Weschler, Lawrence.

"Vermeer in Bosnia."
Vermeer in Bosnia: A Reader. Pantheon Books, 2004. pp.13-26.

https://bobcat.library.nyu.edu/permalink/f/ci13eu/nyu_aleph001144154
 VERMEER IN BOSNIA

I happened to be in The Hague a while back, sitting in on the prelimi­

nary hearings of the Yugo"slavWar Crimes Tribunal-specifically, those
related to the case of Dusko Tadic, the only one of more than forty accused
war criminals whom the Tribunal had actually been .able to get its ·h~nds
on up to that point. While there, I had occasion to talk with some of th~
principal figures involved in this unprecedented judicial un~ertaking.
At one point, for instance, I was having lunch with Antonio Cassese, a
distinguished Italian jurist who has been serving for the past two years as
the president of the court (the head of its international panel of eleven
judges). He'd been rehearsing for me some of the more gruesome stories
~hat have crossed his desk-maybe not the most gruesome but just the
sort of thing he has to contend with every day and which perhaps accounts
for the sense of urgency he brings to his mission. The story, for instance, of
a soccer player. As Cassese recounted, "Famous guy, a Muslim. When he
was captured, they said, 'Aren't you So-and-So?' He admitted he was. So
they broke both his legs,_h3:Tidcuffed
-
him to a radiato.r, and_forced him to
. ·-

watch as they repeatedly _raped his wife and ~o daught~rs ..and then-slit
their throats. After that, he begged to be killed himself, ~ut his torme~tors
must have r.ealized that the cruelest _thing they could possibly do to .him
now would simply be to set-him free, which they d_iq.Somehow, this man
was able to make his way to some U.N. investigators, and told them about
his ordeal-a few days after which, he committed suicide." Or, for instance,
as Cassese went on, ccsomeof the tales about Tadic himself, how, in addi­
tion to the various rapes and murders he's accused of, he is alleged to have
14 { A BALKAN TRIPTYCH}

supervised the torture and torments of a particular group of Muslim pris­

oners, at one point forcing one of his charges to emasculate another-with
his teeth. The one fellow died, and the guy who bit him went mad."
Stories like that: one judge's daily fare. And, at one point, I asked Judge
Cassese ho~, regularly obliged to gaze into such an ·appalling abyss, he had
kept from going mad himself. His face brightened. "Ah;' he said with a
smile. "You see, as often as possible I make my way over to the JY:lauritshuis
museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the
Vermeers."

Sittjng there over lunch with Cassese, I'd·be_enstruck by the perfect aptness
of his impulse. I, too, had been spending time with the Vermeers at the
Mauritshuis, and at the Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, as well. For Ver­
meer's paintings, almost uniquely in the history of art, radiate "a centered­
ness, a peacefulness, a serenity" (as Cassese put it), a sufficiency, a sense of
perfectly equipoised grace. In his exquisite Study of Vermeer,Edward Snow
has deployed as epigraph a line from Andrew Forge's essay "Painting and
the Struggle for the Whole Self;' which reads, «In ways that I do not pre­
tend to understand fully, painting deals with the only issues that seem to
me to count in our benighted time-freedom, autonomy,-fairness, love."
And I've often found myself agreeing with Snow's implication that some­
how these issues may be more richly.and fully addressed in Vermeer than
c!D-ywhere else. .
But that afternoon with Cassese I had a sudden further intuition as
to the true extent of Vermeer's achievement-something I hadn~t fully
grasped before. For, of course, when Vermeer was painting those images,
vy-hich
.
for us have be~ome the very emblem
. .
of peacefulness and serenj.ty,
{J.llEurope vyasBosnia (or had only just recently ceased to be): awash in
incredibly vicious wars of religious persecution and proto-nationalist for­
mation, w~~~ of an _at-that-time unprecedented violence and cruelty,
replete with sieges and famines and massacres and mass rapes, unspeak­
able tortures an~ wholesale devastation. To be sure, the sense of Holland
 VERMEER IN BOSNIA 15

during Vermeer's lifetime which we are usually given-that of the coun­

try's so-called Golden Age-is one of becalmed, burgherlike efficiency;
but that Holland, to the extent that it ever existed, was of relatively recent
provenance, and even then under a co_ntinualthreat of being overwhelmed
once agarn.
Jan Vermeer was born in 1632, sixteen years before the end of th~ Thirty
Years'War, which virtually shredded neigh~ng Germany and repeatedly
tore into the Netherlands as well. Between 1652 and 1674, ·England and the
United Provinces of the Netherlands went to war three times, and though
'
most of the fighting was confined to sea battles, the wars were not without
their consequences for the Dutch mainland: Vermeer's Delft, in particular, ·
suffered terrible devastation in 1654, when some eighty thousand pounds
of gunpowder in the town's arsenal accidentally exploded, killing hun­
dreds, including Vermeer's great contemporary, the painter Carel Fabri­
tius. (By the conclusion of those wars, the Dutch had ended up ceding New
.A.nisterdamto the British, who quickly changed its name to New York.)
These were years of terrible religious conflict throughout Europe-the cli­
maxes of both the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation and their
various splintering progeny. And though the Dutch achieved an enviable
atmosphere of tolerance during this period, Holland was regularly over­
run with refugees from religious conflicts elsewhere. (Vermeer himself,
incidentally, was a convert to Catholicism, which was a distinctly minority
creed in the Dutch context.) Finally, in 1672, the Dutch fell under the mur­
derous assault of France's·Louis XIV and were subjected to a series of cam­
paigns that lasted until ~678. In fact, the ensuing devastation of the Dutch
economy and Vermeer's own resulting bankruptcy may have constituted a
proximate cause of the painter's early death, by stroke, in 1675: he was only
forty-two.

Another preliminary session of the Tribunal was scheduled for late in the
afternoon of the day I had lunch with Judge Cassese, and, following our
conversation, I decided to spend the intervening hours at the Mauritshuis.
i6 { A BALKAN TRIPTYCH}

On the taxi ride out, as I looked through a Vermeer catalogue, I began to

realize that, in fact, the pressure of all that violence (remembered, imag­
ined, foreseen) is what those paintings are all about. Of course, not
directly-in fact, quite the opposite: the literary critic Harry Berger,in his
essays on Vermeer, frequently invokes the notion of the «conspicuous
exclusion" of themes that are saturatingly present but only as felt absence­
themes that are being held at bay, but conspicuously so. Ifs almost as if
Vermeer can be seen, amid the horrors of his age, to have.been asserting or
inventing the very idea of peace. But Hobbes's state of nature, or state of
war ·(Hobbes: 1588-1679; Vermeer: 1632~75), is everywhere adumbrated
around the edges of Vermeer:'sachievement. !hat's what _theroaring lions
carved into the chair posts are all about-· those and also the maps on the
wall. The maps generally portray the Netherlands, but the whole point is
that during Vermeer's lifetime the political and geographic dispensation of
the Netherlands, the distribution of its Protestants and Catholics, the grim
legacy of its only just recently departed Spanish overlords, and the still
current threats posed by its English and French neighbors-all these mat­
ters were still actively,and sometimes bloodily, being contested. When sol­
diers visit young girls in Vermeer's paintings, where does one think they
have been off soldiering-and why, one wonders, does the country need
all those civic guards? When pregnant young women are standing still,
bathed in the window light, intently reading those letters, where is one
invited to imagine the letters are coming from?
Or consider the magisterial View of Delft-as I now did, having arrived
at the Mauritshuis and taken a seat before the magnificent canvas up on
the second floor. It is an image of unalloyed civic peace and quiet. But it is
also the image of a town only just emerging from a downpour, the earth in
the foreground still saturated with moisture, the walls of the town bejew­
eled wi~ wet, the dark clouds breaking up at last, and the sunlight break­
ing through, though not just anywhere: a shaft of fresh, clean light gets
lavished on one spire in particular, that of the radiantly blond Nieuwe
Kerk, in whose interior, as any contemporary of Vermeer's would doubt­
less have known, stands the mausoleum of William the Silent, one of the
 VERMEER IN BOSNIA 17

heroes of th~ wars of Dutch independence, assassinated in Delft at the end

of the previous century by a French Catholic fanatic.
I found myself being reminded of a moment in my own life, over
twenty-five years ago. I was in co~ege and Nixon had just invaded Cambo­
dia and we were, of course, all up in arms; the college had conve:q.edas a
committee of the whole in the dining commons-- the students, the profes­
sors, the administrators-what were we going to d9? How were we going
to respond? Our distinguished American history professor got up and
declared this moment the crisis of American history. Not to be outdone,
our eminent new-age clas~icistgot up and declared it the crisis of universal
history. And we all no4ded our fervent concurrence. But then our visiting
religious historian from England-a tall, lanky lay-Catholic theologian,
as it happened, with something of the physical bearing of Abraham
Lincoln-got up and suggested mildly, "We really ought to have a little
modesty in our crises. I suspect;' ·he went on, "that the people during the
Black Plague must have thought they were in for a bit of a scrape."
Having momentarily lanced our fervor, he went on to allegorize,
deploying the stor}l--OfJesus on the Waters (from Matth~w 8:23-27).
"Jesus," he reminded us, "needed to get across the Sea of Galilee with his
disciples, so they all boarded a small boat, whereupon Jesus quickly fell
into a nap. Presently a storm kicked up, and the disciples, increasingly
edgy, finally woke Jesus up. He told them not to worry, everything would
be all right, wherellpon he fell back into his nap. The storm meanwhile
grew more and more intense, winds slashing the ever-higher waves. The
increa~ingly anxious disciples woke Jesus once again, who once again told
them not to worry and again fell back ~sleep.And still the storm worsened,
now tossing the little boat violently all to and fro. The disciples,.beside
themselves with terror, awoke Jesus one more time, who now said, 'Oh ye
of little faith'-that's where that phrase comes from-and then proceeded
to pronounce, 'Peace!' Whereupon the storm instantaneously subsided
and calm returned to the water:' Our historian waited a few moments as
we endeavored to worry out the glancing relevance of this story. "It seems
to me;' he finally concluded, "that what that story is trying to tell us is sim-
18 { A BALKAN TRIPTYCH}

ply that in t~mes of storm, we mustn't allow the storm to enter ourselves;
rather we have to find peace inside ourselves and then.breathe it out."
And it now seemed to me, sitting among the Vermeers that afternoon at
the Mauritshuis, that that was precisely 'Yhat the Master of Delft had been ·
about in his life's work: at a tremendously turbulent juncture in the history
of his continent, he had been finding-and, yes, inventing-a zon~.;filled
with peace, a small room, an intimate vision ... and then breathing it out.

It's one of the· great-things about great wo'rks of art that they can bear­
and, indeed, that they invite-a superplenitude of possihle re~dings, some
of them contradictory. One of the most idiosyncratic. responses to Ver­
meer I have ever encountered was that of the Afrikaner poet and painter
Breyten Breytenbach during a walk we took one morning through the gal­
leries of New York's Metropolitan Museum. Breytenbach, who was a clan­
destine· antiapartheid activist, had only recently emerged fr~m seven years
of incarceration in the monochrome dungeons of the apartheid ngime,
and most of his comments that morning had to do with the lusciousness
of all the colors in the paintings we were passing. For the most part,
though, we were silent, moving at a fairly even pace from room to room­
that is, until we came to Vermeer's painting of the young girl in the deep­
blue skirt standing by a window, her hand poised on a silver pitcher, the
window light spreading evenly across a ru.~pon the wall behind her. Here
Breytenbach stopped cold for many moments, utterly absorbed. "Huh;' he
said finally, pointing to the gallery's caption giving the date of the painti1:1g:
circa 1664-65. "It's hard to believe how from all that serenity emerge the
Boere.Look:' He jabbed a finger at the little boats delicately daubed on the
painted map's painted coastline. ccThat'sthem leaving right now!" (And,
indee~, Cipe Town had been founded by the Dutch East India c;~mpany
only a decade earlier, and would soon start filling up with some Qf the
Huguenots who had flooded into Holland following a fresh upsurge of
repression back in France.)
 VERMEER IN BOSNIA 19

Edward Snow, for his part, makes quite a convincing case that Vermeer's
art is above all about sexuality and as such provides one of the most pro­
found explorations of the wellsprings of the, erotic in the entire Western
tradition. It is about female reserve and autonomy and self-sufficiency in
the face of the male gaze, Snow suggests, or even in the seeming absence of
such a gaze.
In this context, the pie€e de resistance in his argument is a brilliantly
sustained twenty-page dose reading of Vermeer's magnificent (though
uncannily diminutive) Head of a YoungGirl-sometimes referred to, alter­
natively, as The Girl in a Turbanor The Girl with a Pearl(at the Maurits­
huis, it happens to face The View of Delft, just across the room). Snow's
approach to this overexposed and by now almost depleted image is to ask,
Has the ~irl just turned toward us or is she just about to turn away? Looked
at with this question in mind, it does seem that such immanence, one way
or the other, is of its essence. As Snow points out, if we momentarily blot
out the face itself, everything else conspires to make us expect a simple
profile of a head-so that afterward, as we allow ourselves to look again on
the face unobstructed, the girl does seem to have only just now turned to
face us. But if we look for a moment at the pendant of cloth cascading
down fro_mthe knot at the top of her turban, it seems at first as if that pen­
dant ought to fall behind her far shoulder; in fact it falls far forward, pro­
voking a visual torsion precisely opposite to that of the one we'd surmised
earlier: no, on second thought, she seems to be pulling away.rhe answer is
that she's a~tually doing both. This is a woman who has just turned toward
us and is alrea9-yabout to look away: and the melancholy of the mqp;ien,t,
with its impending sense ot'loss, is transferred from her eyes to' the tearlike
pearl dangling from her ear. It's an entire movie in a singlefrozen .irrzage.
(One is in tum reminded of the obverse instance bf Chris Marker's ravish­
ing short film from 1962, La Jetee,a Vermeer-saturated romance made up
entirely of still shots unfurling evenly,hypnotically, one after the next, with
the sole exception of a single moving-picture sequence: the woman asleep
in bed, her eyes closed, her eyes opening to gaze up at us,.and then closing
20 { A BALKAN TRIPTYCH}

011-ceag~. A sequence that passes so quickly-in the blink, we say, of an

eye-that it's only moments later that we even register its having been a
moving:..picture sequence at all.)
The girl's lips are parted in a sudden intake ofbrea.'th-much, we·sud­
denly notice, as are our own_as we gaze back_upon her. And in fact an
astonishing transmutation has occurred. In the moment of painting, it
was Vermeer who'd been looking at.the girl and registering.the imminent
turning-away of her attention (the speculation among some critics that
Vermeer's model for this image may have been his daughter renders the
conceit all the more poignant}; subsequently, it was, of course, the painted
image that would stay froze1_1 in time, eternally attentive, while it was he as
artist who'd even,tually
. be the one. turning away;.and, still later, it would
be Vermee~ himself who,·through the girl's gaze, would remain faithfulJ
whereas it would be we viewers, casually wandering thn~ugh the museum
and tarrying
. .
before. the image for a few,.breath-inheld moments, who
would be the ones eventually turning away. The.Head of a Young Girlthus
becomes a picture about presence and eternity, or, at any rate, posterity. .
But this is only because it is first and foremost a painting about in­
tersubj ectivity: about the autonomy, the independent .agency, dignity,
and self-sufficiency of the Other, in whose eyes we in turn are likewise
autonomous, self-s~cient, suffuse with in~vidual dignity and potential
~gency.And ·here is where we come full circle: because if Vermeer's work
can be said to be one extended invention-or assertion-of
.
a certain
. .
con-
cept of peace-:filledness,this is precisely how he's doing it, by imagining
or a~serting the possibility of such an autonomous, inhabited sense· of
selfhood.
The seal~ of Vermeer's achievement becomes even clearer if, like me,
you have a chance to walk among some of the genre pieces by Vermeer's
Dutch contemporaries, also scattered about the Mauritshuis (it was get­
ting late now and I wanted to make it back for the final session of the pre­
liminary Tadic hearing, but I did tarry for a few minutes longer in some ~f
the museum's adjoining rooms).
 VERMEER IN BOSNIA 21

For many years, Vermeer's works were themselves seen primarily as

instances of these sorts of mora)izing genre images. The Metropolitan's
Girl Asleep was thus cast as yet another castigating allegory of feminine
sloth and drunkenness, while Berlin?sWoman Putting on Pearlswas folded
into the tradition of vanity motifs. The Frick's Officerand Laughing Giri
was assign_edto the tradition of vaguely unsavory prostitution images (as,
naturally, was Dresden's Procuress,from earlier in Vermeer's career); con­
versely, the Louvre's Lacemakerwas se,enin the context of more positively
tinged.tillustrations of ~dustriousness, and the Rijksmuseum's Milkmaid
was c~s_tas yet another prototypically Dutch celebration of the domestic
virtues. All of which misse_st4e es_sepJiaj __
point, because in each of these
instances and in virtually every other one of :qispaintings, Vermeer deploys
·the conventional ic_ono~raphyprecisely so as to upend it. No, his paintings
all but cry out, this person is not to be seen as merely a type, a trope, an
.- . . .
allegory. If she_i~ standin& in for anything, she is standing in for the condi-
tion of being a unique
.
individual
..
human being, worthy of our own unique·
. .
. .

individual response. (Which is more than can be said, generally, for the
men in Vermeer's paintings, who do seem, hovering there beside the
women, to stand in for the condition of being somewhat oafishly de trop.)_

Or so, anyway, I found myself thinking in the taxi as I returned to the

Tribunal-of that and of the way in which the entire Yugoslavian debacle
has ~een ta1<0g place ip. a _conte~ wherein tlie. Other, even· one's own
neighbor, is suddenly being experienced no longer as a subject like oneself
but as an instance, a type, a vile e:xp.letive:a Serb, a Croat, a Turk, and, as
such, preordained for an ages-old, inevi~able fate. (Note that such a con­
struction has to be as assiduously "invented" as its obverse: people who've
been living.in relative peace for decades have to be goaded into· seeing one
another, once again, in this manner.) No wonder that Cassese flees to Ver­
ID:eerfor surcease.
A Dutch journalist named Alfred van Cleef recently published a re-
22 { A BALKAN TRIPTYCH}

markable book, De Verloren Wereld van de Familie Berberovic (The Lost

World of the Berberovic Family), in which he traces the downward spiral of
the last five years in Yugoslavia through the shattered prism of one Bos­
nian family's experience. Early in his narrative, he recounts how th~ war
came to the Berberovic family's village, how for many months its members
had been picking up the increasingly strident harangues welling out from
the Belgrade and Zagreb television stations but hadn't worried because
theirs was a peaceful village, where Serbs and Croats and Muslims lived
equably together, with a high degree of intermarriage, and so forth. Then
the war was just two valleys over, but still they didn't worry, and then it was
in the very next valley, but, even so, no one could imagine its actually
intruding into their quiet lives. Bl:!.tone day a car suddenly careered into
the village's central square,-four young men in militia uniforms leaping
out, purposefully crossing the square, seeming to single out a particular
house and cornering its occupant, whereupon the leader of the militiamen
calnv.y·leveleda.gun at the young man and blew him away.The militiamen
.hti.stled back to their car and sped off. As van Cleef subsequently recoun~ed
the incident for me, "1:hey~eftbehind them a_village almost evenly divided .
.Those under fifty years of age had been horrified by the seeming random­
ness of the act, while those ?Ver fifty realiz~d, with perhaps even greater
horror, that the young man who'd just been killed was the son of a maJ!...
who, back during the partisan_ struggles of the Second World War, hap­
pened to have killed the uncle of the kid who'd just done the killing. And
the older villagers immediately realized, with absolute clarity; that if this
was now possible everything was going to be possible:'
David Rieff tells a story about visiting a recent battlefield at one point
during the war in the company of a small band of fellow journalists: Mus­
lim corpses strewn across the muddy meadow, a Serb soldier grimly stand­
ing guard." 'So; we asked the soldier, this young kid;' Rieff recalls," 'What
happened here?' At which point the soldier took a drag on his cigarette and
began, 'Well, in 1385 .. : "
Yugoslavia today has been turned back into one of.those places where
people not only seem incapable of forgetting the past but barely seem
. '
 VERMEER IN BOSNIA 23

capable of thinking about anything else: the Serbs and Croats and·Muslims
now appear to be so deeply mired in a poisonous legacy of grievances,
extending back fifty years, two hundred years-indeed, all the way back to
the fourteenth century-that it's almost as if the living had been trans:­
formed into pale, wraithlike shades haunting the g~osts _ofthe long-dead·
- rather than the other way around.
Which is to say that we're back in the moral universe of epic poetry: the
Iliad, Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, the Mahabharata, and, of course,
Finnegans Wake-a modernist recasting of the entire epic tradition, com­
posed during the thirties by James Joyce,who once characterized history as
"two bloody Irishmen in a bloody fight over bloody nothing:'. Not so much
·•·
.over bloody nothing, perhaps, as vengeance for vengeance for vengeance
for who-any-longer-knows-what? That's the heart of the epic tradition:
.,those twinned themes o~the relentless maw of vengeance and the ludicrou_s
incommensurability of its first causes recur time and again, from one cul­
ture to the next. It's worth remembering how, also during the thirties, when
the great Harvard classicist Milman Parry was trying to crack the Homeric
code-to determine just how the ancient Greek bards were able to impro­
vise su~h incredibly long poems, and wl,\at mnemonic devices they had
- '

devised to assist them-he scoured the world for places where such o.ral
epic traditions were still alive, and the place he finally settled on as perfect
for his purposes was Yugoslavia (see his disciple Albert Lord's seminal
account in The Singer of Tales).
Vermeer was not a painter in the epic tradition: on the contrary, his
life's work can be seen, within its historical moment, as a heroic, extended
a~~mpt. t9_st_eerhis (and his viewers') way clear of such a depersonalizing
approach to experiencing one's fellow human beings. It was a project, I
now realized, as I took my seat in the visitors' gallery facing the Tribunal's
glassed-in hearing room, not all that dissimilar from that of the Tribunal
itself
The .day before, I'd spoken with Richard Goldstone, the eminent South
African jurist who has been serving as the Yugoslav Tribunal's lead prose­
cutor. (He is serving the same role on the Tribunal that has been estab-
24 { A BALKAN TRIPTYCH}

lished to prosecute the war criminals in Rwanda.)' rd asked him how he

envisioned th~ mis_sionof the Tribunal, and he'd described it as nothing
less than a breaking of the historic cycle .of vengeance-ip.spired ethnic
~ayhem. He does not believe in the in~yjt4hility,of su.ch.vioknce. «For the
great majority of their histories, the Croats and Serbs and Muslims, and
the Tutsis and Hutus, have lived in relative peace with one another-and
they were all doing that relatively nicely once again until just recently;' he
told me. «such interethnic violence usually gets stoked by specifi~individ­
uals intent on immediate politica_lor material advantage, who then call
forth the legacies of earlier and previously unaddressed grievances. But the
guilt f?_~the viole~c;::e
that results does _n,otp.dhereto the entire group. Spe­
cific individuals
'
bear the major share of the respons_ibil~ty,and it is they,
.

not the group as a whole, who need to be held to _account,through a fair

and meticulously detailed pre~entation and evaluation of evidence, pre­
cisely so t~a~ the next time around no one will be ~ble to claim that all
Serbs didthis, or all_Croats or all Hutus-so that people are _abl~to see
how it"is specific individuals in thej.rcorrµ11g.nitieswho are contin,µally
endeavoring to manipulate them in that faspi9n. I really believe that th.isis
the only way the cycle can be broken."
The preliminary hearings now resumed. Tadic was seated in a sort of
aquarium of bulletproof glass, a panoply of high-tech gadgetry arrayed ;ill
around him and around the various lawyers and judges: instantaneous­
translation devices, video cameras and monitors, co~puterized evidence
screens, and so forth.
JnvepJing peace: I found myself thinking of Vermeer with his camera
obscura-an empty box fronted by a lens through which the chaos of the
world might be drawn in and tamed back to a kind of sublime order. 4D-d
I found myself thinking of these people here with their legal chamber, the
imprbbab~y cal~ site for a similar effort at transmutation.
I looked up at the TV monitor: the automated camera was evidently
scanning the room. It caught the prosecutors in their flowing robes shuf­
fling papers, the judges, the defense table, and now Tadic himself. The
camera lingered on him-a handsome young man, improbably dapper in
 VERMEER IN BOSNIA 25

a navy-blue jacket and a gleaming white open-collared dress shirt-and

then zeroed in for a closer shot of his face.
There he was, not some symbol or.trope or a stand-in for anybody other
than himself: a quite specific individual, in all his sublime self-sufficiency;
a man of whom, as it happened, terrible, terrible allegations had been
made, and who was now going to have to face those allegations, stripped of
any rationales except his own autonomous free agency.
For a startling split second, he looked up at the camera. And then he
looked away.
26 { A BALKAN TRIPTYCH}

POSTSCRIPT

The Tadic trial dragged on for many more months, evidence for the
depravity of the defendant's allege_dcrimes vying against equally com­
pelling evidence of the relative insignificance of his role in the wider con­
flict: he had, after all, merely been a guard at ·the camp in question, and
some felt that he was being singled out at that early stage of the Tribunai's
proceedings primarily because he'd had the bad luck to get caught while
much more significant malefactors had so far eluded arrest, and the Tri-,
bunal had to be seen to be doing something:In the end, he was found guilty
on eleven counts, not guilty on nine others (for which there was found to
be insufficient evidence of his specific involvement) and sentenced to
twenty years in prison (a sentence which, after both sides appealed the ver­
dict, was presently lengthened to twenty-five years).
With the passing years, the Tribunal did begin :1etting more-and more
significant-suspects. By the end of 2003, ninety-two individuals had been
brought before it, with forty-two already tried, their cases disposed. Sev­
eral of these were ccbigfish" indeed-Biljana Plavsic, one of the highest
civilian authorities among the Bosnian Serbs, for example, pled guilty in
advance of her trial-though two of the most significant, the Bosnian Serb
civilian and military commanders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic,
had thus far managed to elude arrest.