Scorpions Trial Verdict

By Jasmina Tesanovic

Today in the short session, the judge publicly read out my request to interview the Scorpions. The lawyer war volunteer, the defender of the Bad Guy Who Became Good and of the Scorpion who lost his leg in the front-line, used the opportunity to once again give a long speech on the justice having two sides and many points of views. He also declared himself very pleased that women in the court, meaning Women in

Black, want to hear the other side of the story.

Well, my opportunity here is to declare that Women in Black don't want to hear the "other side" of justice. It is me, the writer, it is she who demands that interview, as the "privileged" witness of terrible months, during which the juridical language of the war crimes has become her native tongue: the language of her own people, of crimes committed in her name. It is the writer who wants to portray and document truths beyond the abilities of fiction.

All these lines that I wrote all these months, they came from the mouths of real people. Nobody from the outer circle of war crimes could invent such language; to understand it takes a kind of anthropology. I am not proud of it, I was the medium of it; Women in Black, or the relatives of the dead, do not want to speak to the accused, or to hear them. I do feel embarrassed for wanting to stand so close to the fire... But my teacher and guide in these matters, Hannah Arendt, discovered the banality of evil during the Jerusalem trial to Eichmann. I still

wonder what is the local/Serbian equivalent for that valuable insight might be.

The trial does not end here. Whatever the verdict, in or out of be in prison, the Scorpions are and will remain heroes for many. If convicted, they will serve a sentence and someday be let out. Their loyal wives will still be coming to see them, spending the loot of warfare and marauding, then finally rejoicing in public as the prison doors clang open… Death freed Milosevic from a similar sentence, and Mladic hides like a phantom while his posters hang all over Serbia... They are the necromancers of our future not only our past... and we will have to deal with that reality.

April 10, 2007

The verdict today in the war crime tribunal in Belgrade to the Scorpions is much as I expected. It is in the spirit of the sentence in the Hague

international war crime tribunal that found the state of Serbia not guilty of genocide. The genocide is there, but no legal entity did it.

The Scorpions not guilty of genocide... not enough evidence for such a charge, there are no proofs... The bodies of the dead are there, the genocidal intent is obvious, but who gave the orders? Who was what and did why...? Not genocide, but a whirlwind in the storms of war... that is the sentence today. Not even the film is enough to prove the guilt... Only two Scorpions received the maximum penalty of twenty years, the bold Commander, and his more silent relative who has three children. This second man claimed to know nothing of nothing, but

finally lost his temper and said, I shot! of course I shot! Their words and attitudes counted for more with the court than any spectacle on film.

The whole world saw that film, that was the cause of the tribunal, so everyone knows at least that those five indicted Scorpions, in one way or other,committed the murder of six innocent civilians merely guilty of being Moslems. The Bad Guy who Became Good, who pleaded guilty, got seven years less. The so called Cunt who trembled like an epileptic rather than pulling the trigger, got a sentence of only five years. The veteran who lost his leg limps free to his loyal wife... she who publicly asked the court to let them procreate and make many more Serbs. When I phoned the lawyer of the one of Scorpions, he said as much: Wait madame for the sentence, it will all be over and clear. It is: if Serbia is free of guilt, the Scorpions are her guardians...

Says the mother of one of the killed boys: All these years we were hoping for justice. All these months we were coming to Belgrade hoping to get it: we did get the truth, but not the justice.

How can somebody who kicks a captive boy with his boots, pokes him with the gun, calls him a coward and denies him a last glass of water and then shoots him, ever escape the death penalty? Even the president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, declared after the sentence that such crimes deserved maximum punishment.

But who in Serbia will give that order: to hang the Scorpions? The same people who ruled Serbia during the nineties are still in power today. Milosevic is dead, Mladic is hidden, but most of their colleagues and collaborators, open and covert, walk the streets of Belgrade, blustering and threatening...

Today a host of foreign media people, television and others, a big group of relatives, Women in Black and the Scorpions' loud group of supporters, all came to hear the sentence. It was a messy, fussy atmosphere, with little relation to the dramatic but low-key stories of human misery that we witnessed for more than a year. The last day of court is a public world stage of indecency, while the day-to-day process was one long slog through the defeat of human condition.

We will appeal for more justice, said the relatives... Their voices are not trembling as during the testimonies, during the identifications of the bones of their children... They were calm and bearing-up. We, their Serbian friends, are feeling guilty.

The chief prosecutor and the president of our country are not satisfied with the sentence. The lawyers of the victims are angry. The defense lawyers of the Scorpions are triumphant. In prison or out of it, the Scorpions consider themselves moral victors; with the evidence so blatant and so crushingly against them, that strategy was the best they could hope for... And the scale of the prison, a cell or a state, does not make much difference.

With this sentence, all Serbians are once again the moral prisoners of their society's worst elements.

Jasmina's Blog http://blog.b92.net/blog/22