“The International Criminal Court in The Hague. It’s a permanent war crimes tribunal. He’s one of the top prosecutors there, but Hélène wants him home.” Roger allowed himself a meaningful pause and then added, “Olivier thinks you’re the right guy to replace him.”
After a pause of my own, I asked, “So your big idea for me is to go back to being a prosecutor?” I had been chosen as United States Attorney in Kindle County by pure fortuity in 1997, largely so our senior senator, who made the recommendation to the White House, didn’t have to pick between two other candidates, both political heavyweights who hated each other’s guts. By then I’d been a prosecutor in the office for close to twelve years, including two as first assistant, the top deputy. Yet at thirty-seven, I was a decade too young for the responsibility and had to quell my terror of messing up every morning for months. With time, I came to feel I had the greatest job possible for a trial lawyer—electric, challenging, and consequential. Nevertheless, I told Roger I had no interest in moving backward. That Greek philosopher had it right when he said you couldn’t step in the same stream twice.
“No, no,” he said. “This would be different. They prosecute mass atrocities. Genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Mutilation, rape, and torture as instruments of war. That kind of stuff.”
“Rog, I don’t know a damn thing about cases like that.”
“Oh, bullshit. It’s all witnesses and documents and forensics, just on a larger scale. The crimes are horrible. But evidence is evidence.”
He’d moved a box and plunked himself down in an armchair, going at me as comfortably as he had for thirty years. These days his trousers were pushed below his belly, and his hair was a curly white horseshoe with a couple of those embarrassing untrimmed wires sticking straight out of his glossy scalp. He had taken on that middle-aged WASP thing of looking like he’d worn the same suit every day for the last twenty years, as if it were plebeian to care much about his appearance. His shoes, sturdy and expensive when purchased, had not been polished since then. And I doubted he owned more than two or three ties. It was just a uniform he donned each morning. He played for a team whose stars were nondescript.
“And Rog, why is it you’re in my office carrying Olivier’s water? Do you have a professional interest in this of your own?”
“Some,” he said. “There’s a case over there that the government of the United States would hate to see end up in the wrong hands.”
“What kind of case?”
“Do you know where Bosnia is?” he asked.
“East of anyplace I’ve been.”
“In 2004, there was a refugee camp outside of Tuzla. All Romas.”
“Gypsies?”
“If we’re not being PC.”
“Okay. Some Gypsies,” I said.
“Four hundred. All murdered.”
“At once?”
“So they say.”
“By?”
Roger drew back. “Well, that’s where things get opaque.”
“Okay. And 2004—is the Bosnian War over by now?”
“Oh yeah. For years. The Dayton Accords ended the war in 1995. Nine years later, the Serbs and the Croats and the Bosniaks, meaning the Muslims, have pretty much stopped killing each other. And NATO is there enforcing the agreement, which amounts to rounding up tons of weapons and chasing down the war criminals wanted for trial in The Hague. The NATO force includes about eighteen hundred US troops in a ring of camps near Tuzla.”
“I.e., close to the Gypsies.”
“Very close. Couple miles.”
“And why would a bunch of American kids, who are there to keep the peace, want to kill four hundred Gypsies?”
“They didn’t. Stake my life on it.”
“Who did?”
“You know, to take down four hundred people at once, that’s some serious firepower. So it’s not a long list of other suspects. Serb paramilitaries are most likely. Maybe rogue cops. Maybe organized crime. A lot of that back then. And some leftover jihadis, too, who’d shown up in Bosnia originally to defend the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs.”
“Well, it doesn’t sound like the American military has much to worry about.”
“Not so fast. Now we enter the realm of diplomacy and politics.”
I groaned reflexively. Politics and prosecution never mixed well.
“The ICC,” said Roger, “was established by a treaty negotiated by most of the UN member states, including the US. Clinton signed it in 2000, but the Bushies hated the whole idea, especially Dick Cheney, who supposedly was afraid he’d get prosecuted for authorizing waterboarding. So Bush announced in 2002 that he’s unsigning the ICC treaty.”
“Can you do that? Unsign?”
“Do you think that mattered? Instead, the Republicans, who controlled Congress, passed something called the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, which basically says if you try to put our troops on trial, we’ll invade your fucking country and take them home.”
“Literally?”
“I don’t think they used the word ‘fucking.’ Otherwise, that’s a reasonably accurate legislative summary. In Western Europe, they call it ‘The Hague Invasion Act.’”
“So you’re saying that if the ICC charges American troops, we’re going to war with the Netherlands?”
“Let’s just say it risks creating very serious rifts with our closest allies. The mere thought gives angina to whole floors in the Departments of State and Defense.”
“Is that why the case is still hanging around after eleven years? Because people like you have been trying to obstruct it?”
“First, for the record,” said Roger, with a coquettish grin, “I object to the word ‘obstruct.’ We have simply expressed our point of view to various authorities. And a lot of the delay had nothing to do with us. Even the Roma organizations didn’t start investigating for several years, because the only survivor was hiding under his bed, trying to shovel the poop out of his trousers. And frankly, if you ask me, I haven’t been able to obstruct the damn thing well enough. Several weeks ago, the prosecutor’s office at the ICC applied to the Court to open a formal investigation, largely because the flipping Roma activists keep screaming, How can four hundred people get massacred and nobody even looks into it?”
“Sorry, Rog, but that sounds like a pretty good question.”
Roger tipped a shoulder. He didn’t really disagree. On the other hand, he had a job to do.
“And what do we mean by ‘Roma activists’?” I asked.
“How much do you know about the Roma?” he asked.
I let my eyes rise to the fluorescent panels in my office ceiling and concluded that an honest answer was, “Next to nothing.”
“Well, it’s not the kind of contest anybody wants to win, but even taking account of the genocides of the Armenians and the Kurds and of course the Jews, there may not have been another group of white people on earth who have had the shit kicked out of them more consistently for the last millennium than the Roma.” Roger hunkered forward and lowered his voice. “Basically, they’ve been the niggers of Europe.” He meant that was how they’d been treated. “They were slaves in Romania for four hundred years. Did you know that?”
“The Gypsies?”
“It never stops with them. Hitler tried to wipe them out. Ninety thousand fled Kosovo. And Sarkozy just booted a couple thousand out of France a few years back. Everybody from Athens to Oslo hates their guts.”
“They’re thieves, right?”
“You mean every single one of them?”
“No, just enough to get them hated.”
“Enough for that. Pickpockets, scam artists, credit card fraudsters, child gangs, car thieves, phony beggars. The Gypsy caravan rolls through town and a lot of crap disappears. That’s the old story. On the other hand, they can barely get jobs or go to school, so I don’t know what else is gonna happen.”
“Okay,” I said, “so now I feel sorry for the Gypsies, but I still don’t see a starring role in this drama for me.”
“I’m getting there,” he answered. “The ICC is ambivalent about the USA. They hate us for not joining. But they need us in the long run. An operation like theirs is never going to be on solid ground without the support of the most powerful nation on earth. So they’d rather not piss us off irreparably. Which means there’s been a lot of back-channel stuff.”