Will Radovan Karadzic's poetry be admitted as evidence?

More than a dozen years after his indictment on charges of conspiracy to commit genocide--nearly eight of which were spent disguised as Dr. Dragan David Dabic, a pony-tailed, white-bearded alternative medicine practitioner in Belgrade--a clean shaven former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appeared before an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague last Thursday to be formally charged with ordering "ethnic cleansing" and other atrocities against civilians that are prosecutable under international law.

He has now been charged with numerous violations of the laws of war, the Geneva Conventions, and crimes against humanity, including personal and command responsibility for ordering the four year (1992-1996) Siege of Sarajevo--in which over 12,000 civilians were killed and 50,000 wounded--and the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre, in which approximately 7,500 persons--mostly Bosnian Muslim men and boys--were slaughtered after having been "relocated" to a supposed "safe area" under the protection of Dutch United Nations peacekeeping forces.

Before Karadzic was a demagogic, ultra-nationalist Serbian politician, he was a "self-romanticizing macho fantasist" poet whose extreme religious ultra nationalism and "poet-warrior" stance gave him some cachet in the literary world.  Prior to and immediately after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, he attended several international writers' conferences, where he was introduced as "an important anti-Bolshevist voice."

Many readers were skeptical.  "Karadzic is a poet of holocaust. He is a poet who places death in people’s irises, " the Turkish poet Akgun Akova wrote.

In 2005, New Hampshire based poet Jay Surdukowski--who is also a practicing attorney and scholar in the field of international law--published a legal brief entitled "Is Poetry a War Crime? Reckoning for Radovan Karadzic the Poet Warrior" (click on the link to download an abstract) in the Michigan Journal of International Law.  Now that Karadzic is in custody, much attention has been directed to the brief.

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying Surdukowski's reasoning, his basic argument is to read Karadzic's published poetry as a declaration of genocidal intent and suggest it has "at least evidentiary value in the mens rea [criminal intent] determination for genocide, the most significant crime Karadzic has been indicted for.."

He suggests that there is precedent in international law to admit Karadzic's poems as evidence, noting that "the violent nationalism of radio broadcasts, political journals, speeches, interviews, and manifestos have been fair game for the Office of the Prosecutor to make their cases in the last decade in both the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals. Why should poetry, perhaps the most powerful maker of myth and in the Yugoslavia context, a great mover of dangerous men and women, be any different in the eyes of international law?"

Surdukowski goes on to argue that International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) rules allow for the introduction of "character" evidence that proves a "consistent pattern of conduct relevant to serious violations of international law," and proceeds to chronicle Karadzic's "poet warrior activity" and outline the broad contours of his "poetic-military complex."

As neither an expert in Slavic poetries nor the finer points of international law, I'm not sure how to evaluate Surdukowski's "suggestions" to the ICTY prosecutor.  As he makes clear, Karadzic is on trial for his war crimes, not his crimes against poetry.  Perhaps the introduction of his bombastic, ultra-nationalist verse into the record would only serve to politicize the trial and distract from what might otherwise be an overwhelming body of testimony and physical evidence against him.  On the other hand, if transcriptions of Karadzic's poetry shed light on the pathology at root in the mindset of those who perpetrated these atrocities, then I'm for reading his entire oeuvre into the record syllable by syllable.

If there are any readers with a working knowledge of Karadzic's poetry (you can sample several of his poems in translation at Radovan Karadzic - selected poems) or the evidentiary rules of international law, I'd appreciate your weighing in on the subject.

--R.D. Pohl

Comments

[Dan]

Well, I'm not going to get into the politics of this too much since I have done a lot of reading about this criminal court and its machinations, and I've been less than impressed by how it does business. You can even read Carla del Ponte's new book which blasts much of the court structure which is highly politicized, lets some murderers go free in order to preserve the reputation of their affiliates.

On the subject of poetry and fiction, however, it's beyond silly to enter this stuff into the record. The court, for instance, dismissed as evidence a news report from an American journalist published in an American newspaper against Naser Oric, a man indicted for murders in the Bihac pocket. The journalist interviewed Oric and Oric proudly showed him videos of atrocities he had committed. This news article was not allowed into evidence because it was considered secondhand testimony. If this article has no value, then what is the value of one's poetry, particularly if we consider the act of narration a complex act of authorship from the start.

I recognize of course that the international community stripped all Serbian poetry from the schoolbooks in Bosnia after the war, and, as well, people in the region still read Curzio Malaparte's novel KAPUTT as a historical document of Balkan atrocities during WW2. Literature and crimes in the Balkans have a vexed relationship. But reading intent through narration is as skimpy as jailing George Bush for the words Colin Powell uttered at the UN. Who authored that bit? Who was the narrator?

Nothing would surprise me with this particular war crimes court, however, s if they include poetry as evidence, it's par for the course. Video of atrocities gets thrown out, but poetry counts. That's the logic.

Same thing happened with Thomas Bernhard. In his will, he stated specifically that his books could not be published in Austria. Of course, the lawyers then interpreted his will as a literary document (i.e. a silly one). In Karadzic's case, we have the reverse happening. In both cases, the same rule holds true: if it suits the purposes of the interpreter, a legal document can be considered literary, and vice versa.