Scorpions Trial
Jasmina Tesanovic, Belgrade
The Liar, the Fall of Yugoslav Army
March 14, 2006
"I am going to pronounce something that I may regret for the rest of my life — is there is any left after this — but if I knew all this would have happened, I would have preferred to stay there in that meadow together with the victims.
"Mothers, you whose children were killed in cold blood, you should know that they never did anything to provoke or deserve their death: they had no uniforms and they were just kids. They were killed because we got that order, and because they were Muslims."
The only indicted Scorpion who shows some humanity.
in his tremulous voice and red sweater, is the one called the Cunt, the coward who didn’t dare to shoot… He turns towards the audience behind the glass, heated and blurred with our wary breathing, while uttering this unexpected speech.
Then he turns to the witness who took the whole day to tell one big lie, which held no water by the end of the day, when even the guards started puffing with impatience.
His was the historical sentence, uttered in this miserable place called the 'special tribunal for war crimes,' in front of a crowd of war criminals, their criminal lawyers, their criminalized families, and us, a bunch of sobbing women. These brave mothers from Srebrenica are broadcast every single hour on CNN.
[image: Detail of interior house wall, Serbia, by Aleksandra Radonić]
These days as they speak of Milosevic's escape from the prison and punishment, though his death.
Then he turns to the Liar and says, you should be ashamed of yourself, swear on the life of your children, if you cannot respect the Bible and a legal oath.
The Liar, who claims he is not a believer, doesn't blink; he says: I swear on the lives not only of my children but of my only granddaughter, Milica.
We are dumbfounded.
The manus lunga of crime is ready to sacrifice not only the next but the third generation. For a commander? For the two new cars he got? For 7000 euros he embezzled from a fellow soldier. Out of fear of the law? Out of revenge? All of this… or something we are missing.
Like the truth. The witness claims he does not believe in God, nor do I, but I do believe in truth, and not because of others, but because of my human condition and my sanity. The Liar has killed the dead over again with his lies. He tried to drive us all crazy in that courtroom, saying obvious contradictions, nonsensical constructions.
He even announced proudly at a certain point: I am a professional soldier (and that is not a lie, he really was a life long soldier of the ex Yugoslav army). If I ever did get that kind of order, I would have disobeyed it. I am sure that my commander never gave that order, nor would I have obeyed such an order.
Even in the army a soldier can refuse an inhuman order against humanity.
Don't you raise your voice on me, screams the blonde judge at the 52 year old, toothless, bald. and wrinkled sacked soldier to whom even a pension is denied (he claims).
He
looks seventy. He was a volunteer in Croatia,
Bosnia, and even Kosovo. He is not yet indicted. but the map of his moves is that of the worst crimes and mass graves on the territory of ex Yu. He symbolizes also a decadence of an empire: armed bloodshed of civilians carried out by state terror.
His personal story is our miserable history. I feel no disgust in this case, as I did with the beasts who pulled the triggers, I feel hate, for the first time in this trial. As they are becoming more human, I am becoming less. I think of his poor granddaughter Milica, whom he probably holds in his lap every evening.
He is ready to drop her at the first order of his beloved commander, who is not hiding his pride for his disgusting success today in the courtroom. He is displaying his muscles more than usual and rambling utter nonsense about how great a soldier he was. He even shouts all of a sudden; I was always very eloquent with words … I do remember his last speech, when he sang his manifesto about his trio of core beliefs, "the cunt, the
gun and the state"… He sways from his bench to
face
the court and the Liar.
I am not calming down until
they put handcuffs on his hands again. But even with those handcuffs on, he raises his hands high above his head and salutes his faithful crowd, as if he were Mary Stuart, the Catholic martyr queen.
I look at those girls in court, half his age, married to him and other Scorpions. I realize they bought those wives after they killed and raped…they bought them with war loot. These women, now mothers of their children, are their hostages if not their accomplices. Some of them probably never knew what their husbands did for a living. Some maybe even tried to leave them, but then, some are just standing behind their men, as women often do.
"Serbian bodies were scattered all over the place. I
was seeing every day at least one dead Serb. Why
would I
pay attention to stories about an execution of six prisoners who were infiltrated to kill us…?"
His story is the history of an army too, not only of a nation. As he transformed from a high-ranking officer in the official army, into a paramilitary, paralegal killers gang.
He had the power to sign papers and confer ranks.
In those days he asked a Scorpion — the cowardly one
— now tell me which rank do you want? And the coward said, give me the rank of a general…
You can;t have that one, we Scorpions already have our general…
I will give you the next high rank…
Who was their general I wonder: that hero they tried to please cutting off people's heads? Mladic, Milosevic, Karadzic, Hadzic, Martic, Arkan, Legija…? These big shots are rarely mentioned, if at all. But they all seem to know who gave the orders, even if they lie about it.
Crime came from Serbia, from Belgrade, but it spread all over former Yu territory. Dead bodies were taken back to Serbia in huge freezers, to be hidden in mass graves.
At this hour, the body of Milosevic will also be probably coming back here to Belgrade . If it does arrive, and I had my choice, I would bury him in one of those mass graves,
with his victims. We Women in Black would dress in
white for his funeral.
The Liar knows that "ammunition" was referred to in code as "food," but he does not know the word in code for actual "food." His job was to carry weapons to the Scorpions. and that was called food. He was precious because of his skills and experience. They wore Scorpions on their uniforms and the Serbian flag to show their ethnicity.
How can you tell a Serbian decapitated corpse in jeans from a Muslim one, I wonder…? Yet he could tell somehow, and he saw the corpses every day, everywhere. That's what we were told for years on end by Milosevic, that's what some people believed and died for, even honest people, such as simple soldiers who didn’t loot, but were food for enemy tanks… Their real enemy was their best friend; or their commander, as in this case.
All of a sudden I think of Shakespeare.
The Liar reminds me of my friend, who was a poet.
Because he invented words and plots, my friend
was called a liar. The power of a lie
is like poison. I need an antidote immediately. Truth is not enough, tears are not enough… Punishment?
Revenge? or is that, too, a further loss, another step down that same road of hate violence corruption and vice.
"Not one cop in this country is not corrupted." Our former premiere Zoran Djindjic said that, when he got the power to rule after Milosevic. When he tried to rule without lies and corruption, he was executed. These guys here have his blood on their hands too.
We Scorpions were legally part of the official Yugoslav Milosevic army: I had those papers and you can find them now in Serbian part of Bosnia. You can ask for those, you are the special court. Do it, says the Liar
proudly: I have nothing to hide. Ours was a great battalion and a lot of public injustice is done to these heroes who were only defending their own people.
As he answers toothlessly, hissing in the mike to the judge and lawyers, he often sweeps his hands across the empty table in front of him. I wonder what does he see there that we don’t? As he sits during the recesses that the judge forces on him, to recollect his memory and maybe speak to his lawyer, he sits on the bench alone with glowing, blinking eyes. as if he had a nervous tic. Compulsive obsessive behavior. He must have been a very successful soldier, a killing technician.
The Bad guy who became Good by admitting that he pulled the trigger makes an elaborate verbal trap with vivid plot and imagery.
Do you remember the place where we used to stop every time we were going to the headquarters? Together with the commander to take orders and instructions? That place with a clear overview of the enemy's positions?
That place we never missed?
Yes of course I do…says the Liar convincingly.
Well there is no such place. We never stopped there because you never traveled with us. You are lying.
You
cannot be the commander's alibi anymore…
Silence. Blank silence without morality or conscience. We are exhausted by lies, we need the silence of the dead to get back to our humanity. I wonder, after this experience: would I ever manage to lie like this, even if I had to save my child's life?
A young woman tortured in the Second World War by the Gestapo, because she was a Communist, sent word to her comrades before she was arrested: scramble all of you. I will say anything when they torture me. I cannot stand the pain…but instead she simply died in silence.
Stasa has a brilliant idea that boosts us from the deadly silence: let's make a tribunal in Hague for crimes against women. Hurray!
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Jasmina Tesanovic is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com.
Previous posts on BoingBoing:
– Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
– Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
– Milosevic Funeral
– Link to previous posts about Jasmina's work.
