The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

98 DECEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Once More—Never Again Eyewitness: My Journey toThe Hague Isak Gasi and Shaun Koos, Brandylane Publishers, 2018, $29.95/hardcover, e-book available, 270 pages. Review by George W. Aldridge Shortly after the euphoria of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, Europe once again witnessed a genocide of noncombatants: Bosniaks (Muslim Bosnians) were targeted for being an ethnic and religious minority, like European Jews 50 years earlier dur- ing World War II. Isak Gasi, a well-known Yugoslav international canoe and kayak champion who was one of the victims, has written a book about his experience: Eyewit- ness: My Journey toThe Hague . Written in collaboration with his friend and fellow avid canoeist Shaun Koos, the book was published in connection with the 25th anniversary of Gasi’s release from the Serb-run Luka prison camp, where he was brutally mistreated. In it, Gasi interweaves his personal ordeal with the tragic events of the Bosnian War. As a second-tour junior officer in Copenhagen from 1993 to 1995, I never expected to see concentration camps in southeastern Europe, much less meet emancipated detainees such as Isak Gasi. But the State Department’s instruc- tions to me were straightforward: find Gasi, and escort him to an undisclosed location to provide federal investiga- tors and forensic artists with firsthand accounts of Serbian atrocities in his hometown of Brcko, an ethnically mixed port city near the geographical intersec- tion of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. For the ultranationalist Bosnian Serbs, capturing Brcko and ethnically cleansing its majority Bosniak population and large Croat community were prerequisites to link- ing the northern and eastern components of their envisioned “Republika Srpska.” Gasi’s eyewitness accounts were so credible and irrefutable that he was eventually called to testify on six occasions before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague—at the trials of Slobodan Milo- sevic, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic, Momcilo Krajisnik, Vojislav Seselj and Dusan Tadic. In May 1997 Tadic would become the first person convicted of war crimes in Europe since the end of World War II. Thereafter, guilty verdicts were eventu- ally reached in every trial that Gasi gave testimony. As Gasi recounts in the book, he was repeatedly assaulted and nearly executed as a prisoner at the Serbs’ Luka death camp. He knewmany of his torturers; several were local acquaintances. Others he met during his years travel- ing throughout the country as a top-flight Yugoslav athlete who had carried the Olympic torch into Bosnia for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, a city con- sidered to showcase former president of Yugoslavia Marshal Tito’s vision of inter- ethnic and communal harmony. In lamenting the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Gasi and Koos reflect on the extremist ideology that justified the Serbs’ war crimes against the Bosniaks and the Croats. While Gasi dismisses Karadzic, Mladic, Seselj and others as mindless, prejudiced killers, he regards Milosevic as a brilliant demagogue who mesmerized the Serbian masses, convincing them they had been historically wronged by their fellow Yugoslavs. Bosniaks, in turn, were demonized as “Turks” who had betrayed their fellow Slavs. In Gasi’s estima- tion it was Milosevic who wielded Serbian grievances into jus- tifications for mass murder. Milosevic captivated his fellow Serbs, capitalized on their historic grievances and convinced them they had to right past wrongs by taking revenge on their neighbors. Although Bosnian Serbs were rou- tinely threatened by Serb paramilitary units like Arkan’s Tigers, not all partici- pated in the pogroms. Gasi mentions several, including his beloved neighbor Mira Lazic and longtime teammate Mirko Nisovic, who risked their lives protecting Bosniaks and Croats. Others openly shared Gasi’s regret that nationalist hatreds had destroyed Yugo- slavia. And it was Serbs, he notes, who protected Admir Karabasic, one of the few survivors of the Koricani Cliffs massacre. Besides offering a chilling account of Yugoslavia’s demise, Eyewitness: My Journey to The Hague provides a useful timeline of Balkan history and a glos- sary of key characters and places with a pronunciation guide. “Unless societies are vigilant,” Gasi warns in conclusion, “there is no such thing as ‘never again.’” n During more than 27 years as an FSO, George W. Aldridge served in Jamaica, Denmark, Ethiopia, Belize, Morocco, Kenya, Tunisia, Sudan and Lebanon. Prior to entering the Foreign Service in July 1990, he was a political science instructor at three Texas junior colleges and the director of the southwest office of the National Association of Arab Americans. Mr. Aldridge is fromBelton, Texas. BOOKS