SCHEVENINGEN PRISON, THE HAGUE
14 DECEMBER 2005, AFTERNOON
SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC was peering intently at a bundle of papers when Marin came to his cell door. Surrounding the former president were piles of court documents in ring-bound folders, amounting to thousands or even tens of thousands of pages. So much paperwork, so many transcripts and witness statements that the Irish prison commandant McFadden had been forced to grant Milosevic access to this extra cell for use as an office.
Marin coughed, more a clearing of the throat, and Milosevic looked over the top of his reading glasses. It was an actor’s gesture and, when he saw who had interrupted him, he removed the spectacles with a quick movement, grasping the frame between his thumb and forefinger and holding them defensively.
‘Maric,’ he said. ‘Dosao si da me ubijes?’ Have you come to kill me? Despite the attempted mirth, the older man’s voice was strained, weaker than the previous morning. Marin entered the cell and took the only other seat.
‘Shall we speak English?’ he asked.
Milosevic put down his spectacles and took a sip from the cut-crystal whisky glass beside him.
‘That is whole point,’ he said.
‘That’s the whole point.’
‘Maric, I asked big question. But now is not spontaneous.’
‘I can let you make grammatical errors and keep it spontaneous, but that would defeat the purpose.’
‘Defeat the purpose? You would have me speak like Shakespeare?’
‘Reason not the need, Slobodan.’
‘What?’
‘Reason not the need. Our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous … King Lear.’
‘You think I am mad old king?’
‘The story goes like this. Lear gave up all his power and now his own daughters are questioning what he needs to live. What comforts? How many bodyguards? They’re greedy, these daughters. He’s angry and he tells them: Reason not the need. So here you are, an old man who’s lost his power. Alone. Unprotected. And you ask: Have I come to kill you? If he were still alive, Shakespeare might make a play about you.’
‘And what character would you be, Maric?’
‘The fool, of course.’
Milosevic nodded, a glimmer of infernal light returning to his bloodshot eyes.
‘Make me laugh, then.’
‘The real job of the fool is to make you think. So, you asked: Have I come to kill you?’ My spontaneous answer is: Why would I take the trouble to alert you first?’
‘You might,’ said Milosevic. ‘If you want look in my face when you did it.’
‘No, Gospodin President, I’d just whack you over the head and get it over with.’
The smile lingered on Milosevic’s lips, but there was no humour left in his eyes. He jabbed his forefinger on the court documents.
‘If you’re going to do it, make it quick. This endless fucking trial is just killing me slowly.’
Marin shifted in the chair, feeling pressure on the bandaged knife wound on his back. When he had treated it in the bathroom, twisting to see in the mirror the damage the Gypsy had done, he saw that the wound was a U shape. He remembered Mejakic hissing at him—Ustashi. He looked at Milosevic over the table, feeling contempt for the man’s self-pity and wondering if, despite his promise to ‘smooth’ things over, he had gone ahead and authorised the attack.
He asked himself, not for the first time, why he was sitting across from this man. The simple answer was that McFadden had sought him out and asked him to help Milosevic with his English. Marin had resisted at first, for it seemed an absurd proposition, but the commandant was persuasive. McFadden seemed to have the crazy idea of recreating the old Yugoslavia within the little world that he controlled, of stitching the multi-ethnic community back together, forcing enemies to live cheek by jowl in their confinement and compelling them to find ways to get along. The Irishman encouraged them to eat together, to cook meals for each other, to share communal spaces and activities. Marin deduced that this was an experiment in human nature, motivated perhaps by the fratricidal conflict in McFadden’s own homeland.
Of course Marin had not been compelled to go along with this. He could have refused to play the game and kept a scowling distance from Milosevic. But he could not deny his own curiosity. Perverse curiosity, perhaps, but a chance to glimpse the power behind the curtain. He found that he wanted to look into the eyes of the man who, like some vengeful potentate from a bygone age, had ordered the sacking of Vukovar and the razing of the city to terrify and subdue his enemy.
Marin understood why The Boss’s prison cronies distrusted his motives. On several occasions, while playing chess with Milosevic, the impulse to reach out and strangle the monster had welled up in him, like bile rising suddenly in his throat. Each time Marin had suppressed the urge, and it occurred to him that, having grown up with a monster, perhaps Ivo’s madness had immunised him like a pathogen that didn’t destroy but left you resistant.
‘All this talk about me killing you,’ he said now, probing the Serb. ‘Sounds like you’ve been listening to that poisonous little shit Ademi. He’s warned me to stay away from you.’
‘I did not tell him to do that,’ said Milosevic, thrusting out his chin. ‘You know, this Albanian is born conspirator.’
‘A born conspirator.’
‘Fucking hell! A … A … A … He has many theories. He says some big shot would pay you a lot of money to kill me. Culprit number one: Your fucking president.’
‘He’s not my president.’
‘Your people elected Mesic, didn’t they? Who would vote for such an ordinary swine? Three years ago, he comes here to testify against me. Milosevic alone wanted war, he says. Milosevic was in control of everything. Every big decision, every small decision. There’s a massacre in Prijedor, must be Milosevic. Someone’s throat is slit in Kosovo, it’s fault of Milosevic. Mesic tried to bury me in courtroom then, but now he’s panic. Maybe Milosevic will win his trial. Better send an assassin.’
‘Ademi’s telling you this?’
‘Not only him, Mira too. She says my enemies will try to kill me in here.’
Mira! Marin was instantly alert. This was a danger of a different order. Mira Markovic was the lifelong companion of Slobodan Milosevic: his childhood sweetheart, then his wife and political partner. She had been a sociology professor in Belgrade, a virulent left-wing theorist, and a key figure in Tito’s communist aristocracy, more than enough reasons for Marin to hate her. He knew that in Belgrade she had powerful enemies. They called her the Red Witch. Many close to the centre of power believed she was the real engine of her husband’s ambition, his Lady Macbeth. By the force of her will, she had taken this dull bureaucrat, this lawyer and economist, a mid-level party apparatchik, all the way to the presidency. She had wheedled and cajoled him into taking up the killing knife. She stiffened his spine, screwed his courage to the sticking place.
Now she had her own troubles. The new Serbian government wanted to put her on trial for corruption and abuse of power. To avoid that prospect, the Red Witch had fled to Moscow two years ago and she had been stuck there ever since in self-imposed exile. Mira knew full well that behind the corruption charges against her were hidden indictments for murder. Belgrade’s new generation of political leaders and prosecutors wanted to put her on trial for ordering the assassinations of her husband’s enemies.
During these years in exile, Mira had not been able to travel to The Hague to see her husband for fear of being arrested and deported back to Serbia. Milosevic was bereft at the long separation and spoke to her regularly by phone. Marin could not imagine the lovelorn Slobodan wasting time telling her all about his Croatian chess opponent, but he knew that one word from the Red Witch and he could end up as another of her victims.
‘How is she going?’ asked Marin.
‘Don’t talk to me of Mira.’
‘Has something happened?’
‘We spoke today. Nothing but tears. She still cannot leave Moscow.’
‘Two years since you saw her? That’s a long time.’
‘Yes,’ said the older man before lapsing into silence.
Under the fluorescents, Milosevic looked like a dying animal. There was a framed photo of Mira on his desk, a decades-old image of a plump, smooth-faced young woman with a coquettish smile. Her ink-black hair was cut in a straight fringe and there was a purple flower tucked behind her left ear. Marin knew very well that, like her husband, the present-day Mira was a worn and ravaged creature. She had ended up with a face that reflected her character, but Marin imagined that her Slobodan still saw her as the girl in the photograph.
‘You know what I tell to the Albanian?’ Milosevic said eventually. ‘I tell him: Don’t worry about Maric. The real assassins are in courtroom. This prosecutor, Mr Geoffrey-not-so-fucking-Nice, he is the worst of them, but the judges, too, they try to kill me. Mr Fucking Robinson, you know him? The black man … Robinson is from Jamaica! Can you believe? Is that really where to find the best judges? Does it not seem a little grotesque? Sugar cane, rum and reggae, God save me, that’s all that comes from that pathetic little colony. They send to judge me a man descend from plantation slaves …’
‘Descended … descended from …’
‘Descended from slaves owned by a past generation of Englishmen, perhaps the ancestors of Geoffrey Fucking Nice. Justice can be poetic, no? Black and white. Now Mr Nice and Mr Robinson both work for UN, their salaries are paid by new masters in Washington. These lawyers and judges, they are nothing but America’s assassins sent kill me day by day, question by question, a Chinese water torture to death.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Marin, annoyed by the constant whining. ‘Why don’t you just admit you gave the orders in Bosnia and Kosovo? It’s obvious Yugoslavia had a chain of command and you were at the top of it. They don’t call you Gospodin President for nothing.’
Milosevic’s mouth twisted into an ugly smile.
‘According to Mr Fucking Nice, I was head of every Serb citizen. I suppose if someone ran over a pedestrian in Pristina that was my fault too?’
‘The head of every Serb citizen. The. You always forget the definite article. Anyway, I came here to play chess. That’s all.’
‘That’s not all, Maric! You take sides with those who persecute me and expect me to remain silent? These same Americans, and English too, they talk of a New World Order. Tell me: How do you make a New Order by bombing innocent Serbian people, by sending missiles onto trains and refugee convoys and into TV stations? Who are murderers here? Tell me why are they not on trial? They find not one piece of paper with my name on it. No orders to kill, nothing. Now their false tribunal finds me responsible for everything they have done themselves. All Serbs know that President Milosevic and the will of the Serbian people are inseparable. They are one and the same. Milosevic is the expression of their will.’
‘Here’s some advice for nothing,’ said Marin. ‘You should stick to the first person. Every crackpot dictator in history refers to himself in the third person. That’s when people stop listening. And as for your triumph of the will … Wasn’t it Leni Riefenstahl who came up with that?’
‘Oh, I see, now you compare me to Hitler? You? A fucking Croat! Are you so ignorant of your own history? It was Ustasha who embraced Hitler. Your fucking Poglavnik did that. Fascist pig Ante Pavelic … the fascist pig … Pavelic crawled to Berlin like a craven dog to get his Fuhrer’s blessing. He genuflects to Hitler, his Ustashi kill for Hitler, for Hitler they murder all the Jews, and to please themselves they make a great slaughter of Serbs. And all the time the partisans—my people—fight against Hitler. Fifty German divisions cannot defeat them. That is the will of Serbian people!’
‘Why do you want to play chess with me,’ asked Marin, ‘when you think of me as your worst enemy?’
Milosevic ran two hands through his hair and took another slug of whisky before answering.
‘I could ask you same thing,’ he said. ‘To tell you truth, I have to find some way not to think of trial all the time. I have to relax my mind. My blood pressure is boiling. I do not trust these Dutch doctors, but even these ones tell me I need more time to rest and recover. But my countrymen in here do not play, not like you, and when I do spend time with them they speak only of my trial. And when I listen to their anger my blood boils even more. You, Maric, you are different. You don’t talk about trial. Perhaps you just don’t care? Yes, you are my enemy. Yes, you are insolent and sometimes you are intolerable. All true, but, strange to say, you mostly do not make my blood boil.’
•
Marin was enthralled by one aspect of this most unusual prison: the live video link to Courtroom One, which all prisoners could access in their cells. It reminded him of watching the action on the centre court at Wimbledon, but instead of tennis matches you got telecasts of the trials of top-seeded war criminals. Before he even met Milosevic, Marin had seen a good deal of his courtroom antics. He watched, knowing that he too was destined to play at some point, albeit on an outer court. Of course, he might have to wait two years or more, that being the average time it took to put a defendant on trial.
Slobodan Milosevic was the number-one seed and the tribunal’s biggest drawcard so his trial had begun within months of his incarceration. But after this rapid start, it had dragged on for years and now seemed to be grinding into the final games of the fifth set without a clear winner. Not long ago, Marin had watched in his cell a cable TV documentary marking the third anniversary of the Milosevic trial. It was his first chance to see the opening games of the contest.
On day one the large courtroom had been crowded with judges, lawyers and court officials. A theatrical blue curtain hung behind the bench, framing the three justices in their black gowns, red silk vests and pleated white bands. Marin thought they looked like overdressed men waiting for a meal with big white napkins tucked into their collars.
A grey-faced official had come on stage to play the chorus.
‘Good morning, your honours,’ he intoned. ‘Case number I-T 0-2-54, the prosecutor versus Slobodan Milosevic …’
Then on he went, and on and on.
Milosevic sat opposite the bench, flanked by two policemen, one black, one white, each turned in towards the accused like a set of racially balanced bookends. This younger Milosevic was much healthier-looking than the raddled creature Marin knew. He was soberly attired in a black suit, white shirt and striped tie. His fierce brown eyes were fixed on the judges. The effort to bend the judges to his will seemed to deepen the furrows in his high forehead and exaggerate the twin grooves that ran from his nose to the sides of his disaffected, downturned mouth. Then his right eyebrow lifted, his chin jutted forwards and his body shifted around in the revolving chair as he prepared to say his first words to the court.
‘I consider this tribunal false tribunal,’ he announced with a sneer. ‘So I have no need to appoint counsel to an illegal organ.’
In the centre of the bench, the presiding judge, Richard May, a diffident Englishman, peered at the accused over his heavy reading glasses, his inborn dignity already unsettled by the headphones clamped over his ears.
‘Do you want to have the indictment read out on your behalf?’ he inquired mildly.
‘That’s your problem,’ Milosevic snarled.
May’s gentility gave no hint of the ordeal to come, but Marin knew that the judge would be the trial’s first casualty. Forced by ill-health to step down after two years, he would die soon afterwards.
Then it was the turn of the prosecutor. Geoffrey Nice QC had been seconded to the tribunal from London’s Temple Garden Chambers, which had famously supplied Britain’s main prosecutor to the Nuremberg trials. With this weight of expectation on his shoulders, Mr Nice would lead the prosecution in the biggest war crimes trial since the end of the Second World War, and the first of a former head of state. In deference to the location of the international court, Nice went wigless and wore the simple garb of Dutch lawyers—a plain black robe with a pleated white band.
Geoffrey Nice had a finely drawn aesthetic face, shrewd eyes and closely trimmed, blue-black hair. That hair was surely dyed, Marin had thought, which suggested, as did the two gold rings on the little finger of his left hand, an unpromising level of self-regard. The prosecutor’s microphone, like the long stem of a brutalist flower, reached to just below his chin.
‘This trial,’ Nice began, speaking slowly and clearly for the interpreters, ‘is about the rise of this accused to power, power that was exercised without accountability, responsibility or morality.’ He paused here to remove his glasses, then slowly put them back on. ‘At the outset, he thought he could have it all—perhaps a new Yugoslavia, himself a second Tito.’
At this, Milosevic tilted his head ironically, but Nice was speaking beyond him to a global audience, aware that hundreds of journalists were watching on a big screen in the nearby media centre.
‘Ethnic cleansing happened over and over again,’ the prosecutor continued. ‘Did he know what was happening? Of course he did. Was there a piece of paper that said, “Go and commit these crimes”? Of course not. People aren’t like that.’
The stage had been set as if for a grand opera. Nice would supply the soaring rhetoric, the evidence, the motive, the psychology behind it all, the scale of Milosevic’s ambitions and his hubris. Yet at the centre of this ennobling theatre of justice, the accused was sublimely disinterested in playing the role allotted to him. In the years that followed, Milosevic would drag out the proceedings until the global audience and the holdouts in the media centre succumbed to boredom and simply left. Representing himself, the former president lectured and hectored the judges. He refused to accept a single piece of evidence and insisted on cross-examining every last witness in minute detail.
Marin understood that the prosecution had played into the hands of the old devil from the very beginning. The crucial mistake came when Geoffrey Nice announced his intention to introduce more than a thousand witnesses.
‘Over a thousand witnesses?’ Justice May protested. ‘No trial can take place under those circumstances.’
May’s even temper failed him for the first time that day and Marin wondered if the judge had glimpsed, at that moment, his own mortality. The trial that killed him really was like no other in history, encompassing sixty-six charges and more than a thousand events. The prosecutors would generate a million pages of material, requiring Milosevic to read more than a thousand pages a day, an impossible task, on top of the thousands of hours of video evidence he was expected to review. As the former president’s health worsened, the trial would be interrupted by frequent stoppages as he complained to the judges that the burden on him was intolerable.
‘A superhuman could not do it,’ Milosevic told the court. ‘They bombard me with documents, not evidence, quantity over quality, I am the victim of being bombed by documents. This is a form of torture and a form of cynicism.’
Marin felt no sympathy for Milosevic, but he did understand that the trial of the century was collapsing under its own weight. Nevertheless, amid the interminable white noise of testimony, one witness cut through to Marin. He was a fellow who had known Milosevic personally when he was president. He told the court that his impression was of a man who felt that, when he said something, the very saying of it made it true. If he uttered it, it simply must be true.
•
‘Shall we play chess, then?’ Marin now asked.
‘Yes, but not here surrounded by all this shit. We will go next door. I have more whisky there,’ said Milosevic, holding up his empty glass.
The Serb played white and pressed his advantage hard, forcing Marin to build a defensive fortress around his besieged king. Not for the first time during one of their contests, Marin thought of Vukovar and found himself employing his pawns like the small groups of men who used to risk their lives to go out and attack Serbian tanks.
When Zwolsman came to lock down the cells, the game was in the balance. A slip-up by either player would be fatal. They carefully moved the board to the top of a cupboard to keep it safe until they could resume the battle. The guard escorted Marin back to his own cell and shepherded him inside like a farmer herding a prize cow into the barn ahead of a cold night: ‘In you go, Mr M. Take care. Sleep well.’
Marin did not look at him.
‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ said Zwolsman. ‘A letter came for you.’
Marin looked up now, staring at the man’s stupid face. ‘What did you say?’
‘You got a letter, by courier. I put it on your desk.’
Zwolsman smiled inanely and clanged the door shut.
Marin suddenly felt claustrophobic. A letter! He found it on the desk—an envelope addressed to Tomislav Maric c/- the prison. He tore it open and a photograph slipped out, falling face-up on the desk. He looked at it for a moment, then picked it up with trembling fingers.
It was an artefact that should not exist. He saw his younger self and felt a profound shock. The young woman was in his arms and Marin seemed to hear her pleas, faint echoes from the distant past. In the photograph his own face was unreadable. It was like seeing an actor playing a crucial scene in his life. After a while he thought to turn the photograph over, and on the reverse side he found the message:
I’m coming to see you,
Anna
Marin clutched the photograph so hard it began to bend. He dropped it and stood up. He stepped to the window and turned his back to it, standing in the narrow gap between the bunk and the desk. He took four long paces to the cell door, his rubber soles squelching on the vinyl floor. He put both palms on the door. Cold steel. He turned and paced back. The same noise, the same rhythm. He touched the window. It was damp with tiny beads of condensation; he pushed off from it like a lap swimmer and repeated the sequence again and again.
Pressure rose in his veins so they seemed to pulsate, pressing against his skin. The cicada cry of tinnitus was in his ears as he sat heavily on the bunk, squashing the thin mattress.
He clicked on the TV.
Bewitched. That infuriating fuckwit Darren, the pop-eyed, unreasonable prick, was babbling away as usual. What man wouldn’t be happy that his wife could grant his every wish? Click. CNN. More infuriating fuckwits. Click. Crap. Click. More crap. He turned it off.
Marin Katich was filled with helpless anxiety. He wanted to pull the television from its swivelling metal arm and smash it to pieces. He wanted to tear the bunk apart; to drag out the sink; to rip the plumbing from the wall; to break the spines of his books and scatter the pages; to tear up his indictment and the investigators’ reports and the witness statements, and throw them about like confetti.
But he did none of this. Instead, he lowered himself back onto the narrow bunk and closed his eyes. It took some time for him to calm down.
Eventually, he was able to sit up. He stared at the desk. It was plain and orderly. The photograph was still there. He picked it up again and examined it closely. It had obviously been taken from a distance, looking down from a building, and the photographer had been good at his job. He could see that from the detail in the image and its clarity. The young woman cleaves to his body and he feels again the pressure of her against his chest.
Then tears came to flood Marin’s eyes and he began to sob like a child. It was an immense relief to feel something, to remember what it was like to be human.