[Reader-list] Further Notes on the Milosevic Trial

[ananyavajpeyi at vsnl.com]

Dear Soudhamini and Vivek,

Thank you for your thoughtful responses to my posting. I have attempted to address your concerns at some 
length. Both what precedes and what follows are subjective accounts, of course.

To tell you the truth, I had no awareness of there being a question about subjectivity on my mind when 
researching the Balkan wars of the 1990s -- not even during the Milosevic trial. I wasn't wondering about 
Delahaye's subjectivity, or Milosevic's, or my own (certainly not my own, though you may chide me for my 
lack of self-reflexivity in this regard). I was thinking, instead, about how violence is represented, how it 
enters into structures and systems of meaning, when really its effect is to undermine meaning, to leave us 
aghast at the irrationality and meaninglessness entailed by a single moment of violence. And in the break-up 
of Yugoslavia, we are not looking at a mere moment, but at years of sustained conflict, that shattered 
millions of lives. Yet we find -- at least in the Netherlands -- photographs, paintings, novels, films, 
exhibitions, installations: an outpouring of attempts to retrieve and remember and represent what 
happened. Between genocide and its representations, between Slobodan Milosevic and Luc Delahaye's 
photograph of him, there is a hiatus. I don't know what else to call it, that's why I say "hiatus": a tear in the 
seamless fabric of meaning.

At ICTY, I found myself in this hiatus. At any given session of the trial, nothing much goes on. The acuity of 
one's vision itself becomes an obession, because there's not that much to focus on out there. I wore 
headphones and kept switching between the 6 or 7 channels, listening to the proceedings in various 
languages. Even though I understood quite a few of these, it felt like the room was totally silent. I could see 
Milosevic there, right there, his position relative to my own perfectly easy to locate in a closed three-
dimensional space, but he could have been a creature from another planet. My friend Wim Klerkx, himself a 
photographer though disallowed from carrying his camera into the viewing gallery, leant over and asked me 
what the strange drawings in my notebook were. I was drawing the exhaust fans, in some detail. Why? They 
were oddly beautiful, sort of 60s in their design. It's not that I draw well. I suppose they gave me something 
small, particular and harmless to hold on to in the complete madness -- the mayhem, the bloodshed -- that 
the court was trying to fathom.

One time there was a witness whose identity was protected. He had his back to us viewers, and there were 
screens on either side of him, so we couldn't see him directly, while the monitors blurred his face, so we 
couldn't see him on camera. When he had to get up to leave the chamber, a blind was pulled down, the 
entire court room was hidden from our view. The whole scene just vanished behind the blind -- judges, 
scribes, lawyers, guards, computers, furniture -- pouf! gone! Periodically the sound was turned off, because 
the judges were consulting with one another privately. At those moments we could see the actors, but we 
heard nothing of what they said to one another. It was bizarre, being deprived of something to look at on 
some occasions, being deprived of something to listen to on others. One felt an extreme loss of control over 
the proceedings, a sort of helplessness that reinforced one's sense of being shorn of one's tools when one 
came in through the security gates. One had to surrender everything outside before entering, except pen 
and paper. Then even at the site itself, one periodically suffered these further sensory deprivations. I realized 
in the middle of one such "blackout" that the opposite of this court room in The Hague is a mass grave in 
Bosnia.

During a coffee-break, once, one of the main lawyers came downstairs to chat with a visitor. He removed his 
wig, but kept his black robe on. He and his interlocuter sat on two chairs in the lobby, and as I walked by, he 
smiled at me. I could have gone up to him, he was an Englishman, we spoke the same language. But I was 
unnerved seeing him outside the court-room, just like that, a man like any other in the legal profession. He 
was briefly off-duty and I was caught off-guard. What was my intention, you ask me Vivek. The intention of 
all inquiry, reportedly, is to achieve understanding. But how do you understand and what do you understand, 
in the hiatus of meaning? So many times I feel -- I fear -- that trying to understand violence, especially 
genocidal violence, is like hurling oneself at a wall.

A separate leg of my research took me to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, in Amsterdam; 
yet another leg of it to the media archive at Hilversum, called the Institute for Image and Sound. In these 
places I leafed through books, I reviewed television footage. Sometimes I went by myself and sometimes my 
colleague Paul Keller was with me, ostensibly to translate. But again, I wasn't thinking particularly about my 
subjectivity, or Paul's, or Wim's, Indian, German and Dutch as we are (in that order), the two of them men, I a 
woman. I wasn't even thinking about the formal distinctions between the different media and genres before 
me, some visual, some audio-visual, some linguistic and literary. I was thinking, actually, that I don't 
understand, despite the surfeit of artistic and archival materials at my disposal, I don't understand. It was the 
wall of violence and I was crashing into it again and again. You are a film-maker and a poet, respectively, I 
know, you are concerned about the semiotic work of the specific forms of textuality that you create, and 
rightly so. I am not inattentive to this issue -- it's just, in the face of Milosevic, in propria persona, I found 
my scholarly reflexes to be inadequate.

To my surprise, it turned out that Wim approved of my drawing the exhaust fans, as he did of my drawing 
the ICTY logo, which I also later photographed repeatedly (it is displayed outside the building, so one can 
use a camera). Blades in a circle, a globe in the scales of justice. You are trying to get it, he said, making a 
grasping, tactile sort of gesture with his hand, as though the air were cloth or clay. Yes, I suppose that's it, 
we try to get it. If you have better luck that I have had so far, please let me know.

In the mean time, it strikes me that two documentary films that situate themselves in the hiatus of meaning 
created by extreme violence, are Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah", from the mid-80s, about the concentration 
camps in Nazi-occupied Poland, and Rakesh Sharma's recent "Final Solution", about the anti-Muslim pogrom 
in Gujarat in 2002. In conjunction with Delahaye's photographs, these works, to put it bluntly, changed my 
perspective. There may be a door in the wall, one has to know how to find it.

Thanks,
Sincerely --

Ananya.


Ananya Vajpeyi, Ph.D. 
Center for the Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University
JNU New Campus
New Delhi 1l0067 INDIA. 
E: ananyavajpeyi at vsnl.com