The Little Red Chairs (28 page)

‘Shit,’ Zelmic says and bends to retrieve them, then stumbles and has to grab at the nearest table, where she sits, drops her head down and her shoulders begin to heave, as if she is about to cry.

The black phone is on the other table and Fidelma runs her hands over it, as if by some conjury, she could exorcise the contents stored in its heartless crater.

She felt very threatened. She prayed then that someone would come from the other room and sit with her and talk idly about things that did not matter.

All she wanted was that.

PART THREE

The Courtroom

The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood.
Such was Fidelma’s nervous state that she envisaged the final hearing as being apocalyptic.

But it was not like that at all. Fidelma arrived early, fearing there would be a great crush for the final hearing and that the place would be swarmed. Instead the doors were not even open and two signs, one reading
VIP
, the other
Press
, added to her confusion.

It was a long, low, unassuming building fronted with cream-coloured tiles, facing a crescent-shaped pond, water from two fountains rising and falling with a faithful predictability. The street nearby was lined with the flags of all the various nations and even at a glance the colour red predominated, red for bloodshed, yet their gaiety and their furling decrying all catastrophe.

A man was dredging the debris from the muddy water and pointing to the sculpture of a stork, he said it was the official symbol of Den Haag, a stork on a gold escutcheon with an eel in its mouth.

‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it.’ He had an Irish accent and it was a relief that he was a stranger to her. She had come hoping no one she knew would be there. It was Varya who had persuaded her to come, pleaded with her, saying it would be a victory for all of them.

‘It’s unofficial … but this lake is the bane of my life … bird
shit, especially pigeon shit,’ he was saying, as he scraped with the hoe, grousing that it had to be drained and scrubbed several times a year.

‘I thought there would be a bigger crowd,’ she said.

‘Oh Christ, the day he was coming in here it was hectic … getting the cell right, new furniture … a bigger desk … feather pillows … I was run off my feet, up and down to the town, to the various suppliers …’

‘So you’re head bottle washer,’ she said with a smile.

‘What brings you here?’ He was friendly now.

‘God knows,’ and she walked on.

Going through security was simple, and far less frenzied than the airport in London the previous evening. Then she went through the turnstile and down a narrow path and up steps into the great hall that, with its magnificence and its stout marble columns, was made for banqueting, yet there was no mistaking where she was. A vast poster read ‘Bringing War Criminals to Justice and Justice to Victims’.

The stairs were also marbled, the steps steep and without a banister. On the first landing there was a bas relief, warriors and their cohorts, some with weapons, some mere hewers of wood and water, all with erect, chiselled, marbled penises. The women, and they were few, stood behind in deference, one bearing a bowl that contained food, the second nursing a newborn infant and the third in mute anticipation.

They climbed, were handed their headsets and so silent, so neutral was the atmosphere, it was impossible to guess who was friend and who was foe.

Her seat was in the first row, next to four women identically dressed, who sat close together and looked at her with suspicion,
as if she was a traitor. Beyond the thick plate-glass wall, the barristers and their juniors were moving about briskly, their folders under their arms, their black robes brushing one another as they hurried to confer, leaving nothing to chance.

When Vlad entered the trial chamber, she shook uncontrollably, as if he was someone come back from the dead. Inconceivable that he was still alive, or had not descended into madness or infirmity. But there he was, in a smart suit, a nondescript tie, courteous, disarming, still in possession of those insatiate powers that had made him so feared. His guard stood stock still behind him, girt around his waist a belt with a set of keys and a revolver and he seemed curiously roused as he gazed about. From the corner of her eye, Fidelma saw how the four women seized the moment. It was as if a sudden energy possessed them, an urgency, as they stared unequivocally into that trial chamber, making their abhorrence known. He did not look out at the court and as he sat, one of his team, a young woman, crossed and whispered something to him, to which he gave a slight, affirmative smile.

A clerk called, ‘All rise,’ and as they did, the four judges, in scarlet, entered, walked towards their thrones and in what seemed to be the best of spirits, friendly flourishes were exchanged,
‘Good morning … Good morning all … Your Honour … Your Honours … Your Excellencies … My apologies …’

The ruling judge spoke first, saying how, pursuant to Rule 86 and after many years, the court had reached this stage of the proceedings. The prosecution and defence would be permitted ten hours each to present their closing arguments and then one and a half hours each for rebuttals and rejoinder argument.

The prosecuting barrister then stood, his hands outstretched and yielding almost to pathos, said, ‘Let me give you the sad
picture.’ Then calmly and sedulously he summarised events beginning in 1992, when Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croatian communities were terrorised and destroyed, carnage that the world would come to know of in time. He enumerated the thousands of civilians arrested, brutalised, killed, the tens of thousands uprooted by force, the hundreds of thousands besieged for months, years, killing sprees, cyclones of revenge, detainees held in dreadful places of detention and hundreds executed. Yet, when the accused was confronted with these multiple crimes, he deflected them with claims of victimisation or offered implausible explanations. He was the driving force who bragged about the strategies he had devised and was now pretending that they did not happen, or blaming those who did his dirty work, while he had orchestrated the whole plunder and crafted a defence based on falsehood.

At first, Vlad listened, mumbling to himself, his hands moving to his thought, but soon and with a fierce irascibility, he was making notes, which he passed to his team, then with wild gesture, refuting what has been said or is about to be said. The women still with their basilisk stares.

The court then heard of three particular cases that had been selected from the mass of evidence. A man in Sarajevo was never again to see the wife who had made her way to the market to try and pick up powdered milk for their children. She was killed by a mortar and buried at night, it being the only time mourners dared risk burying their dead, for fear of attack.

Next, it was a seventeen-year-old boy in Srebrenica, who, with his father, was endeavouring to join a column fleeing towards Tuzia, but they became separated. Then the boy joined another column that was made to surrender, all of them loaded onto a
bus and driven to the execution site. In broiling heat, beaten and abused, soaking in their own urine, so desperate was the scene that they cried out, ‘Give us water and then kill us.’ This boy miraculously escaped death and rolling over corpses, he found another survivor and together they crawled for days to safer territory.

On Fidelma’s other side, an artist is doing various drawings of Vlad, whose outrage is mounting with each and every revelation. The crayon is orange and the artist draws quickly, jerkily, covering several pages of his sketchbook, the likeness becoming a little bit more authentic with each stroke, capturing the full hair, the abrupt swivels of the neck, the jowls, but not the eyes. In the drawing, the eyes have a yielding compassion that bears no resemblance to the man sitting there.

The third case to be cited was of a doctor who had worked for the UN in Africa, and who became a prisoner in Omarska Camp, where he did everything he could to help others. But one morning, when his name was called and he was told to bring his things, he picked up a few cigarettes in a nylon bag, then his shirt, and his fellow prisoners solemnly thanked him, knowing they were never to see him again.

On and on, camp beatings, killing sprees, women forced to clean the cement floors of the warehouses after executions, bloodied T-shirts, drawn teeth, tufts of hair. At night, mothers helpless at hearing their daughters’ screams as they were repeatedly violated, these conquests scored on the wooden slats of the cots, by rabid drunken soldiers.

When, at the end of the second day, the case for the prosecution was closed, the four women stood as Dr Vlad was being led off. Then they walked to the glass panel, silently, defiantly, dispensing their curses.

‘You cannot interact with the accused,’ a furious clerk told them, and seeing he was ignored, he called in a loud and threatening voice, ‘Please leave now at once,’ except that they did not leave, they waited until their doomings were complete. In those moments, as by some command, an electric blind began, stealthily, to come down on the other side, its dark blue canvas, lowering inch by inch, covering the plate glass, cutting out all confrontation, cutting him off from them.

Downstairs, one of them handed Fidelma a card and watched as she read it. It said
The Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves
in English and in what she presumed to be Serbian. Never would she forget the expression in their eyes, a cold desolation, a remoteness from life, from hope, from pity, from this whole apparatus of justice, that could not lead them to where their sons lay, never to be permitted the sacred ritual of burial.

On the third morning, when he was to defend himself, he walked into the trial chamber, insouciant, like a man setting out on holiday. His barristers flocked around him, acolytes at his behest, while among journalists and visitors there was suspense, as if something very dangerous might ensue. The four chairs where the mothers had sat were empty.

In his opening address he was conciliatory, confessing to feeling handicapped in his plea and likely to appear more as an amateur, and for this, he begged the chamber to excuse his lack of form. But then, with schematic zeal, he set about reminding the chamber of the world’s ignorance of the conflict. He had been a martyr to his people, he had done everything to avoid war, had told his own parliament that it was going down the road to hell. It was only when he realised that his country and his people were about to be torn apart that he became a reluctant
player. His corps never once neglected the laws of war, the legitimate customs of war, always comporting themselves with the maximum degree of responsibility. As president, he supervised the delivery of humanitarian aid and performed many works of mercy. Yes, he drew up borders, because he had to. If in a multi-ethnic society, as he argued, peoples could not live together, surely common sense dictated that they live apart. In territories in which he was accused of ethnic cleansing, people had left of their own accord, droves of them, seen at six each morning crossing the bridge. He called on his opponents to take shelter with friends in other parts, he invited Croats and Muslims to establish their own administrative organisations and as commander of his troops, many times he stopped his army when they were close to victory.

But this reasonableness was short-lived and as the hours went on, in vivid strophes and with blazing contempt, he painted the errors of the prosecution. It had based its case about Sarajevo on the theory that there existed a Serbian policy of producing terror and intimidating citizens, which was not so. Lies, falsehoods, bogus evidence squeezed from witnesses and manifestly partial. Military observers sat in their shelters gathering information from Muslim and other sources with a total sloppiness, unable even to discern who had died on the front and who had died natural deaths. Mass graves, bones, amputees, were from old wars and not his war, he told the chamber with a blasé assurance. The enemy conducted manoeuvres, gathering and hauling weapons, including large-calibre ones, with the intention of massacring their own people and then blaming it on Serbs. That self-same enemy constantly assumed victim status, used and abused UN insignia, painted their vehicles white to deceive
international observers and used every trick under the sun, to appear harmless.

‘Genocide, genocide, genocide,’ he thundered, saying yes, hundreds of thousands were killed, but by whom. It was not established beyond any reasonable doubt where snipers’ rounds or mortar fire had come from. Fatim is sitting on a tram in Sarajevo, sees a flare and presumes she knows the direction from where the mortar was fired. Her head was turned upside down, the way the map of Sarajevo was turned upside down. The direction on the map was changed by ninety degrees, in order to pretend that a specific projectile had been fired by one of his men. Nonsense. Bunkum. In Sarajevo, because of its elevation and its many hills surrounding the urban core, it was impossible, forensically, to identify from where a mortar had been fired. General Francis Ray, representative of the UN Force, had himself said that the exact position from which a mortar was fired was very imprecise and that different possibilities had to be taken into account. Moreover, it was not on the defence that the onus rested to prove where sniper shells came from, it was something the prosecution must prove. Sarajevo, he said then, the voice lowering to a cadence, Sarajevo was his adopted city, the city he loved and every shell that fell there hurt him personally. As he looked out towards his muted audience, he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.