Tihomir Levajac:
Here We Go on Trial Again

1. Story
2. Story
3. Story
4. Story
5. Story
6. Story
7. Story
8. Story
9. Story
10. Story
11. Story
12. Story
13. Story
14. Story
15. Story
16. Story
17. Story
18. Story
19. Story

Verdict

Since the third Story was repeatedly subjected to thorough cross-examination during the inquest, it knew just precisely what awaited it in the course of the trial and was calm when the actual trial began. It was entirely calm inside the cupola when the judges entered the courtroom although they were carrying a pile of documents in their hands. They were followed by the Prosecutor, who trod on the blood-coloured carpet with his head raised, in the manner of a puffed-up frog.

Finally, the Defence Counsel, too, showed up wearing a long lawyer’s gown, stocky and awkward, heavy and slow, looking ridiculous. Having retained the age-old manner of walking of his species, he reached his place treading heavily, placing his entire foot on the floor as he took each step forward.

As his trudging caused quite a stir in the crowded courtroom, the Chairman had to calm the audience down; then he allowed the Prosecutor to address the Court so that the audience could get acquainted with the bill of indictment.

The defendant, said the Prosecutor, had mentioned the Yugoslav People’s Army in one of the stories.

It did so without condemning that Army as an aggressor.

It did not condemn the Army, he said while one side of his face twitched uncontrollably, although that same Army had attacked a sovereign, independent, internationally recognised state.

And it did not condemn the Army for being in the service of the doctrine of Greater Serbia!

That, gentlemen, was premeditated crime, said the Prosecutor twisting his mouth to one side.

When the Prosecutor finished his address to the Court virtually qualifying the defendant as guilty, the Chairman of the Tribeurinal Board asked the defendant, just in passing, as it were, just so that the trial should get under way, whether it pleaded guilty.

No, answered the defendant in an uncommonly calm tone of voice.

How could that be, the Chairman asked, when the Prosecutor had been crystal clear on that point?

Of course, the defendant retorted. It was not difficult in the least for the Prosecutor to be crystal clear when he had deliberately misrepresented the facts of the case!

What was that again, the Chairman shouted.

Quite simply, he, the Prosecutor, spoke to the defendant in a self-assured tone of voice, convinced in the validity of its own reasoning, had distorted its story to such an extent that it was he, not it, who had committed a premeditated crime!

Such grave words made everybody rise to their feet. General commotion ensued, so that it was impossible to make out who was saying what to whom or why.

The Chairman barely managed to restore order, first in the courtroom and then the gallery, and when he was about to continue the questioning, the defendant protested.

It would answer no further questions. It wanted to defend itself by telling its story. If that should not suffice to defend it, then nothing else would. It, therefore, asked for permission to tell the incriminated story so that the whole world could see that the Prosecutor had distorted it.

Failing that, it would defend itself by remaining silent!

The Chairman thought that the defendant was trying to blackmail the Court and tried to engage it in conversation by means of a few inconsequential questions, but his attempt ended in failure.

The defendant resolutely remained silent, thus indicating repeatedly that it had said all it had to say and that it was up to the judges to decide.

After a lot of deliberation, the Tribeurinal Board had to decide to accept the defendant’s condition and allow it to address the Court: otherwise, the trial would have resembled a dialogue between a deaf and a blind man, which would have been below the level of dignity of an international court of justice such as the Vague Tribeurinal.

The defendant rose from its chair and bowed to reason, and then sat down on that same chair again, the way one sits down at home by the fireplace. When it turned its face to the fire and heard it crackling, the Story began its story.

Maja, it said, was a good-looking young girl, sitting impatiently beside an Irishman driving an armoured jeep. She was sitting by the Irish lieutenant, all eager, because she was going to Derventa to liberate four hundred people imprisoned at the local Yugoslav Army Hall. Maja was going there to free four hundred civilians imprisoned in the cellar of the Yugoslav Army Hall, four hundred citizens of Derventa imprisoned there by the Croats and Muslims.

All the preliminary preparations had been completed! Negotiations had been held with the Croatian Defence Council, the Green Berets, the Tuzla Corps, represented by colonel Jovanović, and the Serbian Crisis Committee in Kalendrovci, a village near Derventa.

All of them had promised that they would stop all military operations over a period of two hours; eight buses were to come from Doboj to take the prisoners wherever they wanted to go.

Together with Maja and the Irishman, there were also three members of the monitoring team.

Maja believed in this mission because she had yet to experience life as it really was, because she had yet to get to know the world, so she still smiled at everyone and approached everyone open-handed.

In any case, the one who was in charge of the mission, the Irish lieutenant, did not doubt that it would end successfully. The prisoners were not participants in the war, he kept repeating, so that they had to be released in accordance with the Geneva Convention on freedom of movement! And that Convention, or so the defendant thought, and whatever was written in it, whatever it offered and promised, appeared overblown in Bosnia, where the civil war was being fought.

Maja, however, did not think so. She was still at that age when she could come to love whoever she might meet. Although there was a war going on, everything reminded her of love, and she wanted to embrace all the people of this world and the whole world with all her heart.

Of course, the defendant was sorry that her heroine lived in the clouds. She had no inkling that those who accompanied her on this mission, whom she joined every day on some field mission or other, that those who presented themselves as peacemakers were working against the Serbs. She had no idea that they were gathering all sorts of information daily, at every step, and passing it on secretly to the Croats and Muslims!

The poor soul did not know what it meant when a stranger entered your home to impose order and dispense justice inside it.

When a stranger entered your home to teach you a lesson, then it was definitely time to kiss reason goodbye!

When a thing like that happened, you might as well give up!

Maja did not know any of that, she just went on field missions with the members of the observation team, translating from one language into another. Whatever got said by any of the three sides fighting in this war, Maja would translate. She translated from English, she was an English graduate, although she used to like history in grammar school, into Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, as well as the other way round. Even though she knew that the three besotted peoples spoke one and the same language, she translated into the so-called special languages, hoping to get the three sides in the conflict to bring this catastrophe to a close.

She would have gladly translated into Chinese, Gagauzi[1] or the language spoken by the Bantu Negroes, if only she had known that this language would reach their hot heads, the shell-shaped heads, the heads filled with dynamite and poison gas.

Although Maja used to like history in grammar school, she did not know how the four hundred Serbs had been imprisoned.

She did not know, but the defendant obviously did.

It would tell the judges all about it and they could check the facts if they wished to.

Even the sparrows by the Sava River knew when regular army units were transferred from Croatia to Posavina, the area around the Sava River. Even the sparrows knew that the army was sent there when the referendum on the secession of Bosnia and Herzegovina from Yugoslavia was held. Although the Croats and Muslims knew that the Serbs would not approve of any secessionist acts, they called the referendum contrary to the Serbs’ will. They openly invited their fellow-countrymen to take part in the referendum on March 1st and give their support to secession from the formerly common state, and they invited gastarbeiters from abroad to come and give their vote for an independent, sovereign Bosnia and Herzegovina!

For reasons that would become clear afterwards, thousands of vehicles from all over Europe made for Bosnia, all of them going via Slavonija and Slavonski Brod so that Croatian vehicles with soldiers and military equipment could infiltrate the long lines of vehicles in transit. In this way, forty thousand soldiers, as well as equipment, arms and ammunition entered Bosnia at the time.

The greatest number of Croatian soldiers went to Derventa because Croatian military strategists concluded that this town was the main strategic point in the Posavina region. The strategic axis Brod-Derventa-Doboj-Zenica-Sarajevo had to be maintained at all costs so that the Serbs of Krajina and those of Lika, Banija, Kordun and Knin should be cut off from their native land, from Serbia, and delivered, as it were, on a plate to the Croats and Bosniaks.

If Derventa were to fall, the Croat strategists maintained, the world’s youngest state would be turned into a paraplegic!

The sovereign, independent Bosnia and Herzegovina!

Naturally, as soon as the referendum was finished and its results made public, the war began, as expected. It began in Sijekovac, near Brod, where the Croats massacred the local Serbs, and soon afterwards flared in Derventa, so that by mid-April it had reached alarming proportions.

The Croatian Liberation Army, United People’s Guard, Lilies, Black Shirts, Green Berets and other paramilitary formations took the town overnight, with the exception of the Yugoslav People’s Army barracks, without anything in the way of resistance from the Yugoslav Army. Only when they tried to take over the barracks by the Ukrina River did the Army put up any resistance, that is, the few remaining Serbs in it, since the Croats and Muslims had long ago deserted it.

They did so without the knowledge of the Headquarters in Tuzla, lest they should be liquidated.

In retaliation, members of the Croatian Liberation Army and Lilies caught Serbs in Derventa like rabbits, detained and arrested them, and then sent them to the newly-established camp in Rabić, above the town; those who were among the prominent citizens of the town they imprisoned in the cellar of the Yugoslav Army Hall.

Around four hundred of them.

All of a sudden, the Prosecutor interrupted the defendant without having been granted permission by the Chairman. He pointed out that the Tribeurinal Board should bear in mind that, according to the report of the Human Rights Commissioner, Mr Maizewietski, the Croats and Bosniaks did not have any prison camps for Serbs in this town but only reception centres for refugees. It was the Serbs, not Croats and Bosniaks, who were in charge of death camps! The Croats maintained reception centres for the purpose of protecting the Serbs from being slaughtered by the Muslims out of revenge, and the Muslims did likewise. They, too, established reception centres to protect Serbs from being killed by the Croats out of revenge.

Only the Serbs maintained death camps for both!

That was the truth and not what the defendant was saying!

The Chairman, naturally, thanked the Prosecutor for having presented the Tribeurinal with the true facts of the case, and then allowed the defendant to address the Court again. The Story, once again, turned its face towards the fire and went on with its story as if nothing had happened.

The Serbian Crisis Committee, located in the nearby village of Kalendrovci, was doing its best to try to stop the suffering of the Serbian people. It was helped in this undertaking by the Banja Luka Corps, which illegally provided equipment and military drill instructors, hiding its activities from the local public and the European Union; the reason for this secrecy was that, in accordance with the decision of the High Command, the Banja Luka Corps was forbidden to engage in military operations in this area. The Derventa region was the responsibility of the Tuzla Corps, and this Army unit had maintained a neutral position ever since the outbreak of the war in Croatia.

While the Banja Luka Corps bled for over a year trying to protect the few Serbs left in Slavonija, Banija and Kordun from being exterminated by the United People’s Guard, the Tuzla Corps remained completely inactive.

Paramilitary and illegal military formations were openly waging a war against the Yugoslav Army, including the area that the Tuzla Corps was responsible for, but it would not budge. The very same Tuzla Corps that was constitutionally bound to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country, every square centimetre of it, but which, for some reason of its own, just wouldn’t budge!

For the sake of objectivity, however, the defendant had to point out that the Tuzla Corps did defend the barracks on the bank of the Ukrina in Derventa and the road connecting it with Prnjavor, the road that Maja was travelling along in the story; all the rest, the whole town and the nearby towns, Brod, Odžak, Modriča, Šamac, Brčko and Gradačac it had left to the paramilitary formations for the taking.

Through the streets of Derventa wandered Croatian Liberation Army members, whose equipment, arms and uniforms resembled those of US commandos in Vietnam, and Green Berets, who wore yellow lilies in their lapels.

The defendant, of course, knew all this whereas Maja did not!

She only thought of liberating the innocent and could hardly wait to reach her destination.

When they finally reached the Serbian Crisis Committee in Kalendrovci and were offered coffee and drinks to welcome them there, they immediately established radio contact with other field teams and parties to the conflict.

Was the agreement being observed?

Would all the participants in the conflict refrain from all military operations over a period of two hours, from twelve hundred to fourteen hundred hours, until the prisoners were released?

They all replied in the affirmative with the sole exception of the Yugoslav People’s Army! 

The handsome well-built Irishman thought there must be some misunderstanding there and ordered that the information be checked. He kept referring to his conversation with colonel Jovanović from Tuzla, his promise and the word of a soldier, and mentioned in passing the Geneva Convention and civilians who were not participants in the war.

The soldier who answered the call, the switchboard operator from the barracks, told them to wait a little; he called about ten minutes later and informed them that his superior had talked with the colonel in Tuzla. The colonel had given explicit orders that the military operations scheduled for that day were not to be interrupted at any cost!

The Yugoslav People’s Army could guarantee safety to no-one in Derventa that day!

And there would be no release of the prisoners from the Yugoslav Army Hall. Out of the question!

The young handsome well-built Irishman could not believe what he had just heard. That particular bit of information just couldn’t get through to him somehow.

For the first time he was confused and just kept mumbling to himself: Mein Gott, mein Gott!

Although he always tried to be impartial in every situation, contrary to the other members of the mission, who openly acted against the Serbs, he still believed that the Yugoslav People’s Army protected only the Serbs in this war, that it helped and defended only the Serbs. He thought that the Army was on the side of the Serbs, and now that very Army was acting contrary to his belief and personal conviction!

What was that supposed to mean?

For the first time the Yugoslav crisis appeared to be more complicated than he had originally thought. For the first time he was dumbfounded by the complexity of internal relations in Bosnia.

He could not believe that the colonel would not honour their agreement and asked Maja to check the information by radio yet again.

Unfortunately, the truth of the message was visible to the naked eye and audible to his ear. Shells kept flying from the barracks in the direction of the town, and from time to time loud explosions were heard.

The commander of the Serbian Crisis Committee, a strapping fellow, started cursing in an ugly sort of way and spitting all over the place, just like Serbs when they curse and spit.

The Army was acting that way, he shrieked angrily, because colonel Jovanović was the commanding officer! Because the commanding officer was married to a Croat and shared his bed and pillow with her!

The commander kept spitting, as if on colonel Jovanović, and cursing, calling the colonel all sorts of names.

He called him a traitor to the Serbs, a bastard and trash.

The Irishman asked Maja to translate for him what the commandant was saying so angrily.

When he had the ugly words translated and found out that the colonel was married to a Croat, he turned pensive.

He was merely pensive while Maja was utterly dejected.

She had been expecting so much of this day, and it had come to nothing!

It was as if someone had removed the cornerstone from beneath her forever and she was unable to stand upright any longer.

It was particularly difficult for her on the way back, while she sat in the front seat of a long armoured Mercedes in the shape of a jeep, next to the handsome well-built Irishman. She could not help thinking about the colonel.

Was it possible, she asked herself naively, that he was a traitor just because his wife was a Croat, or because he and his corps were surrounded by the Croats and Muslims?

And what sort of an army was it to have such a colonel for its commanding officer, she asked herself while the ancient landscape, the tearfully beautiful hills scattered all around, slid by.

Was the colonel the image of the Army that he served in such a treacherous way, she asked herself while the beautiful dream-like landscape slid by through the luminous air, the wondrous air.

Beautiful like Šumadija.

She kept thinking about the colonel as they passed Prnjavor and Lišnja, the road going uphill and downhill in turn. It wound alongside a river for a while, then passed some leafy groves, slid into a little valley only to go uphill all of a sudden, while in the distance, to the side of the road, a solitary white house stood on a hillside. The house shone whitely and a lone tree beneath it waved its gloves.

Thinking about the colonel filled her with disgust while her gaze slid over virgin forests full of wonder, hillsides looking like waterfalls of sunlight, meadows resembling green islands, plots of land sown with wheat being tickled by the May breeze, a small hill criss-crossed with paths and lanes.

One hill covered with grass, another with flowers, the next one with wheat.

She thought of things unimaginably ugly while a linden-tree with a giant top hurried to greet her in the blooming air, gathering the May light in an attempt to blossom by the side of the road, while right above it a group of motionless tiny white clouds perched atop a small hill.

Thus forming a sculpture of sorts.

She thought of the colonel as a bastard, inhuman, while travelling through the cascade of spring, through a landscape that was a sight for sore eyes, through nature spilling over hills and vales like a sea of life so that one could not tell where the beauty of perfection that was not human ended and where the skies began.

Everything was transparent, luminous and clear. Everything had turned green, leafy, blooming, everything had swelled and grown.

As if in some sort of ecstasy.

This nature through which she was travelling, where harmony and peace reigned, how much more serious, responsible and perfect it was than man! How superior to the people living there, mostly Serbs, was this nature, at the same time gentle and turbulent, gay and melancholy! How far above the people it belonged to was this nature, which had no history!

While watching it, the mere thought of what she had experienced that day alone was enough to make her give up some illusions, the way one parted with a dream dispersed into thin air. She had to suppress certain feelings, especially those having to do with man, mankind in general, as well as her beloved nation.

Was not colonel Jovanović a traitor?

And he was not the first or the last Serb to have been one!

How many Brankovićs[2] had there been in the past?

Although Maja used to like history in grammar school, it was only now that some history lessons became clear to her. Only now, inside the armoured jeep, did she connect some loose ends and form a coherent whole. Only then did it become clear to her how and why people had converted to Islam and Catholicism. Only that day did she realise how many Serbs had changed their nationality and religion. Now she remembered the lessons on how the Serbian people, in order to survive, had had to migrate, that for centuries it had been forced to leave centuries-old homes, so that today it lived in a diaspora.

But although these migrations had destroyed the compactness of the Serbian national being so that, in the manner of some ignorant mob, it wandered through history as if through wilderness, they were nothing compared to the spiritual migrations, in which one forever lost one’s name, kin, language and orthodox faith!

If she thought this through logically, she had to conclude that in this crazy war Bosnian Serbs mainly fought ex-Serbs, Branković’s Serbs. Today, Bosnian Serbs fought their brothers, their torture-brothers and slaughter-brothers.

Today, Serbs fought their zodiacal doubles.

No doubt, treachery had been sown deep into Serbian soil, so that the Serbian people had, throughout its long blood history and turbulent blood tradition, fought against itself.

Thinking such thoughts about her own people, looking upon her own nation from the point of view of a traitor, she felt like spitting at herself!

What was the matter with her, was she in her right mind?

Did the way she felt have to do with her state of mind or the landscape she was passing through?

Eventually, she started turning her gaze away from nature, trying to defend herself from the overwhelming beauty which shone above the historical reality like some sort of revelation. She even thought that it was hypocritical of nature to offer so much beauty in view of the ugly things people did throughout the world.

This colonel, for example, wouldn’t let her enjoy this beauty because she couldn’t stop thinking about him, the monster and freak that he was.

How could she resist such thoughts when it was he who, in effect, would kill those four hundred people that the Croats and Muslims were going to kill!

Four hundred innocent men, women and children!

Why, the death of a single innocent human being was a disaster, let alone four hundred of them!

Maja kept thinking such thoughts and turning her gaze away from nature; she could hardly wait to get back home and phone the colonel, having talked to him several times already in the role of an intermediary, just to ask him why the Tuzla Corps had not stopped military operations over a period of two hours.

Just to ask him why he had not kept his word and why he let four hundred innocent people get killed!

Indeed, the moment she entered her flat, she dialled the number nervously, got through to Tuzla and was put through to the colonel.

Having introduced herself, she went on and asked what she had meant to ask.

The colonel, thank God, sensed bitterness in her voice, which hurt him.

A lot.

Who was she, he asked, to be putting such questions to him?

She was, she answered in a shaky voice, a human being.

And he was, the colonel was already shouting into the receiver, an officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army!

Because of the way he said what he said, Maja flew into such a rage that she could not stop even if she had wanted to.

He was, she shouted hysterically, shaking all over, no officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army but the YUGOSLAV PEOPLE’S GARBAGE without a shred of humanity, having let so many innocent people get killed! He was a HYPOCRITICAL BASTARD, a turd of a man, traitor to the Serbs, scoundrel and rogue, scum and louse, rat and pest, vermin and swine: she hurled frantically into the receiver words she wasn’t even aware she knew.

Her mother, who had been in the dining room, having realised that her daughter had gone mad, ran up to her and took the receiver forcibly from her hand.

Maja rushed into her room, threw herself onto the bed and started crying bitterly, burying her head in the pillow, feeling horribly alone.

The Story left its heroine crying at this point in order to inquire about the fate of the people imprisoned in the Yugoslav Army Hall in Derventa, but it was unable to find out anything.

When the army of the Serbian Republic liberated Derventa three months later, the defendant said, the soldiers came upon a female arm cut at the elbow, hung upon a wire where housewives used to hang their laundry to dry near a block of flats on Čardak.

The arm was fastened to the wire with a clothes peg.

It was bare, shrivelled and rigid, its fingers turned downwards.

And the index finger pointing.

When they started digging the ground under the finger seven days later, they found a mass grave, the likes of which they came across almost everywhere in Deventa.

That was the story that the defendant was charged with spreading and prosecuted for before the International Court of Justice.

The moment the defendant uttered its last word and fell silent for a second, the Prosecutor hastily addressed the Court trying to minimise the impact of the story.

The defendant, however, beat him to it.

If the Prosecutor still maintained that it had committed a premeditated crime by not condemning the Yugoslav People’s Army as an aggressor, and that same Army let four hundred innocent people get killed, then, due to such partiality, tantamount to premeditated crime, it, the defendant, would step out of the story and leave the Prosecutor and the Court to deal with the story as best they could.

It said this not in an attempt to blackmail them but because it really meant to do it.

Unfortunately, as the Prosecutor was very stubborn, no well-intentioned words of warning could bring him back to his senses.

Why didn’t the defendant, by means of another storyline, he asked while the other side of his face twitched uncontrollably, condemn the Yugoslav Army when that Army had acted as an aggressor attacking a sovereign and internationally recog...

The Prosecutor had not managed to formulate his intended question when the defendant, being incorporeal, vanished inexplicably, magically, from the story and the cabin: it was like a sleight of hand performed at a party. The Story disappeared, and the Court could only deal with its story.

As the International Court of Justice did not stand a chance against products of the human mind, the trial had to be adjourned.