The Freedom To Choose Humanity In The Face Of Evil
October 13th, 2006
Senada is close to sixty, maybe a few years older. The hell she has lived through has taken its toll. The deep sea of grief she navigates has put her off balance — not broken her indomitable spirit, but sent her off spinning through eddies of unfathomable memories. Glaucoma has rendered her nearly blind. In her case it is a stress disease. Even in her blindness, she must unremittingly see too much of the horror which has taken so greedily that which she most loved.
Her three sons—young men with, in different times and universes which now seem so impossibly sweet, jobs and lives and wives and children—were rounded up with her. The four of them were imprisoned in the same detention camp in their village —a notoriously brutal one. Brutality there was measured in degrees of dehumanization, cold-blooded acts of sadism, torture, murder. The day the three disappeared on a bus, with scores of other young men, is the moment that has become her psychic home in the hell realms. The picture of the bus pulling out with them aboard is the eternal moment in which her heart lives. It is when time stood still.
Even now, a decade after those events of 1994, it intrudes unbidden into her waking and sleeping moments; taking her, a tortured hostage, to relive it, relive it, relive it. A colleague of mine, who knows Senada, wonders if the shedding of so many tears is what has damaged her eyes. In this case, the salt water offers no healing, no soothing, no cleansing; only irritation, wearing away, stinging, rending vulnerable.
Her husband, with his weak heart, is too ill to travel to the trial with her. A niece accompanies her from Sarajevo to The Hague, from the site of the genocide to the place of reckoning and responsibility. The commandant of the camp is on trial for murder, torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide, in the deaths of 36 unarmed men and boys. The day she arrives in the Netherlands, just before she takes the stand, he pleads guilty to the charges. She is asked to testify in his sentencing hearing.
She faces the perpetrator in a somber courtroom of the Tribunal, among powder-wigged and robed judges and attorneys. I watch him from the public gallery. To me he is a maniac, a monster, the devil incarnate. But not to her. He is 38, the same age her youngest son would be, were he amongst the living. He lived on their street, was a playmate of her sons. She has a long acquaintance with him and his family. He is still that snot-nosed kid, not even a bully, but shy and insecure, with an innocence which is impossible for anyone, except her, to imagine now.
Breaking all precedents in this most upright judicial institution, when face to face with the accused, she jumps up from her chair and points her finger. “Mirko, tell me where my sons are! What happened to them?” Her mission is to find out. She wants, above all, to know this.
The likes of this interruption, this so human response, has not been seen in the many years the Tribunal has been hearing cases of war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia. The judges move quickly for adjournment, and return with a decision.
Mirko will be allowed to answer the question of a mother desperately searching for her children. “They were removed on a bus, as you saw. They and the others were transported to that small village near the camp, where they were made to disembark. I awaited them nearby, with my unit. We bound their hands, and marched them to the edge of an empty pit already prepared for receiving bodies. As they were shot, they fell, one by one, into the pit behind them. That is where their bodies can be found.” Senada hears these words, which she has been awaiting with dread all these years, and faints. Medical personnel are summoned, and the court proceedings are halted for the day.
Three weeks later I visit her, at her home in Bosnia, to deliver some medications. She is much the same as before. Her eyesight is a bit worse. Nothing will halt this deterioration as she slips toward total blindness. I speak of her courage in the courtroom. She shrugs. It is insignificant to the courageousness required of her every waking moment for all these years. I express my contempt about the sentence Mirko received in the plea bargain—8 years. There shouldn’t be plea bargains in cases of crimes against humanity.
“Well, you must understand, he’s not all bad. He helped people, too. I saw him stop some beatings, some killings.” She has lost everything; her health, her home, her country, her future. She is a bit off balance, but she hasn’t lost her humanity. Her deep sense of justice holds firm. I ask myself, would mine?
by Marcia Jacobs
Former Witness Support Officer
Sarajevo Office—International
War Crimes Tribunal – Hague
Psychotherapist
Vancouver, Canada
Thank you for your words. Thank you for your heart and courage to engage so directly in the depths of human complexity that you do. The experiences you illuminate through what Senada’s life has been made to endure, form a vivid and breathtaking portrait of the inexhaustible depth and breadth of our humanity. Senada shows us that if this is possible, anything is possible.
This is a story that penetrates deeply into the collective stewardship we share on this planet. Senada, having lost her loved ones, offers something of love to all she has left: her enemy’s future.
Thank you for this story gift Marcia, and for your stewardship on this planet.
I am so grateful to hear these words. They make me think of a very sweet woman I met in Eugene, Oregon, who’s two young children and husband were all killed in a plane crash. She said she could not think of them as being anywhere in an “afterlife” or she would kill herself just to be with them. You are so right, Senada is very very courageous. I am deeply touched. Thank YOU!
I only hope that should the day come that I am faced with such devastation,such inhumanity and brutality that I might find within myself the freedom to forgive and freedom from hatred. Thank you for sharing such an inspiring story of true humanity in the face of such inhumanity.