“When I met Ishmael, he had a set of notebooks with collected news clippings from the war years. He called the collection his museum of forgotten facts. Flipping through his many notebooks, you would learn about an internment camp that men went to voluntarily because they thought they would be safer there than on the street filled with men in uniform. You’d come across the cellist who performed at funerals for free during the height of the siege, when every street corner had a sniper positioned to attack civilians. And you’d encounter the journalist, who now cleans toilets in Sarajevo, who kept one hundred notebooks with names of the dead, and of the men he saw killed during those twenty days of carnage. Then there was the woman who had been starved at the internment camp. She lived, but lost the sense of taste, except the taste of cold prison floors. Freedom, once stolen, crippled, and starved, never managed to recover.”
- Suchitra Vijayan.
Attorney with UN War Crimes Tribunal in Yugoslavia.
Author of Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India
Song for the Besieged
Why earth at all, why land and why sea?
Why breeze, why clouds, why mountains,
Why trees? Why, what is and what is to be?
When fingers fold, what does the fist hold?
When the river runs, what does remain?
When to dust, we decentralize,
Or burst into flames, will the speck
And soot ad up to more?
Will the air forgive? Will the earth ignore?
Will the final act rescue the play?
The audience stares but does not see
That which occupies centre stage.
Ensnared in a tessellation of mirrors
Are multiple eyes that now cannot tell
The spectator from the spectacle.
- Masud Taj
(12th to 14th quintets of Song for the Besieged, a mere prelude to Srebrenica 1998 and Gujarat 2002 ).
The Butcher of Bosnia
The International Criminal Tribunal
convicted Radovan Karadžić,
of genocide,
crimes against humanity
and violations of the laws
or customs of war
committed by Serb forces
during the armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He was sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment.
Karadžić significantly contributed
to the Overarching Joint Criminal Enterprises
Karadžić was at the forefront of
developing the ideology and policies
which led to the creation of
a largely ethnically homogeneous Bosnian Serb state
through the commission of crimes.
Karadžić participated in a
Joint Criminal Enterprises
to establish and carry out
a campaign of sniping and shelling
against the civilian population of Sarajevo,
aimed to spread terror
among the civilian citizen.
Sarajevo civilians were sniped
while fetching water,
walking in the city,
and when using public transport.
Children were sniped
while playing in front of their houses,
walking with their parents
or walking home from school.
Karadžić participated in a
Joint Criminal Enterprises
to eliminate
the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.
Ordered by Karadžić,
approximately 30,000 Bosnian Muslim
women, children,
and elderly men
were forcibly removed.
Karadžić had the intent
to permanently
and forcibly
remove
the Bosnian Muslim population
from Srebrenica.
Bosnian Serb Forces detained
the Bosnian Muslim men and boys.
Beginning on 13 July 1995
and over the following days,
the detained men
were taken to nearby sites
where they were executed.
Karadžić shared
with Ratko Mladić and others
the intent that every able-bodied
Bosnian Muslim male
from Srebrenica
be killed.
The Chamber concluded
that Karadžić is guilty of
genocide in Srebrenica
Karadžić was convicted
of
genocide,
of
persecution,
extermination,
murder,
deportation,
inhumane acts,
terror,
unlawful attacks on civilians
&
hostage-taking.
H Masud Taj
Found poem based on United Nations
International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals
“Tribunal convicts Radovan Karadžić
for crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina”
The Hague
24 March
2016
Author’s Note: The tribunal in Hague and courts in the Balkans have sentenced close to 50 Bosnian Serb wartime officials to more than 700 years in prison for the Srebrenica killings (britannica.com). The calligram “Sarajevo & Srebrenica” as well as the full poem with its calligram “Song for the Besieged” can be downloaded from Academia.
Architect-Poet-Calligrapher H. Masud Taj lives with his family in Ottawa, Canada and visits India usually during the monsoon. This author in The Beacon.
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