The Butcher’s Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World’s Most Successful Manhunt by Julian Borger (Other Press, 2016)
I bought my copy of this book at the used bookstore The Open Book in Thousand Oaks, California. It was one of those magical little moments when I stumbled upon a book I wasn’t even looking for, but had mentally flagged as something I’d like to read one day.
This book stood out as one of the more thrilling reads from my Yugoslavia reading list. The Butcher’s Trail focuses on a very specific and very fascinating slice of post-Yugoslavia Balkan history. Journalist and editor Julian Borger touches on war history, ethnic conflict, and the ICTY, but the meat of his book is specifically on the manhunt for war criminals and the many intelligence organizations around the world who worked to arrest them. Borger adds just the right amount of drama and intrigue to make this work feel Bond-like at times without ever diminishing both the true danger and tedium of these operations.
Borger covers the arrests of various war criminals, but the final three chapters focus solely on the arrests of Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, and Ratko Mladić, and how they each escaped impunity for many years. This book is worth the read for these three chapters alone.
A juicy intelligence tale:
I often think that spy movies are exaggerated and dramatized for storytelling purposes, and I’m sure only a fraction of intelligence work is thrilling enough for moviemaking. But this book is filled with stories that would make for incredible film adaptations. For example, this is one on the Polish special forces unit known as the Operational Mobile Response Group (GROM), whose earliest assignment was hunting for war criminals in the Balkans. Rather than retelling it myself, here is the story as told by Borger:
“The unit was conceived as a result of a peculiar incident in Iraq. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, six CIA agents were trapped behind Iraqi lines. Washington appealed to the Polish for help because they still had construction contractors in the country. The Poles dispatched a senior intelligence official to Iraq who found the six American agents and brought them to a Polish building site. They were provided with Polish passports and, to comply with a national stereotype, given hard liquor to drink with the idea they would blend in with other Polish workers as they traveled by bus across the Iraqi border with Turkey. The crossing attempt came close to foundering from a piece of bad luck — there was an Iraqi border guard on duty who happened to speak Polish. But the quick-thinking bus driver leaped out of his cabin to embrace him like an old friend and plant a Slavic triple kiss on the Iraqi’s cheeks. He offered to show the guard all the passengers’ passports but the Iraqi would have none of it, waving him along and saying, ‘No problem. You are friends, you can go.’
“In gratitude for the rescue operation, the George H.W. Bush administration asked Poland what it wanted from Washington in return. After some reflection, the Poles requested American money and know-how to establish an elite unit modeled on Delta Force and Britain’s Special Air Service (SAS).” (p. 28)
On entry to the European Union:
As a predominantly Catholic country, Croatia often looked westward toward Rome and Western Europe as both leaders and peers, while those in Eastern Orthodox Serbia faced east towards the Soviet bloc and Muslims in Bosnia turned towards Turkey. This was a foundational difference that divided those living in the former Yugoslavia. Franjo Tuđman saw himself as a “defender of Western values in a region menaced by the twin shadows of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam.” He made it known that he considered Croatia to be a Western country and wanted an independent Croatia to be a member of the European Union. ICTY Chief Prosecutors Louise Arbour (1996 – 1999) and Carla Del Ponte (1999 – 2007) took advantage of this hope and made it known that Croatia’s membership to the EU would be conditional upon its ability to arrest its own war criminals and to transfer them to The Hague. The same expectation was extended to a post-war Serbia. Arbour and Del Ponte built the legitimacy and authority of the ICTY by making EU membership — and its associated access to financial aid — contingent upon these Balkan nations being willing to surrender their own nationals. This was a powerful, multi-faceted move on their part.
On Radovan Karadžić’s strange second identity:
Radovan Karadžić was the wartime president of the Republika Sprska, the Bosnian Serb Republic. It was on his order that some of the greatest crimes of the war were committed, including the Siege of Sarajevo and the genocide at Srebrenica. But after the Dayton Agreement was signed in 1995, he evaded capture until 2008 and remained one of the ICTY’s most-wanted until he was found living freely in Belgrade under an entirely different identity. He disguised himself as Dragan David Dabić, a bushy-bearded, white-haired, bespectacled New Age mystic who prescribed alternative medicinal cures and spiritual guidance. But not only was he hiding in plain sight, he was also living a rather public life as a “minor celebrity” with a large following, a regular magazine column, and a partnership with an American vitamin company.
Once intelligence officials identified him after years of searching, Karadžić soon became aware that he had been found and was being watched. So he quietly left his apartment with a few belongings and boarded a bus headed for a Belgrade suburb. Officials acted quickly, stopping the bus and quietly collecting Karadžić from his seat. He was transferred to Scheveningen, but not until 2016 was he found guilty of genocide, war crimes, and crime against humanity and sentenced to 40 years imprisonment. His team appealed his conviction, but his appeal was rejected and his sentenced extended to life imprisonment.
My favorite lines:
“As would happen again and again in the course of the Balkan manhunt, a small operation by a few determined individuals succeeded where the grandiose plans of military juggernauts failed.” (p. 24)
“Tuđjman’s success as president, Stjepan ‘Stipe’ Mesić, had been a senior HDZ member and Tuđman’s tennis partner. But he had broken with his former master over the war in Bosnia and had even appeared as a confidential prosecution witness in the Blaškić case. ‘They thought to be a good Croatian, you also had to lie,’ Mesić said. He argued there was another, higher form of patriotism: to tell uncomfortable truths about one’s country. ‘What was most important to me was that guilt was individualized, not collective, and that we shouldn’t be constantly held collectively responsible.'” (p. 110)
“Most of the surviving victims and families of the dead are appalled at the cushy conditions at Scheveningen, but the imbalance between the horror visited on them and the redress offered by any system of justice is unbridgeable anyway. For such crimes there will never be any such thing as closure and it was ever thus. In 1946, after the forty-seven minutes it took to sentence the convicts at Nuremberg, the American journalist Martha Gellhorn observed: ‘Justice seemed very small suddenly. Of course it had to be, for there was no punishment great enough for such guilt.'” (p. 317-318)
basia 