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A More Complete Version of the Truth

Aishlinn O'Connor

Most Americans my age can’t tell you that Bosnia is in Eastern Europe. Those who actually paid attention in history class could probably do that, and the really good students might even remember that there was a war at some point in the nineties. But students who pay that much attention seem to be few and far between.

So when I told my friends that my internship for the summer was in Sarajevo, I got a lot of blank stares.

And then I told my parents. Their stares were less blank than they were filled with horror. They remember the war. They remember the video shown on American television. And that city they saw on television is not the place they want to send their daughter for the summer.

Sarajevo is obviously no longer the place it was fifteen years ago, but somewhere along the way American media stopped paying attention to the Balkans. Even if the problems were not all resolved, the conflict had ended. Other conflicts took the American troops and thus the media spotlight.

While my parents read up on current events in Sarajevo in order to update their perception of the city, I read up on the war in order to prepare for witnessing the war crimes trials.

I read about the causes, major events, and major figures in the war. I read about the intervention, the formation of the ICTY, and the reason the state war crimes chambers were created in the region. But what I knew came from books. It wasn’t until I got here that I could begin to understand it.

I was sitting on the balcony with my host family eating dinner when the mom pointed to where in the mountains the RS offensive came from explained how NATO responded. Later, a taxi driver mentioned that the road we were on served as the frontline for the battle. A television tribute to the victims of war prompted my host sister to talk about what it was like to live here at the time- how they struggled to find food or water, faced the constant fear of bombing, and knew the human costs of war.

The conversations just emphasized to me that I could not imagine the scale of the tragedies associated with the war because I have never lived through war. For my generation of Americans, war is something that occurs in distant lands. I have known soldiers who have left to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight and come back with stories of tragedy and despair. But I have never seen it, and the war has never been in my backyard.

It is with the humility that came from knowing how little about war I understood that I read the indictment for the first trial I was to attend. The two defendants were accused of holding captive up to 1,800 Bosniaks from Srebrenica and then ordering their deaths.

To try and understand the crime, I attempted to comprehend 1,800 people. To me, that number represented more people than there are in my class at university. It is roughly equal to the combined number of homicides in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Kansas City last year. And the indictment claims that these events transpired in only 4 days.

When I finally read through the whole indictment, trying to imagine the conditions in which the prisoners were detained and the way they were all killed, I realized just how grave the allegations were. Such a crime was unthinkable- no matter whether it was committed during a time of peace or war. While I was trying not to convict the defendants before they had their day in court, I was anxious to see what the pursuit of justice would look like.

Then I walked in the courtroom. Nothing seemed to set this trial apart from any other trial I had seen in America; nothing reflected the importance and the profile I assumed the trial would have. There were only two other observers: a reporter from BIRN and a monitor from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. There were no victims’ families, mainstream media, or even overeager law students watching the proceedings.

In my mind the trial was crucial to society’s ability to come to terms with the past and establish rule of law within the democracy. But what I had forgotten was that it was just one trial among many. The trials have been happening for years and will continue for years to come. While they may be new and intriguing to me, they in many ways have faded into the background of society.

People have moved on. They spend their days being teachers, doctors, and shopkeepers. They understand what happened during the war because they lived through it. Because of that, many feel they don’t need to know all the facts as determined by the courts.

For those of us from outside, though, the process of the courts, of determining legal responsibility and creating a historical record, is still intriguing. Because while we will never be able to fully understand, the first hand testimonies, photographs, and court decisions all supply us with information that brings us a little closer.  

And in the end it will contribute to a more complete version of the truth. It will be a version that can be written in the history books so that Americans and Bosnians alike can learn from the tragedy.

Aishlinn O'Connor is an undergraduate student at Duke University in North Carolina studying political science, journalism, and documentary photography. This summer she is interning at BIRN's Sarajevo office.