An embodiment of the banality of evil shuffled into a Sarajevo courtroom Friday, wearing a beaten pair of black shoes without laces.
Borislav Herak, self-confessed war criminal, looked like a defeated man on the first day of his trial for mass murder and rape. The Serb soldier has lost weight since being captured several months ago, and he sat awkwardly in a rumpled, cream-colored workman's jacket that was too wide at the shoulders and too short at the sleeves.Herak, according to prosecutor Ljubomir Lukic, is charged with raping at least 12 women and murdering 30 war prisoners and civilians, including a family of 10. He has confessed to 20 killings and says he expects and deserves the death penalty. His trial with co-defendant Sretko Damjanovic, who is accused of killing five people and raping two women, is the first war crimes trial in Bosnia-Herzegovina and marks the first one in Europe since the Nuremburg trials of Nazi German leaders.
Herak, 22, has an unsettling habit of not moving his head when he wants to look at something. As he sat during the opening session, hands folded obediently in his lap, his dark eyes prowled cautiously from one place to the other - to the photographers on his left, the television cameramen on his right, the five stern judges straight ahead of him. His eyes were like captured ravens in the cage of his skull.
He was led into the courtroom at 21 minutes past 10 Friday morning, silvery handcuffs around his bony wrists. The lead policeman halted in front of the defendant's bench, a long stretch of hard and dark wood, and Herak stopped behind him. Herak, taller than his Bosnian escorts, even though his head was bowed, meekly raised his wrists as the policeman unlocked the handcuffs. There was a sharp metallic click when the handcuffs slid back.
For about five minutes, the judges, prosecutor and defense lawyers waited while the photographers surrounded Herak. Herak did not smile, did not smirk, did not say anything. His thin shoulders were scrunched together, elbows close at his sides, and he gave the impression of being cold or ashamed.
The prosecutor needed about half an hour to run through Herak's alleged offenses. One of the incidents, the prosecutor said, took place in May when Herak's unit of ethnic Serb soldiers, based outside of Sarajevo, captured six Bosnian soldiers. Herak killed three of them by slitting their throats, the prosecutor said.