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Summary
Summary
Written with a thrilling narrative pull, The Butcher's Trail chronicles the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Borger recounts how Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic - both now on trial in The Hague - were finally tracked down, and describes the intrigue behind the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president who became the first head of state to stand before an international tribunal for crimes perpetrated in a time of war.
Author Notes
Julian Borger is the diplomatic editor for The Guardian . He covered the Bosnian War for the BBC and The Guardian , and returned to the Balkans to report on the Kosovo conflict in 1999. He has also served as The Guardian 's Middle East correspondent and its Washington bureau chief. Borger was part of the Guardian team that won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism for its coverage of the Snowden files on mass surveillance. He was also on the team awarded the 2013 Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) medal and the Paul Foot Special Investigation Award in the UK.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Guardian diplomatic editor Borger, who covered the Balkan War of the 1990s, vividly relates how the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) tracked down the 161 individuals on its most-wanted list. Many of them lived among sympathetic populations; U.N. peacekeepers initially avoided pursuing war criminals, and U.S. secretary of defense William Cohen also opposed hunting them down. By the time the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords were signed, an air of impunity surrounded the fugitives. The pursuit picked up after President Clinton's 1996 re-election and the election of Tony Blair as U.K. prime minister, and it was furthered by the efforts of Louise Arbour and Carla Del Ponte, successive heads of the ICTY, who made Croatia and Serbia's cooperation a condition for significant financial aid and admission into the E.U. Borger recounts the tracking and capture of the "big three": former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic', Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic', and Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic'. While noting that efforts to bring some of the perpetrators to justice have suffered setbacks, Borger's well-researched account nevertheless makes the case that the ICTY's hard work and persistence represented "the high-water mark of international justice for crimes against humanity." Maps and photos. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
With Radovan Karadzic's verdict due next week, this powerful, pacy account details the tortuous journey to track down the warlords and bring them to justice Lady Justice looks best from a distance, her elegant form unblemished by compromise and expedience. So at first glance the story of the Balkan warlords from the 1990s being held to account is satisfying: every single one faced justice. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, known as the Hague tribunal, got their men -- and one woman. It took until 2011 for the last to be rounded up; and proceedings churn on with Radovan Karadzic, the bouffant brute who led the Bosnian Serbs, due next week to learn the verdict in his trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. Some hold that slow justice is no justice, but when it comes to international justice more patience is required. From the murk of the battlefield, the Hague tribunal hints tantalisingly at rare moral clarity, the principle that some crimes are so vile there can be no hiding place for the culprits. And vile many of the crimes certainly were. Investigators digging a mass grave near the Sava river found skeletons with rubber tubes around the arm bones. The victims' flesh had long perished, so at first the investigators thought the tubes were restraints. Then a horrific realisation dawned: the pipes were intravenous lines, the victims hospital patients dragged from their wards still plugged into their medication, too weak to need restraint, too frail to defend themselves. What Julian Borger has achieved in this superb account of the tribunal's manhunt is much more than a litany of these crimes. It is an elegantly written, powerfully convincing reckoning of how the world stumblingly faced up to a reality that should not have been: war crimes in modern Europe. He focuses on the manhunt as a single thread in the complex Balkan story, partly as a way to reveal how that region influences our wider world today, through rendition, jihad -- and the delicate flower of international law. I worked as a reporter in Bosnia alongside Borger and know him as a journalist you can bet the farm on. Yet his book is much more than long-form journalism. There is no romanticism in his account of the tribunal's founding. It was set up as a compromise, as a way for the world to do something to stop the death camps and slaughter then being perpetrated mostly by extremist Serbs. The west, with cold war mindsets still frozen in place, simply could not work out how to deal with sub-strategic-level conflict beyond the old iron curtain. "The court came into being as an exercise in penance and distraction, the unstable product of high ideals and low politics," Borger writes. "The mass atrocities would not be prevented, but they would be judged after the victims were dead." For almost two years after the 1995 Dayton peace accord ending the Bosnian war, low standards prevailed with western governments too jumpy to go after alleged war criminals even though they had thousands of peacekeeper "boots on the ground". Italian troops routinely turned their backs when the motorcade passed by carrying Karadzic, the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, allowing him to escape justice for a further 12 years. The bigger powers were in effect shamed out of their paralysis in Bosnia when Polish special forces, serving in neighbouring Croatia, boldly carried out the first detention operation of a war crimes suspect in June 1997. Their courage proved contagious. Weeks after Tony Blair's government replaced the risk-averse Conservatives, the SAS were ordered to seize three Bosnian Serbs. The results were mixed: one dead, one escaped and one captured using a ruse de guerre that came close to Britain itself breaching a Geneva convention. The drama of the arrest operations keeps the pages turning, not least when a later SAS operation goes wrong with the arrest of a pair of identical twins. Planners in Hereford might have spent more time reading their Shakespeare -- who fancied Illyria, the historical name for Croatia and Bosnia, as the setting for his twin-muddling comedy Twelfth Night. The SAS had nabbed the wrong twins. Throughout The Butcher's Trail there is a sense of the Hague tribunal succeeding in spite of, not because of, the international community. Poorly funded to begin with and undermanned, it became effective because a small number of committed individuals were prepared to explore the bounds of international law: the chain-smoking prosecutor, the tubby police sergeant from Stratford, the US special forces officer who carried a gorilla suit in his baggage. Borger is honest about the muddles and misunderstandings. He recounts America's early muscle-bound efforts to go after targets. Planes laden with special forces and staff officers keen to get in on the action were a dead giveaway when they flew into Bosnia. No surprise that the targets vanished into thin air by the time the operational juggernaut creaked into action. The early snatch operations -- target cars being rammed from behind and pushed into pre-arranged ambush positions -- provide great military theatre, but Borger shows how the greatest scalps for the tribunal were won through diplomatic finesse: the moderate leaders of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia were told that a pre-condition of those tiny new nations being welcomed as equals by the international community was the surrender of war crimes suspects. Borger's description of the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader largely responsible for the extreme nationalism that destroyed Yugoslavia, is excellent. Milosevic's erstwhile allies in Belgrade turned on him one by one until he suffered the 21st-century version of defenestration: he was handed over meekly to the tribunal, cuffed and cowed. The most poignant part for me is Borger's discussion of how the war criminals got on once incarcerated in Holland. Ivo Andric famously wrote that "Bosnia is a country of fear and hatred", yet in a Dutch prison exercise yard the same men who 20 years earlier slaughtered each other would happily play football and cook each other meals using recipes from home. * Tim Butcher is the author of The Trigger -- Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War. To order The Butcher's Trail for [pound]13.99 (RRP [pound]17.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pound]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pound]1.99. - Tim Butcher.
Kirkus Review
A bracing history of the hunt for Balkan war criminals and the seminal establishment of the Hague Tribunal in 1993. Diplomatic editor for the Guardian, English journalist Borger covered the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s for both the Guardian and the BBC. In his debut, he offers the thrilling account of the long-running international search for the masterminds of "ethnic cleaning" during these wars. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1991 into rival states, ethnic bloodshed erupted, especially in Serbia, led by ruthless leader Slobodan Miloevic, who eventually became the "first sitting head of state ever to be charged with war crimes in an international court." Though horrified by the bloodshed in Bosnia, the United States under new President Bill Clinton was loath to send in troops, leaving the United National Security Council to establish the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, an experiment in justice with an eye to the postwar Nuremberg Trials. Yet the court had little authority to track down and prosecute criminals like Miloevic, his puppet Goran Hadic, Croatian counterpart Franjo Tudjman, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadic, and many others. In his vivid, page-turning account, Borger follows not only the actual hunt for the criminals, which took years and as many false starts as successes by a team of international special forces, but also the astonishing legal history that the ICTY forged in bucking a complacent international mindset. The author chronicles the tireless work of keen advocates of the ICTY, such as U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and the intrepid "tracking team" led by chief prosecutors Louise Arbour and Carla Del Ponte. Borger impressively consolidates this important story, and he also includes a useful chronology of "arrests and transfers to the ICTY in the Hague." A well-organized, deeply researched work that ably digests the Balkan war, the criminals, the criminal court, and its legacy. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
After covering the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Borger (diplomatic editor, The Guardian) delves into the frustrating manhunt to track down accused war criminals. Follow a recently formed Polish commando unit making the first arrest, Germany in military action for the first time since World War II, and a reluctant French Force, along with British and American special-op units, as they work with, and against, local police and intelligence units to track down the ICTY's most-wanted fugitives. The accounts and background decisions of each search and capture are presented in captivating detail often playing out like a true-life spy novel. However, the sheer number of people, territories, and international interests involved can be dizzying. Each individual's accused crimes are described, as are the implications these missions had on future renditions and extractions. In a cruel irony, captives end up housed in one of the most progressive jails in the world, a stark contrast to what the peoples of their respective nations suffered through under their leadership. VERDICT Those with a strong interest in the nations of the former Yugoslavia, covert military operations, and international law and relations will find this work most fascinating.-Zebulin Evelhoch, Central Washington Univ. Lib. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Genocide challenges our idea of what it is to be human. The acts perpetrated against innocent victims are so grotesque and disturbing we recoil from their contemplation. We prefer them to be either far away or long ago. What happened in the countries of the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999 ripped all that insulation away. The mass murders took place in supposedly modern Europe, a continent that flattered itself in thinking it had evolved beyond such savagery. For millions of Europeans, it was a holiday spot, dotted with resorts along azure seas, yet suddenly it was a war zone on the evening news. Almost immediately, the rest of Europe began to distance itself, like neighbors of a dying household. Shutting their doors and windows, they convinced themselves that if they looked the other way, they would never catch the disease. Western politicians diagnosed "ancient ethnic hatreds" let loose by the fall of communism as the cause of the bloodshed. It was one of a litany of excuses for not getting involved, and it explained nothing. The history of the ethnic communities that made up Yugoslavia had indeed been marked by sporadic bouts of violence, but those eruptions had been interspersed by long periods of peaceful coexistence. Exactly the same could be said of most regions of Europe's richly diverse and turbulent continent. Yet if the English herded the Scottish into concentration camps, or if the Spanish committed mass murder against the Catalans or Basques in the late twentieth century, a history of "ancient ethnic hatreds" would seem a grossly inadequate explanation. As it is for the Balkans. Excerpted from The Butcher's Trail: How the Search for Balkan War Criminals Became the World's Most Successful Manhunt by Julian Borger All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Author's Note | p. ix |
| Introduction | p. xi |
| 1 Operation Amber Star | p. 1 |
| 2 Operation Little Flower | p. 25 |
| 3 A High Expectation of Violence: The SAS in Bosnia | p. 45 |
| 4 Manhunting the Pentagon Way | p. 77 |
| 5 The Hunt in Croatia | p. 101 |
| 6 Gorillas and Spikes | p. 127 |
| 7 The Tracking Team | p. 151 |
| 8 The Strange Death of Dragan Gagovic | p. 181 |
| 9 The Spymaster of the Hôtel de Brienne | p. 197 |
| 10 Slobodavia: The Fall of Milo¿evic and the Unraveling of Serbia | p. 221 |
| 11 Radovan Karadzic: The Shaman in the Madhouse | p. 247 |
| 12 The Old Man in the Farmhouse: Mladic on the Run | p. 283 |
| 13 The Legacy | p. 309 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 333 |
| Chronology | p. 337 |
| Abbreviations | p. 345 |
| Notes | p. 347 |
| Bibliography | p. 370 |
| Index | p. 374 |
| Photo Credits | p. 400 |
