LONDON, 12 July 2005 — Two small feet in black slip-on shoes poke out under the folds of a long white skirt. It’s late, and Natasa Kandic is hunched on a low step, resting her chin on her knees and dragging on a cigarette. She was described recently in Serbia’s Parliament as a crazy drug-addict, a pathological liar “who should be chained to a radiator”. The likeness is not clear. In fact, she just looks exhausted.
Darkened eyes peer up over round spectacles as I exit the elevator and intrude on her resting spot in the corridor of her Belgrade office. “I’m so tired,” she says, her voice deep and scratchy. “Let me get my cigarettes and I’ll be right up.” She points up through the ceiling to the rooftop cafe, unaware of the steady drizzle outside. We go anyway.
Kandic has just been to the Serbian border with Croatia to pick up two witnesses — “two wonderful women” — who will testify the day after our interview against Serb ex-paramilitaries accused of executing more than 100 Croat prisoners of war at an isolated farm in 1991. For over 10 years, this diminutive sociologist-turned-lawyer has trawled the length and breadth of what was once Yugoslavia in search of the awful truth.
That Serbia’s president attended the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia owes much to Kandic. For Serbs, the truth is particularly discomforting. Put bluntly, Serb forces were responsible for most of the 250,000 civilian deaths in the 1990s from “ethnic cleansing” operations in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo designed to carve out one state encompassing all Serbs.
Like an annoying itch nationalists can’t quite reach, Kandic has been there at almost every step, listening and scribbling. “It is historically, morally and politically essential,” she says slowly, stringing out each word. “If you want to establish a certain system of values where the rule of law is paramount, the law must be applied to those who broke it. The truth must come out.”
It began in 1991, when her “small circle” of Belgrade 30- and 40- somethings began holding candlelight vigils outside the offices of Slobodan Milosevic, petitioning against Serb conscription and reading the names of the dead from the first throes of war. “Every evening we read out the names of those killed. That was the only place you could hear the names of Croats, and not just Serbs.”
As war spread, Kandic began to travel, documenting a side of the conflict unseen in Milosevic’s Serbia. “It seemed to me incredibly important to try to show what was happening. It wasn’t easy, but it was incredibly invaluable.” Now 59, Kandic is the classic Belgrade urbanite - a well-dressed, chain-smoking intellectual with short hair and low heels. She’s a hip older woman who since the early 1990s has run the Humanitarian Law Center, a group of 25 like-minded lawyers and investigators in Belgrade’s oddly-named “MacKenzie Street”, round the corner from the vegetable market in the bustling suburb of Vracar.
In Serbian courts, Kandic represents the families of Milosevic’s victims, and week after week appears on television to be harangued by studio audiences and shouted down by fellow guests who accuse her of “spreading anti-Serb hysteria”.
Srebrenica has become the byword for the brutality of the Yugoslav wars — a small town in Bosnia just over the border from Serbia where Serb forces rounded up and summarily executed 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the course of a few hot summer days in 1995.
The 10th anniversary fell yesterday and Kandic is at it again. After weeks of skulking around cafes and bars in the dead-end border town of Sid, she recently got her hands on a video she knew existed of Serb paramilitaries executing six Bosnian Muslim prisoners near Srebrenica 10 years earlier. The tape put Srebrenica back on the political agenda in Serbia. It was broadcast at Milosevic’s trial and television immediately followed; it was horrific and incontrovertible proof of Serbia’s role in the massacre, the worst since the World War II. Arrests followed, but the alleged masterminds — former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his wartime commander Ratko Mladic — remain on the run.
Nationalists in Serbia are waging a war in Parliament and in the press against Kandic and “those foreign-funded non-governmental organizations” dragging Serbia’s name through the mud. “These people are now helpless,” says Kandic. She coughs. “Once, they went at the weekend, by bus, with weapons. They killed, robbed, became rich, and now they can’t do that anymore. All they can do now is to get even through the institutions, because they are still everywhere. They have the power to hide documents. They have police to stop certain information coming out, to falsify documents. But there exists one thing they can’t control: there will always be people who will say what they know to be the truth.”
I ask her if she considers herself brave. “No.” Is she ever scared? “No. I’d know it was time to stop the first time I became scared.”
Her entire frame is seized by another coughing fit.
Does she think that being a woman makes any difference to her work? “Women started it all,” she says. “When the war started, men felt a greater fear of being called up. Women had more freedom. They became very critical, but always very politically articulate.”
She tells me about a trip to Bosnia at the height of the war in 1993 to pick up three Muslims who were refused access over the border to visit relatives in Serbia. “I called state security and told them to not even think about arresting us.” It didn’t work. She was hauled into the nearest police station when she reached the border. “I was in a long white skirt, which was quite unusual for that area at that time. The inspector came in, I think he was slightly drunk, and he stood there in shock. He looked at me, and didn’t know how to talk to me. He began screaming. He was so angry with himself. When I told them everything I knew about them, where I knew they’d been, they were amazed. How could someone who looks like this know so much! They apologized and said I was free to travel.
Kandic made frequent trips to Serbia’s southern province of Kosovo in 1998-99 as ethnic Albanians waged a guerrilla war on Serb forces, who retaliated brutally against the civilian population. Then in 2003 she succeeded in persuading four Albanian children, survivors of a massacre, to travel to Belgrade and testify against a former member of the aptly named “Scorpions” paramilitary group, accused of gunning down 19 of their relatives in a small town in the north of the province.
“When they spoke, it was amazing,” she says, her stare sharp and long. The denial and refusal to face the truth goes on, but Kandic insists she does not feel in a minority. “I’ve spoken with many policemen who are very professional. I get most of my information from senior policemen. When I see how helpless they feel, how much they thought it would be different, then I feel I’m not in a minority and I know that one day it will be different. What dominates now is the voice of those responsible for the very things I talk about. And they speak loudest right now.”
But does she ever have any doubts? “These are small steps, but I’m succeeding in disturbing the public, and that’s not insignificant.” She finds refuge in her faith in the facts. “I am totally at peace that it is all correct and fair, and that I should say what I say and do what I do.”
(It is the 10th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. Natasa Kandic, a Belgrade lawyer, has spent the past decade battling to bring the perpetrators of Serbian atrocities to justice.)
