Excerpt from “A Human Package,” written by Jasmina Tesanovic in Belgrade this week:
I hail a cab. It is snowing and gloomy, Friday 23 December. People in Belgrade are already hysterical because of the New Year holidays.
Please hurry to the special court, ex military court. Do you know where it is? Of course Madame I know, it is a very famous place these days, it is round the corner, you don’t need a cab really.
True, the military court is an old renovated building for new war crimes, a monument to the last wars, my friend Stasa says. It’s much fancier than The Hague court room. In my street live some war criminals, so no wonder they made their court there.
We Women in Black are official NGO onlookers. We enter the building with Natasa Kandic, the woman most hated by nationalists in Serbia, Natasa Kandic the representative of the victims and a human rights lawyer, plus the family members themselves: 15 women, all in all.
This is the last day of the first round of the trial of the Scorpions, the paramilitary formation which executed 6 Muslim war prisoners in the days of Srebrenica. During this mass murder of the Muslims, the Scorpions unwisely filmed their own crime. Last July, this video document was screened in The Hague during the Milosevic trial, and then all over the Serbian and international media. Some family saw the faces of their missing for the first time.
Now we see the faces of the arrested executioners. One young woman, a victim’s relative says; it is so relieving to see their faces, so soothing, to see who killed your loved one, to see if he is a human, and to hear him speak for himself. It is so important to start making a difference between those who did the crime and those who didn’t.
Link to full text.
Previous Boing Boing posts on Jasmina Tesanovic — filmmaker, author, and most recently, Mrs. Bruce Sterling: Link. She can be reached at email (politicalidiot – at – yahoo.com).
Photo: “Snowed,” a snapshot of Belgrade by Flickr user Aleksandar Vacic.