Atone and Move Forward

Michael Stewart

• Balkan Justice: The Story behind the First International War Crimes Trial since Nuremberg by Michael Scharf
  Carolina, 340 pp, $28.00, October 1997, ISBN 0 89089 919 3
• The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia by Rezak Hukanovic
  Little, Brown, 164 pp, £14.99, May 1997, ISBN 0 316 63955 9
• Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia edited by Jasminka Udovicki and James Ridgeway
  Duke, 326 pp, $49.95, November 1997, ISBN 0 8223 1997 7
• A Safe Area: Srebrenica, Europe’s Worst Massacre since the Second World War by David Rohde
  Simon and Schuster, 440 pp, £8.99, June 1997, ISBN 0 671 00499 9
• Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War by James Gow
  Hurst, 343 pp, £14.95, May 1997, ISBN 1 85065 208 2

In a speech at the London School of Economics in June this year, Antonio Caesese, the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, spoke about the century’s greatest forgotten massacre and the role of the ‘Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide’ in drawing it to the world’s attention. Though provision had been made in the Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 to bring the Turkish-perpetrators to trial, the impetus soon weakened and in the place of justice came punishment by the Commandos, who sought out and murdered leaders of the Young Turks in Germany in 1921-22. The aim of the Commandos – and this was Caesese’s point – was not primarily revenge. Their most famous member, Soghomon Tehlirian, surrendered voluntarily to the police, hoping that a public trial would make the world more aware of the massacre. Tehlirian was tried, and acquitted, by a Berlin court – but even so the story of the slaughter all but disappeared from the historical record. Antonio Caesese recalled Hitler’s reported appeal to his worried colleagues when they doubted they could get away with a ‘final solution’: ‘After all, who today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?’