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truth and documentary evidence came into play significantly during Colonel Doyle’s testimony at the ICTY trial of Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic. Karadzic was representing himself and was granted three days of cross-examining the Colonel, and part of that consisted of gaining access to Colm’s diary, which he only agreed to on the grounds that he supply a partially redacted, photostat copy. In fact the Karadzic trial was one which presented particular challenges for Colonel Doyle, which he details in the book. “I was very emotional after the cross examination and I suppose it was the culmination of a lot of things, but at the end of the cross-examination I could see that Karadzic was a man who, despite all the terrible things that had happened, seemed to genuinely believe that he had done nothing wrong,” he explained. Colonel Doyle also testified at the much publicised trials of General Ratko Mladic, General Pavle Strugar and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. All in all the ICTY sought to indict 161 individuals as a result of the war. They eventually got them all.
The book chronicles the seemingly interminable rounds of brokering and meetings that Doyle endured, with characters including Karadzic, both with the ECMM and as Lord Carrington’s Envoy. One reviewer wrote of it conveying the ‘banality’ of evil, the smiling faces and formalities which greeted Doyle with one face, while the other was plotting further death and destruction. “I knew that many of the ceasefires would last but a matter of hours, however, if they saved life they had a purpose,” he says, adding that while few could have foreseen the full extent of the horrors that would engulf the region, his work with the ECMM on the ground in Bosnia, meeting the different sides there, gave him a sense of the peril that lay ahead. “History of course has a strong resonance everywhere, particularly int he Balkans. Meetings with Serb or Croat soldiers would frequently refer to unsettled scores dating back to the Chetniks (Serb irregulars) or Ustashe (Croat pro-Nazi irregulars) of the Second World War. The organising of distinct political parties for Serb, Croat and Bosnian identities created an environment in which they would ultimately turn on each other.”
Returning to Sarajevo
Doyle recently returned to Bosnia, in 2018, to do a TV documentary for Radio Free Europe, only the second time he had returned to the country, and specifically Sarajevo, since he
left a city in flames in 1992. “I was initially reluctant to do it to be honest, but there can be a certain catharsis about revisiting things, and the editor of a local paper who was adamant that I should do it as I was one of the few officials at the time that had been accepted as an interlocutor by all sides. I revisited places where I was involved in the lifting of the barricades, the ambush on the presidential convoy and other locations where some significant events had occurred. I remember in particular going to what is now a ruin, but was once a restaurant, located high over the city, which had been one of the sites frequented by Bosnian-Serb snipers. From that range, with a view of the entire city, a sniper with a high-powered rifle could kill literally anybody. I remember the words of one sniper who was interviewed after the conflict, and they are impossible to forget: ‘Every time I aimed to kill somebody, I always targeted a child. Because if I killed a child, I also automatically killed its mother.’ Can you imagine somebody saying that?” Indeed the Balkan war also saw the appalling return of concentration camps to Europe, and the book retells in chilling detail Colonel Doyle’s visit to one such camp close to Banja Luka, in what is now the Republika Srpska. As he says, the apparent normalisation of society in the former Yugoslavia after the war has masked the terrible memories which endure amongst communities that now live side by side in often tense circumstances
The ongoing tragedy of Bosnia is illustrated in the national elections that were held there the Sunday after Doyle’s recent visit this year. “Nothing has changed, I don’t think it can be said that there has been any meaningful progress in healing the divides in the country. There is still the same lack of trust. It’s all the same, except 100,000 are dead. I found that very sad. When I was there I said that one of the few things that could have halted the slide to war was the establishment of a political party transcended ethnic divides; Serb, Croat and Bosnian- Muslim. Over a quarter of a century later, that party has yet to emerge. One of the other elements I noticed in the city was the increasing number of Mosques, doubtless as a result of overseas investment.”
Commitment to honesty
Doyle’s book chronicles his engagements on all sides, and his exposure to not just threats, but genuine risk. During the gripping retelling of the negotiations to return the kidnapped Bosnian
| WITNESS TO WAR CRIMES |
Colm Doyle in Bosnia with the European Community Monitoring Mission (ECMM)
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