Judith Armatta

            Mary Mallon, born in 1869, is best known as “Typhoid Mary.” She is iconic for allegedly  spreading typhoid to 51 people, three of whom died. Since there was no known cure, Mary was isolated for nearly three decades of her life. Today, we apply the term to people who infect (wittingly or unwittingly) us with information we otherwise might avoid hearing. That, at any rate, is the way in which I use the term here.

            When I was living in the Balkans, then in The Hague reporting on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, I wrote regular letters to a group of friends and colleagues about my experiences. They were mostly disturbing, focusing as they did on war crimes, genocide, torture, and crimes against humanity. I was grateful to those recipients of my missives who actually read them, though they could hardly have brightened their days. One brave friend, who may have read them all when he could have been watching basketball or hanging out at the local pub, endearingly described me as “The Typhoid Mary of the Internet.” It pretty much fit and we are still friends. So, when I decided to write a blog, an amended version of the title seemed apropos. Henceforth, this blog will be known as belonging to “The Typhoid Mary of the Blogosphere.” Those with courage enter here.

            My intent is to blog about the subjects that stir my conscience, yet leave me feeling helpless. Writing is how I know to influence people -- revealing what is hidden, witnessing what is distressing, offering suggestions for change, passing along the wisdom of others, and most of all, telling stories. Writing moves me from despair. In the best of circumstances, it means I am not alone with sadness and anger that heavies my soul. Julian Beck in The Life of the Theater wrote an exhortation that has guided me since I first read it over four decades ago:

“I see all the danger, the dissolution, I am not content, I recognize the emergency in every house and place….

It is not what we do not know but what we do not feel.

The Theatre of Emergency is the theatre of feeling.

For a feelingless society, feeling.

For a fractured people, unification.

Realization. The people as one, one.

A theatre not for people, but at one with people.

Mending the gap between human nature and the human mind. Stein. We know what class hatred and race hatred are, but we can’t get ourselves to really do anything beyond petty liberal gestures because we don’t really feel what we believe. To change the world.

The theatre of change. Of emergency. Of feeling.

When we feel, we will feel the emergency: when we feel the emergency, we will act: when we act, we will change the world.”

            Yet I do want to be a comedienne. I’d love to make people laugh. I want to laugh more myself. Another adage I try to live by is attributed to Emma Goldman: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.”

            I hope some of you will take this journey with me. It is not just a telling, but a hearing. I am still teachable (I think). I know that something new comes from respectful discussion among many. So, let’s see what we can create.

Good news, folks, though not unexpected! I mean, what would you do??? The Office of the Prosecutor at the ICTY (now MICT) has announced that they will appeal the Seselj judgment. To do otherwise would be shameful. Here’s the OTP announcement:

Stalin’s judges couldn’t have done a better job. On March 31, 2016, a trial chamber of the ICTY acquitted paramilitary leader Vojislav Seselj of all charges. In doing so, they ignored and thereby undermined the entire jurisprudence of the ICTY over the last two decades. They also ignored the facts long established in other cases. As Judge Flavia Lattanzi stated in her scathing dissent: “[T]he majority sets aside all the rules of international humanitarian law that existed before the creation of the Tribunal and all the applicable law established since the inception of the Tribunal in order to acquit Vojislav Šešelj.” And, as Jelena Subotic wrote for Balkan Insight: “The embarrassment is in the rewriting of the history of the Yugoslav breakup in a manner that is not only outside all major scholarly consensus, but also in direct contradiction with what the ICTY itself has concluded in its previous cases.”

The Vojvoda (duke), so annointed by his Serbian Chetnik movement, led the Serbian Radical Party and was a chief propagandists for ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims and Croats from territories in the former Yugoslavia in pursuit of a Greater Serbia. He formed his own paramilitary group early in the wars. Called Chetniks, the White Eagles, or Seseljevci (Seselj’s men) they were recruited from the dregs of society. Urged on by Seselj’s dehumanization of Croats (comparing them to “primates” and “vampires”) and Bosniaks (“balija” or “pogani” which he translated as excrement), they were implicated in a number of massacres, including at Ovcara following the siege of Vukovar, where hospital patients as well as prisoners of war were rounded up and executed.

Judges Antonetti and Niang concluded that the prosecution did not establish the existence of “a widespread and systematic attack against the non-Serb civilian population in large areas of Croatia and BiH [Bosnia and Herzegovina] . . . .” Instead, the judges held “that there was an armed conflict between enemy military forces with civilian components.” In other words, it was a legitimate war caused by the unlawful secession of Croatia and BiH. Under this interpretation, the displacement and deaths of thousands of civilians were collateral consequences, certainly not the main focus of forces seeking to establish a Greater Serbia. That Serb forces provided buses to take non-Serb civilians away from territories intended for Serbs alone was a humanitarian gesture to help them “voluntarily” leave combat zones. No matter that only non-Serbs were accommodated. It could not be considered ethnic cleansing, according to the two judges in the majority.

Astonishingly, the court felt comfortable in reaching this conclusion despite the fact that every other relevant decision since the ICTY’s inception, including the Karadzic judgment last week, recognized the existence of widespread and systematic attacks against non-Serb civilians in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Karadzic trial chamber, as others have before, found that planned attacks against this civilian population were part of a joint criminal enterprise that included Seselj. For judges Antonetti and Niang, it might just as well have been a poker party.

I weep for the (invisible to the court) victims of the Greater Serbian project who have found little justice from the first international criminal tribunal since WWII. I weep for the ICTY, established with such hope – to end the 20th Century Balkan wars and reconcile the peoples who once lived in a country admired for its multi-ethnicity. I weep for international justice. With this decision and the turn taken by the Appeals Chamber in 2009 away from superior and command responsibility, lady justice (whose statue adorns the grand staircase of the International Court of Justice in The Hague) lies bleeding from her wounds. Can the permanent International Criminal Court bind them up to keep hope alive? Is there any chance at all that an appeal of the Seselj judgment would be successful and not do further damage to the Tribunal, international justice, and, most of all, the victims and survivors of these terrible wars?

http://www.sense-agency.com/icty/judgment-miscarried.29.html?news_id=16997

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/how-seselj-s-verdict-got-history-terribly-wrong-04-01-2016

http://www.icty.org/x/cases/seselj/tjug/en/160331_judgement_summary.pdf

http://www.icty.org/en/press/information-on-the-partially-dissenting-opinion-of-judge-lattanzi-in-judgement-in-the-case-of