The Key to My Neighbor's House by Elizabeth Neuffer

Author:Elizabeth Neuffer [Neuffer, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2015-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

ON ONE LEVEL, the Srebrenica case was proceeding well: Dražen Erdemović, the mass executioner at Pilica, had confessed to the Yugoslav Tribunal, providing valuable evidence of how he and other members of his execution squad, including Marko Boškić, had gunned down prisoners. Erdemović, a twenty-five-year-old Bosnian Croat with curly hair and an angelic face, had been a mercenary. He began the war in the Bosnian Army but had drifted to the Serb side. When the war finished, he claimed, Serb members of his squad singled him out and harassed him because of his ethnicity.

He cried during some of his testimony. Because of his youth, his apparent remorse, his value to the Srebrenica investigation, and the fact that he committed the execution under duress, the young executioner received a ten-year sentence on November 29, 1996. In Bosnia, Srebrenica survivors including Hasan were outraged. Ten years for an estimated 1,200 lives? The news shook Hasan’s confidence in the Yugoslav Tribunal. Even Judge McDonald was surprised. She thought the sentence should have been longer.

At the same time the United Nations was being accused of complicity in Srebrenica’s capture and the ensuing massacres. The failure of the Dutch UN troops to protect Bosnian Muslim civilians in Srebrenica had become a major scandal in the Netherlands. A government inquiry was launched, but—much to Hasan’s, and other survivors’, distress—-it absolved the UN peacekeepers, blaming UN commanders instead. Even in France, questions were being raised about UN general Bernard Janvier, who had refused three separate calls for air strikes before finally approving the bombing that had come too late to help.

On another level, the Srebrenica investigation had hit a major snag. After the exhumations ended, several members of the team complained to tribunal investigators that shortcuts had been taken that could compromise the evidence. Among the complaints, other than Haglund’s management style, were that the graves had not been made secure. Animals had raided some of them, dragging off body parts. Other allegations centered on administrative sloppiness; some bodies and their parts had been wrongly labeled. Fearful that defense attorneys in the case might have been handed a powerful weapon, the tribunal and its lawyers launched an internal inquiry.

Haglund had no sooner returned to his home in Seattle for his first vacation in more than a year when he got the news he was suspended and his work was under review. He was furious, hurt, and outraged all at once. The tribunal had assembled a list of some twenty-seven complaints, from the picayune to the serious. But my God, he thought, the team had exhumed five mass graves in three months, as the Yugoslav Tribunal had asked him to do!

Haglund was not alone; serious complaints had also been raised about how Bob Kirschner, the PHR pathologist who oversaw the morgue, handled some of the pathology reports.

The tribunal inquiry lasted well over a year and deeply divided the exhumation team. Some saw the probe as a necessary precaution; critics saw it as a witch-hunt. Some thought Haglund was

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