By Jasmina Tesanovic
Photo: Jasmina in a former prison. "Despite the scale of the facility, it was densely crowded once." Shot by Bruce Sterling.
The Hague tribunal commenced the trial of Ratko
Mladic, ex commander of the army of the Serbian republic in Bosnia.
Mothers of the slain gathered in front of the court.
Twenty years ago, Mladic started his criminal activities, while still an
officer of the army of disintegrating Yugoslavia. A year ago, Mladic
was arrested, after years of concealment, mostly within Belgrade. Today
Mladic, aged 70, is sitting in the court neatly dressed as a civilian,
without his legendary military cap.
As the judge reads the indictment, Mladic cheerily waving to the
audience and even applauds certain parts of the recitation. "The wolf
loses his hair but not his character," as the Serbian proverb puts it.
The indictment precisely proceeds as a short elementary lesson of the bloody fall of Yugoslavia.
Ratko Mladic is facing 11 charges: ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes
against humanity, torture, sexual violence, the wanton destruction of
the urban fabric of Sarajevo, and so forth.
The maps of the indictment are a trail of blood. The borders of these
maps were the major outcome of the Dayton peace treaty of 1995, signed a
couple of months after the genocide of Srebrenica.
A witness appears to describe the concentration camp where she was
systematically raped. I didn't even look at their faces when they would
enter the room or go out. They had killed my whole family: I was the
only survivor. I was just asking the same question day after day: why?
These people lived together for centuries, and then, in a burst of
bloody disaster, some became criminal nationalists when their neighbors,
now demonized as Others, had to be annihilated at their hands. There
is little going in the Hague courtroom that wasn't described by Hannah
Arendt during Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1963.
It outdoes Hollywood, though. Angelina Jolie’s recent movie, "In the
Land of Blood and Honey," is a pale replica of this horror
reality-show, live from the Hague.
This trial of this soldier is haunted by the conspicuous absence of
the late Slobodan Milosevic, the civilian leader. It was Milosevic who
transformed General Mladic's Yugoslav army into an instrument of ethnic
cleansing.
This much-respected people's army, which had defeated the Nazi
genocide and the Fascist occupation, had stabilized Yugoslavia for
decades. But, thanks to the machinations of Milosevic, the remnants of
this once honorable force, now a micro-state Serbian militia, were
liquidating civilians en masse in Srebrenica. Eight thousand ex-Yugoslav
men and boys were executed there in three days. The UN protected
enclave fell, Mladic raved, lied, and had the Moslems rounded up,
confined and shot, while the "international community" turned its
attentions elsewhere.
A host of movies, books, and heaps of material evidence didn’t
bring justice to that dismal place, which today is a tourist center of
crime, but also, still, an ethnic-Serb territory within the Dayton
maps. Those who were killed there dwell only within the vast cemetery,
so to that extent, Srebrenica was a lasting Mladic victory.
The JNA, once a popular national army, became experts at black
operations. Special forces of paramilitary killers, the shadow forces of
intelligence services and the mafia, took on themselves the worst
burdens of cruelty. Their policy was raiding, arson, robbery, killing,
expulsion and rape -- to terrorize all civilian populations that
weren't Serbian, leaving a Greater Serbian nation to expand where the
victims had fled for their lives.
The capital of this expansionary scheme was Belgrade, but the
Bosnian Serb militias headed by Mladic were always formally autonomous
and plausibly deniable.
In Belgrade, I lived in the same street with a couple of
those notorious criminals: we shopped at the same bakers, and our
children went to the same schools. In Belgrade, we were not sniped-at,
shot or shelled, we looked peaceful; and the covert war did not touch
our streets until it fell from distant jets in the air, in the NATO
bombing.
Twenty years later, today, I can ponder the dreadful fates of people
I knew, or saw, or lived with, who ripped their country apart to march
to power over the bones of their neighbors.
The central mastermind died behind the bars in the Hague. Two major
stars are under trial now. A bunch of minor ones are serving
sentences. My neighbor, the professor turned war profiteer, committed
suicide as a Shakespearean antihero. But there were thousands of
others whose activities were just as bloody and sinister, who still live
in Belgrade, shopping, sometimes reminiscing over the bad old days.
The Serbian population is still living in denial, and other nations
have learned to let this new nation do that. Twenty years have passed,
a period longer than the distance between Eichman's Nazi crimes and
Eichman's trial. There are other wars nowadays, other covert, armed
operations, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, the Sudan, where the lessons
of destabilization, pioneered in the Balkans, have been fully
modernized.
Even the political party of Milosevic has managed to rehabilitate
itself nowadays. They did well in the recent Serbian elections, mostly
through ignoring their heritage and talking about Serbia's modern
troubles, which are many.
As for me, I follow the trials, and
I sometimes write about them.
After twenty years, a new generation has arisen on the bloodily divided
ground. They are innocent, but to live in peace with each other in the
region will require an understanding of the past.
That past lives in the details of the Hague court's indictment: the
snipers in Sarajevo, civilians mortar-blasted in the marketplaces,
women raped, children killed, and much of this mayhem cynically
described by the killers in their own documents, a host of private
conversations and public interviews exposed to the world.
In the dock, Mladic is industriously taking notes as his prosecutor
describes his war-crime strategies. I wonder what Mladic has to say to
himself? His diaries have been published and translated: his daughter
committed suicide during her father's battles. What does this 70 year
old have to say to history? One of his favorite quotes is well-known in
the record:
“Whenever I come to Sarajevo, I kill.”
The word is power and the silence of the dead is loud.
Kodak turned the material over to the government in 2007, under heavy
security. But for more than 30 years, the company had a device called a
californium neutron flux multiplier, or CFX, in a specially built
labyrinth beneath Building 82 at its labs near Rochester, New York. The
device was about the size of a refrigerator.
It was not a reactor, but rather a hunk of metal emitting radiation. Its
purpose was to create a beam of neutrons to use for scanning and
testing other materials. The device's primary source of neutron
radiation was the radioactive element californium, but the stream of
neutrons produced by the californium was multiplied by passing it
through a lattice of highly enriched uranium U-235, whose nuclear
fission released additional neutrons.
Iraq Veterans Against the War calls on fellow service members, veterans,
Chicagoans, and everyone who believes in justice, dignity, and respect
for all peoples to join us in the streets on May 20th. On this day, we
will hold a nonviolent march to the site of the NATO summit where we
will ceremoniously return our military service medals. We will demand
that NATO immediately end the occupation of Afghanistan and relating
economic and social injustices, bring U.S. war dollars home to fund our
communities, and acknowledge the rights and humanity of all who are
affected by these wars. We wish to begin a process of justice and
reconciliation with the people of Afghanistan and other affected
nations, fellow service members, veterans, and the American people.
This
story reminds me of the joke about a customer who was upset that a
waitress cut him off the buffet after two plates. “That’s ALL you
can eat for ten dollars!” she said. But this is a real story out of
Thiensville, Wisconsin, where a man says all-you-can-eat doesn’t mean
just until the restaurant runs out of food.
Americans
have been wringing their hands about the problem of obesity for decades
(for some of us, while munching on snacks), but never before has the problem
been attacked from the perspective of ... math!
Robotic arm controlled by thought
"It's
a lion*, run!" strategy doesn't seem to work out very well for white-tailed
deer fawns.
