloquently.

 

The ending of Where You Come From takes the form of a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’, which is where the book lost me a bit.  I’m the sort of person who gets anxious in museums if the layout doesn’t take me in an obvious direction, in case I experience time in a non-linear fashion, or – worse still – miss any vital information.  Flipping back and forth through the pages, I worried that I would choose the wrong option and miss something fundamental.  Stanišić expresses his love of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’ as a child, which explains the structure, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was this was merely a gimmick.  Or was it an inspired artistic choice?  Are we supposed to re-read the book and each time choose a different path?

 

These fictional aspects of the book certainly pose questions about the unreliability of memory, especially when childhood recollections are so easily clouded by nostalgia.  Themes are interwoven throughout the book so subtly that you don’t notice them at first.  A disappearing village mirrors a disappearing memory.  The fragmented nature of dementia is reflected in the disjointed, dreamlike quality of the final chapters.  The narrative is not linear, and neither is life.

 

Seldom has a book left me with so many questions to ponder.  Does where you come from matter?  Does it define you?  Do we try to foster a sense of attachment and identity in order to anchor ourselves to something?  Is all this more important for those who leave?  And these questions will undoubtedly hold more weight for a Yugoslav – for someone who was born, as Stanišić was, in a country that no longer exists.

 

It's hard to sum up Where You Come From in any succinct way.  The only thing I will say is: read it.  I can promise you that this is one of those books that will stay with you for many years to come.

A Pirate's Life for Me! (Or why I would have made a terrible pirate)

Is there anyone amongst us who hasn’t, at one time or another, dressed as a pirate?  At some point in your life, you get the urge.  Popular culture is awash with pirates: from Treasure Island, to Peter Pan, to kids’ birthday parties, sexy Halloween costumes, sitcoms, dramas and even ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’ (19^th September, if you’re interested).  We love these swashbuckling rogues, with their cutlasses and buried treasure.  So, why the Hollywood glow-up?  Why are we all so hell-bent on romanticising these violent criminals? 

Firstly - where do our ideas about peg-legs and parrots and walking the plank actually come from?  Well, you can probably blame Peter Pan for that last one, and potentially the first and second too.  But many other images, of wild beards, wooden sailing ships, and black flags bearing terrifying death heads, all hail from a very specific period of history.  The Golden Age of Piracy, as it has become known, lasted from around 1705 to 1725, and was at its height during 1717-1719.  This was the period when such infamous pirates as Blackbeard, Ned Lowe and Charles Vane menaced European shipping in the Caribbean.

 

Historians have written at length about the reasons why such a Golden Age came into being, but it really boils down to a perfect storm of social conditions: the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714, resulting in the discharging from the Navy of thousands of destitute and disillusioned sailors; the vagaries of shipping routes and transatlantic trade requiring many ships to pass through the warren of Caribbean archipelagos; and the wrecking in a storm of a Spanish treasure fleet off the Florida coast in 1715.  Though some historians broaden the period to include the buccaneering age of the late 1600s, and the Indian Ocean piracy of the 1690s, most agree that the Golden Age was over by 1730: by this point, all the most famous pirates were either dead (many executed), pardoned or vanished from the records.

 

Ever since human beings first got into boats, there have been pirates, so it’s strange that this short period has had such a huge impact on our collective imaginations.  Stranger still that such a period of intense criminal activity is referred to as a ‘Golden Age’.  It certainly wasn’t a golden time for the merchant ships that were terrorised by the pirate crews!  It appears that we have one Robert Louis Stevenson to blame for much of this. His 1883 novel Treasure Island endures in popularity, mixing fact and fiction to the point where, in the popular imagination, it is sometimes difficult to unwind them. (Israel Hands, for example, is both a character in the book and a genuine historical pirate.  The TV show Black Sails further muddied the waters by having Stevenson’s fictional Captain Flint and Long John Silver rub shoulders with Benjamin Hornigold, Calico Jack and Woodes Rogers, amongst others.)

 

Stevenson, in turn, was influenced by the pirate-historian’s invaluable tome, A General History of the Pyrates, first published in 1724 by Captain Charles Johnson, whose true identity is still a matter of debate.  Johnson tells the tales of many of the pirates of the Golden Age, including dubious biographical details and accounts of their trials and deaths, which lend them an almost legendary status.  Fiction certainly has a lot to answer for, but, then again, perhaps it is merely the fascinating uniqueness of this period which has spawned its weighty legacy.  Never again would the world see an explosion of this kind of criminality, led by such notorious, brazen individuals, whose exploits barely required embellishment to transform them into page-turning thrillers.

 

Yet life as a pirate was hardly one long romantic adventure.  For a subject that fascinates so many, there is a frustrating lack of historical sources around piracy.  Trust me – I’ve read virtually every academic book going, and they all get a little samey after a while, since they’re mostly rehashing quotes from A General History of the Pyrates.  However, one thing that all the books can agree on is that life on board a pirate ship was, for the most part, nasty, brutish and short.  Life at sea was hard and dangerous: in a time before universal healthcare, injury from wood splintered by a cannonball would likely result in death, or - best-case scenario - a lost limb.  Punishments were brutal and crews were unsentimental.  For pirates, it really was all about the loot, and they didn’t much care how they got their hands on it.

 

Much is made of the fact that pirate crews were egalitarian in their approach: they voted for their captains; their quartermasters shared the loot, if not equally, then by agreed proportions; they drew up rules that all aboard had to abide by; they had their own rudimentary health insurance policy, in that they received compensation for lost limbs and other significant body parts.  It has been argued that many sailors were drawn to a life of piracy because it was easier than life in the Navy or as a merchant sailor.  This was true – you could make more money as a pirate, and pirate crews tended to be much larger than those on a merchant ship, making the day-to-day running of the ship a little less gruelling.  But it can be too easy to assume that life on pirate ship was one of freedom from the oppression of the state.

 

Pirate crews were exclusively male (search for female pirates during this age and you’ll likely only turn up Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two amongst thousands of men) and many were riddled with STDs thanks to their usage of brothels when in port. Although some crews were multiracial, pirates regarded slaves as fair game for raids just as much as any other commodity.  It has been suggested that pirate ships were places where homosexuality was able to flourish free from societal judgment, but there is no evidence that these ships were any more tolerant than the rest of society.

Aside from the fact that I have no earthly idea how to sail, my general timidity and non-confrontational approach to life probably means I won’t be selling my house and buying a boat anytime soon.  Still, it’s nice to dream sometimes, and I doubt I’m alone.  We’ll all be fascinated by these colourful characters from history for many years to come, and the harsh realities of pirate life, and the terror unleashed on their (mostly undeserving) victims, will be conveniently overlooked.  Because the truth is that the appeal of piracy lies not in the violent crime or the brutality, but in the idea of freedom: of blowing off societal constraints and living by our own rules, sailing the seven seas with a trusted gang of shipmates.  Or maybe we just think we look good in the outfits...

Further reading on the Golden Age of Piracy:

Under the Black Flag - David Cordingly

Black Flags, Blue Waters - Eric Jay Dolin

The Republic of Pirates - Colin Woodard

The General History of the Pyrates - Captain Charles Johnson

A Pirate’s Life for She - Laura Sook Duncombe

A Time for American Heroes? Reflecting on the Legacy of the West Wing

Inauguration. White House.  Supreme Court.  Executive Orders.  Despite having studied the politics and modern history of the US, I can’t hear any of these terms without thinking of The West Wing, a show which has become far more divorced from reality in the past few months than it seemed two decades ago when I first encountered it.

September 2024 marked the 25^th anniversary of The West Wing first airing on US television.  It had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, so I decided to mark the occasion with another.  I was also lucky enough to have been given the book ‘What’s Next’ (written by West Wing actors Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack) for Christmas, which in turn led me to the West Wing Weekly Podcast, which has been the soundtrack to my commute for the past few weeks, and so I’m currently pretty thoroughly immersed in the world of President Bartlet’s White House and his improbably committed staffers.

It's interesting to look back now, a quarter of a century later, and wonder if the world really was a more hopeful place in 1999.  The series began in the final year of the Clinton Administration and it’s no secret that Aaron Sorkin modelled his dedicated band of staffers on those who worked in the Clinton White House, with some of them even serving as consultants on the show.  Unfortunately, at least on this side of the pond, Clinton’s legacy is somewhat dominated by his scandalous romp in the Oval Office, something it would be unimaginable for President Bartlet to have done.

It was partway through the second season that George W. Bush took office, and many have commented that the show served as wish-fulfilment during the Bush presidency.  However, it could be argued that this was just as much the case during the waning Clinton years.  Elected after 12 years of Republican rule, Clinton espoused a ‘Third Way’ of politics, pacifying the right wing of his own party and winning back the working classes who had been charmed by Reagan’s old-fashioned conservatism.  Clinton courted business, signed up to spending cuts and abandoned unions.  His record on LGBT rights might well have been called “legislative gay-bashing” by President Bartlet.  His foreign policy was more a doctrine of indecision than Bartlet’s “doctrine of intervention when only humanitarian interests [are] at stake.”  Clinton was a centrist – Bartlet was a liberal, and one who (mostly) put principles before politics to boot.  Is it any wonder that the show became so popular in its first season?

 

The West Wing ended in 2006 on a hopeful note, with the election of Democrat Matt Santos as the first Hispanic POTUS, which would be eerily prescient in predicting the election two years later of Barack Obama.  In many respects, The West Wing appeared more forward-thinking than much of US politics of today.  In Season 3, Bartlet easily defeats plain-speaking candidate Governor Ritchie (clearly a stand-in for Bush), and the idea that someone like Ritchie could be elected was laughable.  Fast-forward to November 2024, and the American public were busy electing someone far worse.

But America’s shift to the right is not in isolation – the far right is growing in influence all over the world.  The AfD in Germany and Reform here in the UK are making disturbing gains in elections.  This move towards the right stems, of course, from dissatisfaction.  GCSE history students across the country have written countless times how the Great Depression contributed to rise of Nazism in the 1930s.  For this generation, it is COVID-19 and its fallout that is the source of our discontent.  In any case, watching The West Wing now seems more of a fantasy than ever: a world where even Republican politicians are decent, principled people.

The West Wing is undoubtedly clever TV: in how many other shows would a main character deliver an un-subtitled diatribe in Latin?  (I will always argue that ‘Two Cathedrals’ is one of the best 45 minutes of TV ever produced.)  It sparked my own desire to become politically active; a desire which, I’m ashamed to say, has become increasingly jaded over the past decade.  It makes the potentially dull business of government incredibly compelling and honours public servants, painting them as heroes on a tireless crusade to make the world a better place.

 

Whilst it’s tempting to view The West Wing as a perfect liberal fantasy, it’s not without its flaws.  Season 3, airing post-9/11, was rife with anti-Arab sentiment that is hard to stomach now.  The level of reverence shown to the office of the President and the unironic declarations of the USA’s greatness – the idea that it can and should serve as saviour to the rest of the world – come across as somewhat hypocritical.  Coming from such a self-deprecating, buttoned-up little island, it’s a little nauseating to watch these extreme bursts of patriotism and arrogance.

 

It’s also becoming more apparent to me on each rewatch just how much representation is lacking.  Though The West Wing boasts two of the strongest female characters I’ve ever seen on screen in Press Secretary CJ Cregg and Dr Abbey Bartlet (with an honourable mention to the criminally-underused Joey Lucas), the treatment of other women leaves a lot to be desired.  Feminism is often derided, and often by the women themselves.  With the exception of Dulé Hill as Charlie Young, personal aide to the president, the main cast is exclusively white (and mostly male).  And notwithstanding a passing Republican Congressman, no LGBTQ+ character shows up until the final season (and even then, it’s a minor character and not made explicit until very near the end).  There are jokes that land awkwardly and lines (“these women”?) that just don’t sit right throughout.  Part of this doubtless comes from the fact that Aaron Sorkin wrote virtually every episode of the first four seasons.  Reading ‘What’s Next’ has given me insight into just how involved – and how protective – he was with the scripts.  However gifted the writer, scripts written from the sole perspective of a straight white man must inevitably be lacking in representation.

 

Was The West Wing simply a product of its time?  In July 1999, the NAACP President Kweisi Mfume threatened to organise a viewer boycott of major networks when it became apparent that none of the new comedies or dramas being launched in the autumn schedules would feature any actors of colour.  Whilst Sorkin does try to address this in a meta way, with the hiring of Charlie as personal aide to the president, it’s not simply an issue of cosmetics, as Admiral Fitzwallace says.  Progress has been made, but even now, it’s as much about the voices behind the camera as it is about those in front of it.

 

It’s been said that we are in a slingshot era, much like the USA was in during the 1960s' Civil Rights Movement – that to make great progress, we sometimes need to pull back, in order to shoot forward.  Yet I can’t be alone in worrying that we are pulling so far back on the slingshot that the elastic may snap.  It seems more unlikely now than ever that we could see a president like President Bartlet in the White House.  Even Sorkin himself has admitted that writing such an idealistic and aspirational show would be challenging in the current political climate.  And yet, should we not also have hope?  If we could aspire to greatness then, can we not aspire again?  Hope is what’s going to get us through this.  Hope – and action.  It's certainly not perfect, but if the legacy of The West Wing is simply to inspire us to do better, then maybe that is enough.

Pristina: A City Break with a Twist

Bulevardi Bil Klinton

It is a strange yet powerful experience to visit a country that has been in existence barely a decade. Kosovo has been a nation state for only as long as I have been an adult.  Having visited its Balkan neighbours many times, I was keen to pay a visit and so I did, in August of last year.  Arriving in Pristina just as dawn broke, after a surreal, overcrowded night bus journey from Podgorica involving snatched, uncomfortable sleep and much shouting in Albanian at the border, only the straining of the engine betraying the landscape outside in the darkness, Kosovo’s capital seemed something of a ghost town as we wandered empty residential streets clutching a Google maps printout in search of our accommodation.

But after much needed sleep, we ventured into the city centre.  Unlike its neighbouring countries, the streets of Pristina were crowded with new and expensive cars bearing an assortment of international number plates.  The constant flow of traffic was punctuated by ubiquitous Balkan horn honking and, after the sweltering, oppressive heat of Montenegro, the temperature was a pleasant 25 degrees with a cooling breeze.  Bill Clinton greeted us cheerily from atop his plinth as we made our way up his titular Bulevardi.

More than any other Balkan capital, Pristina is an international city. It is a city unashamed in its gratitude to its American saviours – Bill Clinton has his boulevard, Madeleine Albright a square. The Stars and Stripes fly alongside the deliberately uncontentious Kosovar flag and US multinationals slap their brands across the city.  Nowhere was this more ironically obvious than the Coca Cola stall pumping out turbo folk and obscuring the much-photographed Newborn monument, updated with the golden digits 1 and 0 to mark Kosovo’s tenth birthday.  It is perhaps true that this monument, in all its chipped, graffitied glory, encapsulates everything that is conflicted about this tiny new nation.

Flags, as they so often do, play an important role in national identity here.  As visible as the gold and blue flag of Kosovo (colours and design chosen to offend no one), is the black and red of the Albanian flag. It functions almost as a de facto dual national flag and signifies the controversial history of this small country that was so quickly taken to the heart of an international community anxious not to screw up another Balkan war so soon after Bosnia.  Uniformed soldiers, wearing the patches of their home countries on their sleeves, stroll the streets as another reminder that all is not so rosy beneath the surface.

Kosovo's National Library (with abandoned church in background)

An enormous, ostentatious Orthodox church newly erected in the centre of Pristina seems to be the ethnic elephant in the religious room, since no one appears keen to discuss their Serbian neighbours.  A more accurate metaphor might be the derelict church beside the mesmerisingly striking national library, where trees grow from long-gone windows. At the national museum, an enthusiastic guide with near-perfect English was keen to show us their mementos of war and made no apology for his hatred of the Serbs nor his hero-worship of Adem Jashari, leading martyr of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army).  In 1999, the Serbs had run out of international sympathy, their leadership having spent the best part of the 1990s positioning them as the bad guys, and so the suffering of the Kosovo Serbs in KLA reprisals is conveniently forgotten.  One wonders if Kosovo can truly move its young nation forward without acknowledging this, though recent proposals for land swaps with Serbia might just clamp a convenient lid of denial on the issue forever, if the swaps can settle the dispute that is preventing both Serbia and Kosovo from joining the European Union.

Ibrahim Rugova looks down over Bulevardi Nena Tereze

If the city centre was a little more awake than the outskirts, it certainly burst alive at night.  Down the pedestrianised Bulevardi Nëna Terezë (named for Mother Teresa, another local hero), the air was full of the smell of singed corn on the cob, fanned over flames until it began to pop, the sweet smell of candyfloss and omnipresent Balkan cigarette smoke.  The sounds of the call to prayer mingled with the squeaks of toy dogs with demonic eyes. Children played amongst brightly lit jets of water and zipped around on battery powered ride-along jeeps. Watching over the crowds with fatherly benevolence loomed statues and photographs of Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s first president.

A handful of notable buildings aside, Pristina’s attraction lies in the features that makes it so unattractive to the casual eye – its newness, its half-finished infrastructure, its struggle to define itself, to free itself from its recent history and to know whether it should draw its strength from within or without.  Who are the Kosovans most thankful to for their independence?  Pristina is a city half broken, half renewed but mostly coming alive.  It is a work in progress and it felt like a privilege to be there to witness this.  Kosovo may not top your list of travel destinations but to visit at the formation of a nation is a rare opportunity that will only be lost as time marches on.

Election Thoughts

I was seventeen years old when I first realised Conservatives existed.  I mean, I knew they existed in Parliament and on the telly, but not in real life.  Cossetted in my liberal-leftie anti-Thatcher pre-social media upbringing, I assumed that all ordinary people shared my views.  Not so.

I was a teenage communist (next album title).  I stood as the Communist Party candidate in my school's mock election (frustrated that my eighteenth birthday was a few days after the actual election and furious with my friends who were eighteen and did not vote) and plastered the school in anti-fascist posters, earning one of my (fairly) rare calls to the Head's office.  I read Marx.  Tories were the enemy.

So imagine my surprise when I encountered a real-life Tory party member (at a classical concert in a rural church, so hardly surprising in hindsight, but not to my teenage self.)

"You'll grow out of it," the patronising (elderly) Tory assured me, on discovering my political views.

It made my blood boil.  It still has an adverse effect on my blood pressure now.

I haven't grown out of it.  I may (finally) be able to accept that I am no longer pollster-classified young and am far outside that oft-quoted 18-25 age bracket, but I certainly haven't grown out of it.

I was also told that as I earned more money, I would change my mind about fair distribution of wealth.

I haven't.

I hate the rhetoric floating around that somehow young people have been 'fooled' by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour.  That, somehow, encouraging young people to exercise their right to vote was a dirty tactic.  That young people are too naive, too ignorant and too stupid to know better.  That they'll regret it.  That they'll grow out of it.

I don't agree with everything Corbyn stands for.  But I do agree with the central idea that prompted 72% of young people to come out and vote in this election: that a fairer society is possible.

His detractors tend to fall into one of two camps: those who genuinely believe that some are owed more than others and those who see a fairer society as an absurd fantasy.

Why should it be?  Those people - the politicians, the political commentators, the media - who want you to believe it's not possible are acting under the assumption that humanity's default position is selfishness.  Everyone looking out for themselves.  This is my money - I earnt it, I deserve it and it's mine to keep.

Well, I like to think a little more optimistically than that.  I would happily slash my not-particularly-large public sector salary if it meant state education could be properly funded, to give more children the start in life that I was given; if it meant that everyone could access the highest quality free healthcare; if it meant that the most vulnerable in our society could be looked after.  (And if anything is worth getting our country into debt over, it's funding these three areas, surely?  Not wild speculation on the financial markets and bailing out irresponsible banks.)  I don't believe I'm alone in thinking like this.

Politics can be a force for good and people can come together.  We are not all selfish.

Labour lost this election, but Theresa May's arrogance failed to win it for the Conservatives.  Although we are entering uncertain, somewhat terrifying times, I am hoping that the people who voted in this election for the first time - the young, the old and the somewhere-in-betweens - have seen that they can make a difference.

And here's a message to the right-wing and centrist cynics: don't tell young people they'll grow out of it.  I hope they never do.

In Pursuit of Justice: Review of The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger

If nothing else, Julian Borger notes in the final chapter of The Butcher’s Trail, the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) has made the Balkan wars the most well-documented and catalogued conflict in history.  In this meticulously researched account of the manhunt for the Balkan war criminals, Borger draws on this evidence, as well as extensive interviews, to chronicle the pursuit in fascinating detail, with the story rattling on in places like the paciest of spy thrillers.

They say truth is often more fantastical than fiction, and that proved to be the case in the work of the ICTY; from the bungled arrest of the wrong pair of identical twins, to a plan involving a gorilla suit, to Radovan Karadžić, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, living the flamboyant cover story of a mythical healer in Belgrade.  Borger’s tale is layered with political intrigue; in this telling, prosecutors and investigators work tirelessly on a shoestring budget, against death threats and government roadblocks from all sides.

Nearly two decades after the fighting finally ended in the region, with all the indictees arrested and only one more verdict, that of Ratko Mladić, leader of the Bosnian Serb Army, left to be handed down (as well as Karadžić’s appeal against his 40 year sentence), it feels as though a chapter has been closed on a terrible era.  Justice has been served.

Mladić and Karadžić on trial in The Hague

Or has it?  Borger muses on this in his conclusion.  Many people in the former Yugoslav states do not think so, believing the tribunal to be either too one-sided or too lenient.  Borger describes the Scheveningen prison as a place of harmony, where former enemies play football and cook together, attend yoga classes and learn new languages, without regard for ethnicity.

Many indictees have been released early or acquitted, free to return home and stir up nationalistic hatred once more.  As for the tribunal's legacy, attempts to set up an International Criminal Court have been hampered by the most powerful nations, wary of the precedent set by the ICTY of holding leaders to account for the crimes committed by those beneath them.

Nevertheless, the ICTY has completed its mission.  All the indictees on its list have been brought to some kind of justice.  It was, as the book’s tagline states, the most successful manhunt in history.  The court's place in history, however, has yet to be decided.

The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger, published by Other Press (January 2016).

A Quarrel in a Faraway Country

Karadžić in court today.

Over the course of my research into the Bosnian War I have spent many hours trawling through transcripts from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), combing pages of legal jargon and prevarication to find the testimonies of those involved in the war.  Of all the bit players and small fish to face trial in The Hague, today saw the culmination of the case of the court's biggest catch.  Today, Radovan Karadžić, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the violent conflict of the early '90s, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

There were tentative celebrations in Sarajevo and protests in Belgrade.  Some hailed the conviction as justice served for the victims; others damned the ICTY for the punitive punishment.  40 years is not enough for genocide, some protested.  Journalists and academics have been writing at length about what Karadžić's sentence means for the future of Bosnia.  Scholars and activists have begun to pick apart the judgment and its language, studying the minutiae of Scheduled Incident E2 or F1.  I stared at a blank page.

Karadžić has defended himself throughout his trial

I cannot in my mind make the connection between this suited old man, spectacles perched on his nose, sitting in a court room on the other side of Europe and calmly defending himself in increasingly fluent legalese, with the chillingly ebullient character who bluffed and postured through the footage and reports of a war that ended over twenty years ago.  Today, 70-year-old Karadžić looked haggard as he sat and blankly listened to Judge O-Gon Kwon's hour and a half recitation of his crimes. Reading his defiant pre-trial interview with BIRN, he did such a convincing job of rewriting history, and his own role in it, that I began to doubt my own research.

Karadžić with military leader Ratko Mladić, pictured
in 1993.  Mladić remains on trial in The Hague.

What should I write about Karadžić's conviction?  Found guilty on 10 out of the 11 counts on which he was indicted, including, significantly, the indictment for genocide for his part in the massacre at Srebrenica.  Is the conviction historic? Landmark?  Does it set precedents and send out warnings to other would-be genocidal maniacs?  Will it bring closure?  Has justice been served?  Are there any other clichés I can roll out?  A guilty verdict has been presumed from the moment Karadžić was first indicted back in 1995.  I could have written this twenty years ago.

For a country beset by corruption, economic woes and unemployment, the verdict of a court in a faraway country will have little impact back in Bosnia.  It won't help those displaced by the conflict return to their homes and it certainly won't lessen the pain of those who lost their families, or allow them to even begin comprehending how neighbours could ever have done this to one another.  It will have little effect on the ethnic tensions that still lurk; on the Bosnian Serbs who feel the ICTY is entirely too one-sided in its convictions of war criminals; on the Bosniaks angry that the Serbs shared the spoils of war at all; nor on those in Herzegovina who fly the Croatian flag above their homes.  As Karadžić himself has said: he is an old man now, and there is a new generation of politicians.  That generation is responsible for building Bosnia's future.


Karadžić's sentencing confirms what has been known for some time: that terrible deeds were committed under his leadership.  He will appeal, but he will not be successful.  His chapter is closed and history will condemn him.  For Bosnians, the wounds of the war that tore them apart will only begin to close when they are left alone to heal.  Scars will remain, and rightly so - they should not be forgotten - but a future cannot be built on open wounds.  In this Bosnian future, Radovan Karadžić is irrelevant.  And perhaps, for him, that is the greatest damnation.