The Unquiet Dead (39 page)

“We tried to find the truth. We followed every possible lead to prove that Drayton was Krstić.”

“His gun, his tattoo—they were not enough? The tattoo I pointed you to. The JNA-issued military pistol. Not enough?”

“Then you were there that night,” she breathed.

“Of course I was. It was my plan from the first. Did you think I would let my children face it alone? My poor Haki? My lonely lost Yasminka? Our beloved Damir, whose quest for justice has been blocked again and again? It is only because of Damir that Haki and Avdo made it to Canada. Why? Because when Avdi made it to Tuzla, he gave Damir his brother's tennis shoes. Mesha's body falling over Avdi was what saved him from the artillery fire. And Avdi—so young, so brave—made himself look at the body that saved him, made himself remember so he could tell one person what had happened to someone he loved. Damir will carry this debt all his life. And he saved Yasminka as well. Because of his efforts, she was able to bury her brothers and place their names upon the memorial. Did you think I would abandon these children to face the devil alone?”

“What happened that night?” Rachel asked him. “The others said they confronted Krstić and he fainted. They say they left him alive.”

“Did they also tell you that he rose from his chair, threatening us with his gun? And that when he fell back drunk, he said our people had died because they were weak—too weak to fight, too worthless to live. He boasted about his accomplishments in Srebrenica. He said he would pull the same trigger again. He fired at Yasminka but his gun was empty. We had checked it beforehand—that seemed to surprise him. We weren't foolish enough to trust in his rehabilitation.”

“Then where did you go that night? After the confrontation? Yasminka didn't say you were at the meeting for the museum with the others.”

“I wasn't.”

“Where were you, then?”

He sat down in a single motion, balancing the Qur'an on his lap.

“Was I here in my rooms, offering prayers of gratitude and perseverance to the Almighty Protector? Or did I walk along the Bluffs in the dark to see what the butcher would do? He didn't have the strength or the humanity to point the gun at his own head, as we had asked him. Perhaps he chose another way.”

Rachel bit back a gasp. “Are you saying he jumped? That Krstić committed suicide because you had tormented him for so long?”

“Would he do such a thing?” His smile was bleak. “Perhaps it was the ghosts of Srebrenica who haunted him. Perhaps they followed him wherever he went, the way they followed Avdo and Haki from the killing fields of Grbavici. Isn't that possible?”

Rachel's lips were stiff. “What did you really do, Imam Muharrem? Tell us the truth.”

He caressed the Qur'an in his hands. “I did not begin hostilities.”

“I'm asking if you finished them.”

“Although he was a man who deserved death, I think you will find that my people are not murderers.”

“And if you saw the men who murdered your family today? Marrying, having children? What would you do?”

“I would hunt each one of them down if I could.”

“Were you on the Bluffs that night? Did you follow Drayton?”

“I'm very tired,” he said. “This day has been a long time coming for my people. I would ask you to leave me to finish my prayers.”

“We can't just leave it like this. Surely as an imam, you have a duty to the truth.”

“No, my dear Sergeant. You had a duty to the truth and you failed it completely. I've fulfilled my responsibilities, one and all.”

“With Krstić's death?” Esa asked him.

Imam Muharrem replaced the Qur'an on the table. He took up his stance on his prayer rug.

“How formidable is your desire for simple answers, Inspector Esa. Was I there or not? Did I follow Dra
ž
en Krstić? Did I send him to his death?” He raised his hands from his sides to his ears, to fold them over his stomach, oblivious to their urgency. “Allah knows the answer. Shall we leave it with Him?”

“If you're guilty of this, Imam Muharrem—”

“Then you will have to prove it.”

*   *   *

They crowded together in the shelter of the mosque, its slender minaret backlit by the moon.

“Was that a confession?” Rachel asked. Her hands were trembling.

“I doubt we'll ever know.” Nate said it, and Esa didn't contradict him.

“Then what do we do, sir?”

She wanted Khattak to know. She wanted to believe he had the bedrock certainty of right and wrong, truth and falsehood, that she herself lacked. There wasn't a single person who would mourn Dra
ž
en Krstić's death, whether murder, suicide, or accident. And yet, and yet—didn't they have a duty to the truth?

Khattak placed one hand on Nate's shoulder. “We call Tom Paley at Justice. The rest is up to them.”

“Then come back to Winterglass.”

She knew the invitation meant more than it seemed on the surface: it was Esa and Nate clearing away the wreckage of the past, the dross of Laine Stoicheva. It was Nate's warm eyes approving her as a person, a woman without artifice. It was the chance to sit by his fire and make a phone call to her brother without fear, without hopelessness, after he had helped her determine whether a girl named Sable Norman was a student at the Mozarteum.

Yet at this moment, it was the light of the minaret that seemed to hold the truth in the balance.

They had come full circle. Murder, suicide, accident, coincidence. There was no certainty to be had.

But Khattak thought he knew. He thought he knew what Muharrem had done. The man who had hounded Dra
ž
en Krstić and brought him to his knees would not have let him walk away at the last.

There had been a tussle in the dark on the edge of Cathedral Bluffs.

Justice had found the butcher of Srebrenica.

And the shadow of the mosque was no consolation.

 

Author's Note

This novel is based upon events that occurred during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia, formerly a republic of the nation of Yugoslavia.

In 1991, Yugoslavia dissolved into its constituent republics, each of which was to wrestle with the question of independence. In 1990 and 1991, respectively, Slovenia and Croatia staged their referenda on independence from Yugoslavia. When Bosnia followed suit in 1992, it put forward a vision of the future that attested to its uniquely blended heritage. In Bosnia, Serbs, Croats, and Muslims spoke the same language, intermarried without controversy, and embraced each other's traditions in the fullness of history. In this vision of the future, the Bosnia that rose from the ashes of Yugoslavia was a nation of equal citizens, with rights guaranteed under a democratic constitution, in recognition of a centuries-old pluralism.

What came to pass instead was the vision of ultranationalists in the republics of Serbia and Croatia. In their formulation of Bosnia's future, a “Greater Serbia” or “Greater Croatia” could only be achieved by the annexation of a Bosnian territory rid of its non-Serb or non-Croat inhabitants. Thus followed a series of acts that began with the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, and culminated in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

For the first time since the Second World War, a genocide campaign of staggering ferocity and ruthlessness was unleashed against a civilian population in Europe, nearly in tandem with the international intervention that eventually became complicit in the suffering of Bosnia's people. In his influential work
Slaughterhouse,
journalist and author David Rieff calls the Bosnia of this period a “slaughterhouse” and describes the conflict within its boundaries as a slaughter, not a war. Through Bosnia's many well-documented agonies, the terms
ethnic cleansing
,
cultural destruction
, and
rape camps
would also become commonplace.

The term
ethnic cleansing
first entered the parlance as a description of Serbian tactics that “cleansed” the land of its Muslim inhabitants. The substitution of this term for the actual crime of genocide went some distance toward undermining the international legal obligation to prevent the genocide while it was still under way. (See
Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstic
IT-98-33 [2 August 2001].)

Cultural destruction
encompassed the deliberate campaign to eradicate mosques, Catholic churches, and countless other representations of religious and cultural identity—foremost among these, the architecture of Bosnia's Ottoman past. Finally, although an endemic part of the overall war strategy, it was for the widespread and systematic use of rape in the southeastern town of Fo
č
a that a historic legal precedent was set: rape was recognized as a crime against humanity under international law. (See
Prosecutor v. Dragoljub Kunarac and Radomir Kovac
, IT-96-23-PT [22 February 2001].)

For those who seek to learn how it was possible for the Bosnian enlightenment to be obliterated so swiftly and steadily, there are several key works I recommend. On the nature of the war crimes and cultural destruction that took place, see Roy Gutman's Pulitzer Prize–winning
A Witness to Genocide
and Michael Sells's
The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia.

Rabia Ali and Lawrence Lifschultz's essay “In Plain View,” in their edited book
Why Bosnia?,
remains a landmark in the study of the war, alongside
The Death of Yugoslavia
by Laura Silber and Allan Little. For perspective on the role the international community played, there is David Rieff's
Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West
, Brendan Simms's
Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia,
and Samantha Power's
A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide
. Human rights reports, war crimes testimony, and UN reports are listed extensively in the notes section.

A comment on names used in this book. Although not based on actual persons, the characters Avdo and Hakija Osmanović were named for two Bosnians who did not survive the war. In 1993, Bosnia's vice president, Dr. Hakija Turajlić, was shot and killed by a Serb fighter while traveling with a United Nations Protection Force convoy. Surrounded by Serb forces on a road ostensibly under UN control, the French commander on the scene opened the armored personnel carrier transporting Dr. Turajlić, resulting in his immediate assassination.

Colonel Avdo Palić of the Army of Bosnia-Herzegovina defended safe area Zepa against Serb siege for more than three years, volunteering himself for negotiations with Serb forces during the fall of Srebrenica, so that the people of Zepa might escape a similar fate. Ordered to investigate and fully account for Colonel Palić's disappearance, the Palić Commission found that Avdo Palić had been held in a military prison until he was disappeared by Serb forces on the night of 4 September 1995. Avdo Palić's remains were subsequently located, exhumed, and returned to his wife, Esma, bringing her fourteen-year search for her husband to an end. He was buried with honors in 2009.

Though not based on any single individual, Dra
ž
en Krstić was named for two figures who were instrumental in the carrying out of the Srebrenica massacre. Dra
ž
en Erdemović was a soldier in the 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Bosnian Serb Army. He participated in the executions of hundreds of unarmed Bosnian Muslim men from the Srebrenica enclave and was the first person to enter a guilty plea at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). General Radislav Krstić was the Deputy Commander of the Drina Corps. He took command of the Drina Corps on 13 July 1995, giving him direct command responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre and the forcible depopulation of the Srebrenica enclave. He was the first person to be convicted of genocide by the ICTY.

As to the tireless prosecutors and fearless investigators of the International Criminal Tribunal, who carry out such difficult yet necessary work: nothing has struck me more than the statement of the Chief War Crimes Investigator, Jean-René Ruez, when he said of Srebrenica, “It was a crime committed against every single one of us.”

In that spirit, I wish to thank Professor Cherif Bassiouni, President Emeritus of the International Human Rights Law Institute. Professor Bassiouni took time out of his very busy schedule to educate a twenty-three-year-old law student about war crimes in Bosnia, at a time when he was investigating those crimes as Chairman of the United Nations Commission of Experts. His compassion and dedication have stayed with me all these years.

I worked briefly with the Bosnian Canadian Relief Association during the war and had the privilege of meeting many members of Bosnian communities and their imams. I particularly wish to thank Imam Muharrem, who shared his story with such courage and humanity. I have also had the opportunity to learn from the work of many Bosnian witnesses, activists, and scholars over the years, foremost among them Hasan Nuhanovic, whose efforts in the cause of justice have served so many without ever faltering.

I hope what couldn't be articulated at that time has been articulated in this book.

A last word on the people of Bosnia—Serb, Croat, and Muslim—who defended the Bosnian enlightenment in the face of the fascist drive for ethnic and religious uniformity. Their courage, perseverance, and dignity in the face of appalling carnage remind us why Bosnia was a place worth saving.

 

Notes

Chapter 1.

I will never worship what you worship. Nor will you worship what I worship. To you, your religion—to me, mine.

Sura Al Kafirun, “The Unbelievers.” Qur'an 109: 4–6.

They are going to burn us all.

Paraphrased from the statement of Emil
Č
akalić, relating what he heard a soldier say to him and other prisoners at the Vukovar military barracks in 1991, after he narrowly escaped execution at Ov
č
ara. He testified on 5 February 1998 in the case against Slavko Dokmanović; on 13 and 14 March 2006 in the case against the Yugoslav People's Army officers Veselin
Å 
ljivan
č
anin, Mile Mrk
Å¡
ić, and Miroslav Radić; and on 16 July 2003 in the case against Slobodan Milo
Å¡
ević.
Prosecutor v.Slavko Dokmanovi
ć
, IT-95-13a-T [5 February 1998], Witness Name: Emil
Č
akalić, page 908.