Outside, standing with the families of victims and with
survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, awaiting with them in anxiety and contemplation
a verdict that everyone knows will be essential to the work not only of justice
but also of grieving, is a journalist, Florence Hartmann, who for years worked
mightily to denounce those crimes, to help identify the perpetrators, and to
untangle the web of complicity that made them possible.
The decision had not yet come down when a handful of guards split
the crowd, pushing aside Bosniak women who, once they realize what is about to
happen, try unsuccessfully to close ranks and protect the journalist from
arrest.
For myself and others stunned by the news the story goes
back to 2007, when the former correspondent for Le Monde, having returned to her original profession after several
months spent helping the first prosecutor of the new tribunal, Carla Del Ponte,
get the unprecedented institution up and running, publishes a book, Paix et châtiment (Peace and
Punishment), in which, without revealing the details, she takes note of a
little arrangement between the tribunal and the government of Serbia, an
arrangement designed to conceal the extent of the latter’s involvement in the
actions of Serb separatists in Bosnia.
The tribunal, alas, reacts like one of the statist monsters
against which it was supposed to deploy its new wisdom. Becoming anxiously indignant,
it initiates a surreal proceeding against its former employee, imposes a fine
that a support committee immediately raises the funds to pay, but then changes
its mind and sentences Hartmann to a week in prison—a sentence that no country,
including France, takes seriously enough to force her to serve.
And it is that sentence that the ICTY guards, members of a
private police force that holds no authority outside court property, a force
whose role it is to watch over, escort, and prevent from escaping the
architects of genocide who inhabit the ICTY’s cells—but not to abuse a
journalist—move in to enforce.
By the time these lines appear Florence Hartmann will have
been released from the cell in which she has been treated just the same as Mladic,
Karadzic, and the other monsters she has spent her life denouncing—and just a
short distance from their cells.
Doubtless we will have heard embarrassed explanations, and
perhaps even excuses, from the Netherlands, whose real police permitted, on
Dutch soil, a disgrace that the monsters in question never would have dared to
imagine, even in their dreams, that a great democracy would commit, as well as from
France, which did not, as far as we know, issue any very strenuous objection to
the unprecedented treatment of one of its finest journalists.
And perhaps lesser colleagues, including those who, after
the Balkan wars ended, so often abandoned Hartmann as she pursued, almost
single-handedly, the painful struggle for the truth, will speak up to say, in
so many words, that it is not such a big deal to spend seven days of your life
locked up, even on genocide row among the murderers you have been pursuing, not
so awful to live for a week with the lights kept on around the clock, with your
clothes confiscated, and with the peephole into your cell opening every 15
minutes. Perhaps some will say (they have already begun to do so) that all she
had to do to avoid this was not to be there that day with the families whose
cause had for so long been her own.
For my part, on this 28th day of March, I want to express my
anger at the shameful images that have circulated widely on the Web (though for
once not widely enough) of a manhandled journalist, her glasses ripped off,
dragged off by police, veritably kidnapped, and stashed in a jail that in
principle is reserved for the dregs of humanity.
I want to express my astonishment at the faint-hearted
response of the French media, compared with that of the Anglo-American press,
in defending her. From the director of the daily that she served with such
distinction for four years running we had a right to expect a little more than
a belated article (four days after Hartmann’s arrest) criticizing as “totally
disproportionate” (what would have been proportionate, one wonders?) the
punishment meted out for her “whistle-blowing” (as if a committed, courageous
journalist who has never relented in her search for the facts were no more than
a “whistle-blower”).
And lastly I want to express my sadness at a disastrous
failure. Last week the day finally arrived when the world was to see the leader
of Bosnia’s Serbs sentenced to forty years in prison, an occasion that should have
been one of unalloyed joy for all those who had kept Bosnia close to their
heart for twenty years, a day that should have been one of glory and victory
for all of the men and women who had wanted to see the conclusion of the long
march begun in Nuremberg by Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht, the men introduced
into modern law the notions of genocide and crimes against humanity. On this same
day the ICTY chose to place on the same footing, symbolically, as the most
hardened criminals a person who had done more to bring us to this day than
nearly anyone else since Lemkin and Lauterpacht! Was this a lapse? An
unintentionally revealing act? A misfire by an institution insufficiently aware
its own greatness? Will we hear remorse? Or is this a sign of an era that
cannot seem to stop repeating its own dark moments? What happens next will give
us the answer.
