[Reader-list] At the Trial of Slobodan Milosevic

[ananyavajpeyi at vsnl.com]

>From September to November 2004, as the scholar in residence at the Waag Society for Old and New Media 
in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to attend a few sessions of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. What follows 
is an account from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), located in The 
Hague.

Ananya Vajpeyi.

In front of me is a courtroom: its walls are cream-colored, its furniture wooden, some surfaces are glass, 
some accents are UN blue. Dead center in my line of sight sits a man, the accused; he is Slobodan Milosevic. 
White computer monitors, black legal robes, blue security uniforms, a suit-clad perpetrator of genocide, 
war crimes and crimes against humanity -- this is the scene I look at, a picture of the regime of international 
law. A picture taken, in fact, by Luc Delahaye, and hanging before me in a very large print at the Huis 
Marseille Foundation for Photography in Amsterdam, at an exhibition of Delahaye's work on conflict that also 
contains photographs from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Israel / Palestine, as well as a meeting of the Security 
Council. Belying its capture of an instant in the unfeeling process of law, and despite its subdued 
composition that may as well have been titled "Legal Bureaucracy", Delahaye's "The Milosevic Trial (2002)" is 
deeply affecting. It depicts the banality of evil, and in so doing, recalls powerfully for the viewer the trial of 
Adolf Eichmann as reported on by Hannah Arendt.

Three months later I am back in the Netherlands, still haunted by what is seemingly the most banal of 
images, hoping to study some of the footage of the trial that has been going on for well over two years. 
Hundreds of hours of the Milosevic trial have been painstakingly and precisely recorded, webcast, and 
archived, as they unfold in a courtroom that is one of the most heavily mediatized spaces in the legal world. 
Why come all this way just to look at recordings? asks Geert Lovink, the internet critic and theorist of digital 
culture based in Amsterdam. Go to Den Haag, he says, see it for yourself. It takes Lovink's words to articulate 
for me what Delahaye's photograph said, in its own way: on occasion it is possible to look history in the eye, 
to see it for what it is. Still, I have my doubts. Can one simply walk in, be present, become a witness, not in 
the trial, but of it? Can anyone go and see what Delahaye saw; does the photographer not have privileged 
visual access to the historical moment? My colleague at the Waag Society, Paul Keller, himself a media 
activist, offers to dispel my rather abstract apprehensions by accompanying me to the trial. We look up the 
courtroom schedule, the trains between Amsterdam and The Hague, directions to Churchillplein where ICTY 
is located, Keller's agenda, mine. It turns out to be entirely feasible, then, our plan to attend a session of the 
trial, and so to attend to history.

Over the next several weeks I repeatedly go to The Hague, with Keller, with the photographer Wim Klerkx, or 
by myself. It is not permitted to carry a mobile phone, a camera, a computer or any other kind of electronic 
device into the viewing area, so I must rely on my companions, my notebook and my memory for 
impressions of the ICTY premises, the chambers, the sections of the trial that take place while I am there, 
and the people involved in the whole procedure. I find myself making sketches of the layout of courtrooms 1 
and 3, mapping the positions of the judges, the witness, the defendant, the scribes, the prosecutors, the 
defense counsel, the security guards, but also of the monitors, the cameras, the microphones, the lights, the 
curtains and blinds, the chairs and tables, the pillars and doors, the exhaust fans and clock; in short, all the 
material and human elements of the space before me. I realize almost as soon as I sit down in the gallery for 
the very first time that Delahaye had special permission to take his photograph, not only because ordinarily 
no photography is permitted, but also because nowhere outside the courtroom can one see Milosevic from 
the spot at which Delahaye's lens must have been positioned. I realize also that there is a whole other color 
that Delahaye's palette omitted: the red of the judges' robes. Blue for the United Nations, black, white and 
red for justice. I am concerned about the detail and accuracy of my impressions because despite the fullness 
of the scene, its clarity, its reality, the motivation behind the violence that it seeks to discover, punish and 
atone for is utterly obscure, beyond the scope of eye or camera, hiding in the light on the other side of the 
transparent glass wall that separates viewers from actors.

On the 9th of November 2004 Slobodan Milosevic acts supercilious. His appearance is genial and upper 
class: he could be a German professor of some mildly difficult subject, linguistics perhaps. He belongs in old 
Europe, in a highbrow profession, snowy haired, well-bred and murderous. I recognize him, tellingly, from 
Delahaye's photograph. His dark suit is similar, his location in the courtroom is the same, in life as in the 
picture, only this time he is not thirty feet from me, in the flesh. He is impeccably dressed. He does not seem 
unwell at all, nor does it look like he has uncounted killings behind him and a death sentence ahead. 
Assigned counsel, formerly Amici Curiae, are pleading with the judges to be allowed to withdraw from 
Milosevic's defense. Their uncooperative charge exudes arrogance, superiority, boredom. If contempt of 
court could be embodied, it sits there, in the defendant's seat, refusing to recognize the rule of law or the 
jurisdiction of ICTY. Who are you to try me? his body-language shouts, who are you to judge my innocence 
or guilt, who are you, that my infinite power cannot simply crush you as it did hundreds of thousands of 
persons in the country I once ruled? At the recess he stands up, puts his hands in his pockets, makes a 
remark -- probably a sarcastic one -- to the guard, and leaves the room. An hour later he re-enters, shuffles 
over to his seat, resumes his posture of exasperation at the foolishness of those who would dare to make 
him accountable for his deeds, heinous or glorious. The prevalence of rules that dictate the court's deference 
to the rights of Slobodan Milosevic is necessary, but infuriating. No one was deferential to the rights of his 
victims -- not their countrymen=2C not their government, not their armed forces, and not the rest of the world. 
Theirs was the bare life that could be extinguished with impunity. But Milosevic gets due process, and scoffs 
at it, openly, his hand tucked in his suit-pocket, his mouth curled in a sneer.

The photograph "The Milosevic Trial" by Luc Delahaye is the flip side of many other images from the Balkan 
conflict of the 1990s. Sebastião Salgado captured the forced displacement, the deportations of Bosnians and 
Croats, awfully reminiscent of Europe in the 1940s. Ron Haviv, Gilles Peress and others brought back 
pictures from the circles of hell called Sarajevo, Kosovo, Srebrenica. Footage by the television channel ITN 
took a horrified world into the detention and extermination camps of Omarska and Trnopolje. Bombed 
bridges and mass graves, streets on fire, Chetnik militia on the rampage, Muslim refugees and deportees in 
flight, cities under siege, countryside aflame -- behind this antiseptic courtroom lies all of the sickening 
visceral reality of war and genocide, the carnage and suffering unleashed when Serbian supremacist ideology 
was put to work in a complex and multi-ethnic nation. In the chair that Delahaye photographed from directly 
in front of its incumbent (but we can see only off to one side of the chamber, stage-right), in the chair to my 
left behind the glass, is the author of unspeakable crimes. Sometimes what is hard to believe is not what you 
see, but what you don't.

ICTY's logo depicts a globe in the scales of justice, the world hanging in the balance. Indeed without the law, 
human society tips over into unbridled chaos. This trial must not peter out, it must come to its logical end, 
which is an indictment of Milosevic and his deputies. The judges are all of different races, the security guards 
of different nationalities. The lawyers speak several languages between them. This tribunal is remarkably 
diverse in its personnel. There are as many women as men present and participating. Simultaneous 
translation over 5 or 6 channels runs through everyone's headphones. The republics are legal persons, as are 
their armies, their administrations, their generals, their leaders, and their citizens. Among these big and 
small, collective and individual legal persons, somehow, occurred the gross illegalities of ethnic cleansing 
and mass murder. A well-known image of Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 shows him behind 
a glass booth, surrounded by three security guards, writing something down. In front of him, bottom-center 
of the frame is a legal personage, gray-haired, sitting behind a microphone. Surely Delahaye makes an 
explicit reference to this photograph, with his genocidaire subject, glass booth, three guards, and middle-
aged man in lawyer's robes seated behind a mic. Within fifty years of the Holocaust, unbelievably, history 
began to repeat itself in Europe. Now the world appears to have come together to try to understand what 
happened in the former Yugoslavia, and make reparations to whatever degree possible. There is no 
justification for abandoning this international effort to bring the truth to light, howsoever slow and 
expensive the process.

Ananya Vajpeyi, Ph.D.
Center for the Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University
JNU Main Campus
New Delhi 1l0 067 INDIA.
E: ananyavajpeyi at vsnl.com