Last week I went to a preview of a new film called Storm.

Here is a New York Times review which conveys the gist of it. The story centres on a Bosnia war crimes trial at the ICTY. A Bosnian Serb military officier is on trial, but the case against him wobbles as a key Bosniac witness is shown to have lied.

The feisty woman prosecutor struggles to get new evidence and finds deeper layers of horror at a hotel where systematic rapes by Bosnian Serbs were carried out. But how to get evidence of what happened there presented – will a victim who survived the ordeal be prepared to testify so many years later?

The film is marketed as a ‘thriller’. It is not especially scary or dramatic, although it does well in the Bosnian scenes, conveying a sense of bleak black menace and deeper powerful interests at play, all the more effective for being understated.

The plot turns on procedural manoeuvres at ICTY. The court is said to be under pressure to end trials, hence a murky plea-bargain deal is done behind the prosecutor’s back to bring the proceedings towards an end without the full extent of the new evidence being presented. The prosecutor and the Bosniac woman victim all end up betrayed in different ways.

As a dramatic device this works well, giving the viewer a well-acted, subtle and interesting (if rather gloomy) movie experience. For my taste the feministic gender clichés were too clunky: the key women were conflicted but principled, brave and defiant, the key men devious, manipulative and unsympathetic. But then I’m male.

After the screening I was part of a panel looking at the issues raised by the film. The session was chaired by a colleague from Amnesty who with two other women panelists familiar with the issues at first hand raised depressing examples of the difficulties faced by many women victims of rape and other abuse in Bosnia (on all sides).

They argued that even if it was bound to be difficult to bring most perpetrators of Balkan war crimes to justice, there were many other ways in which help and support might be extended to victims, especially women. The Yugoslavia conflicts had led to some trail-blazing legal and policy work in this direction, but a lot more was needed.

I pointed out the startling cost of ICTY – now approaching $2 billion since it was set up in 1993, a lot of money to spend indicting only 161 people. This meticulous process was in stark contrast to the scores of war crimes trials in Europe after WW2, some of which involved many defendants but lasted only a few weeks and led to many executions. One result of doing things in this new measured way was much greater scope to defendants – a point I had made to London when Milosevic was sent to ICTY in 2001 (Is Milosevic Innocent?).

I said that in this sense the film had done a good job, bringing out a number of basic legal and procedural themes which were not always obvious to the general public.

Nonetheless, as an account of the way things work in real life, it looked, ahem, unconvincing. The driving force behind the betrayal seemed to be a jovial but sly senior EU official, keen to move the Balkans countries towards EU membership for the Wider Good. The real-life problem was not that the EU did cynical deals. Rather that it was unable to do any deals.

I added that as the latest arrest of Bosniac leader Ejup Ganic in London on a Serbia arrest warrant showed, moving war crimes trials to countries in the region opened the way to possible political monkey-business.

A lawyer in the audience pointed out firmly that the main victim in the film was Justice; there had been obviously improper (and obviously unrealistic) collusion between the prosecutors and judges, for no good reason.

Another woman from Amnesty in the audience remonstrated with what she saw as my ‘dismaying’ attitude to war crimes trials in Serbia and elsewhere, which she said had done fine work. London had been quite right to respond to the request from Belgrade to arrest Ganic on war crimes charges – other Belgrade war crimes arrest warrants issued against eg senior Kosovar leaders had been ignored by other European partners, undermining the credibility of local war crimes trials. (Note: time ran out and I had no chance to reply.)

All in all, a fascinating evening. Two powerful lines from the film stand out:

  • “What are these trials for?”
  • “This (ie ICTY) is not therapy…”

I need to think a bit more about the issues raised by these stark statements, namely what purpose war crimes trials for the former Yugoslavia are meant to serve and how far they are capable of being effective.

To be continued.