A Kenyan’s encounter with a war criminal who shocked world with courtroom suicide

What you need to know:

  • Ms Anna Osure joined the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a young lawyer in 2007 and soon rose through the ranks to the position of deputy head of the Office of Legal Aid and Detention.
  • When conflict broke out, he joined the army of the republic of Croatia rising to the level of Major-General by April 1992.

As a piece of courtroom theatre, the last act Bosnian-Croat war criminal Slobodan Praljak pulled off in The Hague was as shocking as it was dramatic.

Standing erect, his bushy white beard giving him a wild outlaw’s look that did not bolster his claims to innocence, Praljak greeted the guilty verdict in his trial by declaring the judges were wrong, opening his fist to reveal a vial with a brown liquid and swigging the substance before collapsing into his chair and telling his lawyer he had taken poison.

Images of a suicide carried out before the glare of the cameras in such a high-profile case soon went around the world. For one Kenyan lawyer who was closely associated with the war crime detainees at The Hague, the whole scene was especially stunning.

Ms Anna Osure joined the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as a young lawyer in 2007 and soon rose through the ranks to the position of deputy head of the Office of Legal Aid and Detention.

LEGAL ADVICE

In that role, she effectively took on the task of providing legal advice to the international tribunal on all detention related matters concerning a parade of big names accused of committing some of the gravest crimes known to humanity.

Among the remandees whose legal needs she oversaw were General Ratko Mladic, the notorious “Butcher of Bosnia,” Serbian warlord Radovan Karadzic, ex-Prime Ministers and several military chiefs from the killing fields of the former Yugoslavia where tens of thousands died in the early 1990s in the worst conflict Europe had seen since World War II.

I met Ms Osure when I travelled to The Hague to cover the trials of the six Kenyans indicted by the International Criminal Court for their alleged role in the post-election violence in 2007/2008.

Being one of the most senior Kenyans in the international justice system, she was a perfect guide through the mazy world of international trials and she took the time to chat about what to expect when the pre-trial sessions in the Kenya cases began.

HEARINGS

To pass time beforehand, Ms Osure suggested that I attend hearings at the Yugoslavia Tribunal which were in session at the time and as fate would have it hearings involving the war crimes committed by Croat generals were in session at the time. It proved to be a good idea.

The courtrooms in which the cases at the tribunal were held were quite similar to those in which the eagerly anticipated pre-trial motions in the Kenyan cases would be heard with the main difference being that the suspects in the Yugoslavia cases were constantly shadowed by two uniformed policemen while the Kenyans, not being in detention, could operate more freely in the courtroom.

Ms Anna Osure. The Kenyan joined the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a young lawyer in 2007. PHOTO | COURTESY

The charges were also, of course, similar, although in the case of the Europeans the scale of atrocities was far bigger, flowing from the reaction to the break-up of Yugoslavia by assorted leaders who organised the massacre and displacement of thousands of civilians in a bid to create ethnically and religiously “pure” mini-states, resulting in an estimated 140,000 deaths and millions of refugees.

Ms Osure mentioned at the time how surreal it was to constantly handle the cases of people accused of shocking atrocities and who, close up, were impeccably behaved, well-educated intellectuals who seemed to be the last individuals one would expect to order campaigns of murder, rape and displacement.

DRAMATIC IMAGES

I reached out to Ms Osure last week after seeing the dramatic images from the trial in The Hague. She was at first reluctant to say anything citing confidentiality rules, only offering: “I was disturbed by Praljak’s suicide. At first I thought it was a stunt. It was shocking and should not have been aired over and over. That was not pretty.”

Yet Ms Osure played more than a bit-part role in the later life of the dramatist-turned-military general-turned-war-criminal.

Praljak was born in what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1945, one of the many ethnically and religiously mixed parts of the former Yugoslavia. He carved out a career as a theatre, cinema and television producer and also lectured in philosophy and psychology.

When conflict broke out, he joined the army of the republic of Croatia rising to the level of Major-General by April 1992.

This was basically a tribal war although that word seems only to be applied in the western imagination to conflicts in Africa.

DOMINANCE

Yugoslavia was made up of a mix of groups that have fought on-and-off for dominance for decades.

After World War II, during which fresh atrocities were carried out by Croatian forces against Serbs, Jews and Roma people, the authoritarian president Josip Broz Tito took over and ruled with a strong hand, suppressing nationalism and promoting the idea of a greater Yugoslavia.

His death saw the rise of ethnic nationalists in power personified by the eventual president Slobodan Milosevic who pursued the idea of an exclusive Greater Serbia without minorities.

Those policies unleashed a series of mini-wars with a common thread of ethnic Slovenes, Croats, Kosovar Albanians, Bosniaks, and ethnic Macedonians fighting sometimes among themselves but often to escape the dominance of Serbs and have their own independent republics.

SIEGE

The war only ended when international attention was drawn to the siege of the city of Srebrenica where Serbian troops carried out shocking atrocities against Bosnian Muslims drawing armed international intervention and an eventual deal that resulted in the independence of many of these mini-states.  

Praljak was accused of participating in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at creating an ethnically pure “Greater Croatia” during the war. The campaigns waged by forces he controlled involved widespread looting, mass arrests and cruel treatment of civilians including sexual violence, killings and other forms of persecution. Praljak surrendered to ICTY on April 5 2004.

As was to be expected of a former theatre director, proceedings in the case were full of drama.

The presiding judge, Jean-Claude Antonetti of France allowed Praljak to cross-examine witnesses, a privilege usually extended only to self-representing defendants and not those with a lawyer like Praljak and the court sessions turned into stages of drama as the suspect took on witnesses including a reporter for the UK Guardian who described him last week as a first-rate bully.

The ICTY worked hard to try and trace Praljak’s properties to recover the millions of dollars it spent paying his lawyers.

INNOCENCE

Ms Osure was one of those involved in this quest and a lengthy manifesto Praljak published online proclaiming his innocence showed that the pair had an interesting, testy but still trusting relationship.

In one letter, Praljak declares himself tired of being asked questions by Ms Osure about specific properties he is said to have owned in his homeland but he then turns around and offers her power of attorney to sell off the said property in the event of his death.

The letter reads: “I, Slobodan Praljak, resident of The Hague (detention), permanent address Zagreb, Croatia, Kraljevec 35 A, in my sane mind give the power of attorney to Ms Anne Osure to sell, in my name and for the benefit of The Hague Tribunal, ‘Oktavijan d.o.o.’ in full, or the part which belongs to me, and to cover all the expenses which the Court has in relation to the giver of this power of attorney. Please pay the remaining money into the account which you will open in my name in a bank of your choice.”

The note continues, contradicting the earlier power of attorney by declaring he does not own the property and referencing other questions on other possessions including a vehicle: “With this power of attorney sell the ‘Property in Radnika’, cover the expenses of the defence counsel until now and in the future, and give me the rest of the money. So both you and I will be satisfied. In which other way can I explain to you that it is not mine and that I have no shares there? … I am not the owner, I am not the co-owner, I have no connection to the ‘Property in Radnika’.”

REMANDEES

Signalling the self-importance in which he and his fellow remandees held themselves, he signed off his   letter as “Sincerely yours, Slobodan Praljak, prof, master in EE, film and theatre director”.

Asked about this remarkable interaction with Praljak captured in documents the war criminal posted online, Ms Osure said she cannot speak about her interaction with him on legal matters.

On his personality, he was, she said, a clearly intelligent fellow who could be jovial and who entertained those who knew him with fine poetry-writing skills. Like the other prisoners who somehow forgot the ethnic hatreds they incited, they related well across ethnic and religious lines behind bars. One had to constantly remind themselves that they were charged with some of the worst crimes known to humankind.

Praljak was due for release in 2019 having served two-thirds of his 20-year sentence but as the last stages of his appeal were heard, the theatre director was planning a dramatic finale.

HAGUE

His lead counsel, Nika Pinter, told the New York Times that Praljak asked his wife, who had travelled to The Hague every month for 13 years, not to attend court for the announcement of the verdict and not to watch the session. “From the start, 13 years ago, he told me he could not bear being called a war criminal,” Ms Pinter said. “He couldn’t live with the stigma.” But she added: “He never gave a hint that he was planning to end his life.” Shortly after the judges condemned him to jail, he shouted in a gruff voice, speaking in Croatian: “Slobodan Praljak is not a war criminal. I reject your judgment with contempt.” He then took the substance which turned out to be potassium cyanide and his final words to his lawyers as he slumped down were — “I have taken poison.”

The reaction among many Bosnian Muslims on social media whose people were targets of Praljak’s crimes was similarly blunt: Good riddance.