Reason to Take On War Crimes Tribunal

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — So you’re a lawyer and your client is an international pariah. The charges against him include mass murder and other horrific crimes. The prosecution has every advantage, while you may not even speak the language of the court.

And the whole world is watching.

It is a formidable task, defending a war crimes suspect. Add to the equation the fact that your hometown, in its own brand of political correctness, refuses to recognize the court as legitimate.

With all this, it might seem that lawyers would shy away in droves from the difficult, unsavory war crimes cases springing from the conflicts that shattered the former Yugoslav federation earlier this decade. Actually, even here in Belgrade, where the international prosecution of war criminals is viewed as treason, attorneys are scrambling for a piece of the defense action.

The money is good--fabulous by local standards. The publicity, if not always favorable, is at least plentiful. Winning means stymieing a well-endowed Western legal powerhouse while championing a patriotic cause at home. If you lose, well, the odds were stacked against you to begin with.

“We are all suffering a bit . . . of professional vanity,” said Igor Pantelic, attorney of record for Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs’ war-era president, who has been indicted twice on genocide charges. “These are the top cases in the world.”

Pantelic is part of an elite club of attorneys in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, and Zagreb, the Croatian counterpart, who are divvying the docket of Serbian and Croatian defendants facing trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. They are often teamed up with lawyers from Western countries, including at least one from Los Angeles.

Pantelic, whose most famous client remains a fugitive, boasts a role in at least 13 cases, thanks in part to his special consulting relationship with the wartime leadership of the Bosnian Serbs based in the tiny Bosnian village of Pale.

More than 75 men have been publicly or secretly indicted by the tribunal, a United Nations body established in 1993 to prosecute those accused of genocide, murder, rape, torture and other crimes against humanity committed during the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia between 1991 and December 1995. Twenty-six suspects are in custody; three are Bosnian Muslims and the rest Serbs or Croats.

Rising to the Challenge

Though hampered by stonewalling governments and unwieldy bureaucracy, the work of the tribunal is historic. It is the first formal pursuit of war crimes justice since World War II and will be the model for a future permanent court.

Some attorneys find the chance to rewrite case law exhilarating, along with the perks of European travel, mobile phones and high-profile living. On the other hand, the hours are long, the work hard--and there are occasional death threats. They complain of being outgunned by a prosecution with the weight of the U.N., scores of investigators and the intelligence services of major Western governments behind it.

And they complain that, with only one courtroom, trials take too long. (A second courtroom opened this month, and the U.N. Security Council this week approved a third chamber.) Many of their witnesses are reluctant to come to The Hague, fearing that they too will be arrested. Because of politics at home, where rival nationalist leaders were slow to agree on common symbols, some of the attorneys don’t even have valid passports.

Pantelic, whose office in Belgrade overlooks the city’s botanical gardens, sports well-tailored suits and a dashing haircut, speaks English fluently and has a background in international commercial law. But many of the local attorneys who take up these cases do not have his skills, and that puts them at a disadvantage in the lofty circles of The Hague.

“A lot of prominent attorneys think they are ready, but because [the work of the tribunal] is so new, they soon encounter tremendous problems,” the 40-year-old Pantelic said. “The main mistake of some of my colleagues is they want to transfer their knowledge and experience from here to The Hague. But the rules are absolutely different.”

Under formal guidelines, most of the defense attorneys are paid by the tribunal when their client is proved to be indigent, which is almost always the case. About 400 defense attorneys from all over the world have met U.N. requirements and signed up to be included on the List of Persons Willing to Represent Indigent Accused and Detainees.

Officially, the attorneys receive a base fee of $400 for each phase of a case. In addition, they can bill up to 175 hours a month on a sliding fee schedule, plus expenses. Peanuts to American lawyers, maybe, but good money in the impoverished Balkans.

The attorneys representing the most senior Croat to be indicted by The Hague tribunal, Gen. Tihomir Blaskic, are not paid by the court but by a special fund set up by the defendants’ supporters. Residents of the Croat-controlled parts of Bosnia pay a kind of tax, based on a percentage of their salaries, to the fund.

Blaskic pleaded not guilty to crimes against humanity for commanding Bosnian Croat militias that allegedly killed hundreds of Muslim civilians in a 1993 rampage through central Bosnia’s Lasva Valley.

He is represented by a former federal prosecutor from Los Angeles, Russell Hayman, and one of Croatia’s leading criminal attorneys, Anto Nobilo. Such teaming is intended to provide a defendant with one attorney familiar with Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and another with background in the history of the region.

Balkan attorneys, even when they speak English or French, the official languages of the court, come from a continental tradition of law that is more inquisitorial, where the judge assumes a dominant role in questioning and investigating, than adversarial. Many are unskilled in the cross-examination techniques, for example, that can win or lose a trial.

And most Balkan attorneys were trained in a Communist-era legal system.

Lawyers Team Up

Blaskic’s two lead attorneys say their talents complement each other. Nobilo has a superior grasp of the minutiae of the war and local history, and he does the fieldwork gathering Bosnian witnesses and documents. Hayman handles most dealings with the court as well as with international agencies that may provide information valuable to the case.

At least, he tries to. Hayman said many organizations, once they learn that he is defending an accused war criminal, refuse to cooperate.

“They don’t even respond to our letters,” Hayman said in a telephone interview from The Hague. “Most doors get shut in our faces. You say you represent a war crimes suspect, and people want nothing to do with you. There is a tremendous stigma to the charges.”

Hayman, who moved his family from their Pacific Palisades home to the Netherlands for the duration of the trial, thinks that unequal access to evidence will hurt his case.

“It’s frustrating,” he said.

His partner, Nobilo, is experiencing the flip side when he travels into the wilds of Bosnia to gather evidence. There, among the hard-line Bosnian Croats who still harbor enormous animosity toward their Muslim neighbors, Blaskic and the other indicted Croatian suspects are heroes.

“There is no problem collecting money,” Nobilo, 47, said, occasionally picking up a golden pen to jot notes on monogrammed stationery. “It’s easy to find witnesses, documents. We got 20,000 documents through the veterans association. I go and I say I’m defending Blaskic, and I can do almost anything.”

By contrast, the government of Croatia refused to obey a subpoena from the court demanding documents that potentially benefited the prosecution.

The nationalist Croatian government, in fact, has displayed enormous support for indicted Croats. When 10 suspects, including a notorious political leader, surrendered in October under U.S. pressure, the Zagreb government gave them a glorious send-off at a sun-drenched airfield by the Adriatic Sea. And until his death May 3, Croatian Defense Minister Gen. Gojko Susak was known to take personal interest in hiring the right attorneys. Anyone whom he perceived as having been too closely linked to the old Communist regime could be vetoed.

Whereas the Croats are treated as heroes, the Serbs are largely shunned by the Belgrade government, which would prefer to sweep them under a carpet lest it be forced to admit its own role in the war.

“The state is acting like nothing is happening and ignoring these cases,” said Toma Fila, a boisterous, amiable veteran of the legal profession in Belgrade. Fila is defending Slavko Dokmanovic, a Serb who was acting as mayor of the war-besieged Croatian city of Vukovar when Serbian forces captured it and killed more than 200 patients at the local hospital.

Fila’s office was abuzz with activity on a recent spring afternoon. Round-the-clock secretaries employed to help with the workload sat at a front desk while a team of young lawyers and paralegals examined an English translation of the defense opening statement, which had just arrived on the fax machine.

The telephone rang. It was defendant Dokmanovic, calling from his jail cell in The Hague, where he arrived last year after arrest on a secret indictment.

“I’m doing my best,” Fila assured his distraught client. “I am not a prophet--I cannot tell you how it will turn out.”

After half an hour of attempts to comfort his client, Fila transferred his call to one of the other attorneys. “He calls every day and cries for an hour,” Fila said, explaining that he and his assistants pass the call through the office, with each staffer taking turns lending a sympathetic ear.

Vlada Petrovic is a young, up-and-coming attorney in Fila’s office. He thinks that international criminal law could be a real growth industry for Serbian attorneys. Most Serbs scorned the tribunal when it was created, he noted, but they will have to reach an accommodation.

“It is a fact,” he said. “Serbia cannot change the world. We might like to, but we can’t, so we might as well live with it.”

‘Best Thing in Town’

Work on these cases is fast becoming the envy in young legal circles, he said.

“This is the best thing in town,” he said.

It’s a small world, that where war crimes suspects and lawyers intersect. In 1991, Fila defended notorious Serbian warlord Arkan in a Zagreb court that attempted to charge him with subversion; Nobilo was the prosecutor. More recently, Pantelic, Karadzic’s attorney, has represented Arkan, whose real name is Zeljko Raznjatovic, in assorted commercial deals.

Nobilo also prosecuted Andrija Artukovic, who was convicted of Nazi-era war crimes in 1986. Artukovic, who was interior minister in Croatia’s Nazi puppet regime during World War II, was extradited to Croatia from Southern California, where he had lived for years.

For Muslims, who make up the majority of victims from the wars in the former Yugoslav federation, the tribunal is a chance to see justice done. However, for Serbs and Croats, who make up the majority of the alleged perpetrators, the tribunal is seen as an evil political tool of revenge that answers primarily to the U.S. State Department.

Milan Vujin, president of the 5,000-member Serbian Bar Assn. in Belgrade, said he initially feared that it would be difficult to persuade attorneys to represent Serbs. The government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, for example, is openly contemptuous of the court. Instead, the attorneys are clamoring for a place on the roster.

“The tribunal now functions more as a true court,” said Vujin, who represents Dusan Tadic, the only defendant convicted thus far. “The political pressure is not gone completely, but it is reduced.”

Unconventional Case

Undoubtedly the bastard case among the current crop of war crimes suspects is that of Zdravko Mucic, a Bosnian Croat accused with three Muslim defendants of running a detention camp where Serbs were tortured, raped and killed.

The case is so controversial that two of his attorneys, first a Serb and now a Croat, have received threats and hateful criticism. The Serbian attorney, Branislav Tapuskovic, said his sister-in-law declared that she would change her last name if he continued defending Mucic. Tapuskovic and his wife later bowed out of the case.

The problem is that Mucic falls between the cracks--a Croat involved in a Muslim case, where his main defense argument is that he actually saved many Serbs.

“He doesn’t belong anywhere,” said his current attorney, Zeljko Olujic, a Croat. “The Croats don’t acknowledge him; for them, it was a Muslim crime. The Muslims don’t want him; they’re ashamed of the crime. And the Serbs see it as unfavorable to them.”

Olujic said he has received telephone and letter threats but believes that the risk is worth it.

“The tribunal is the first court on the planet,” he said in his Zagreb office. “Anyone who is part of it is part of the history of law.”

Nobilo, who has put his private practice on hold for more than a year to defend Blaskic, agreed:

“It is a big sacrifice, but we could change the way of thinking. In the end, every law university in the world will study these cases.”

Besides, he added with a smile, “almost every day I’m on TV.”