At War Against War Crimes
Natasa Kandic isn't the most popular woman in Serbia. She's been called a witch and a prostitute, gets more hate mail than junk mail, and recently had to cancel a television appearance due to a bomb threat. "That just goes with the job," says Kandic, 57, who runs the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade. "I don't think it's me they hate, it's my message."
But she won't shut up. For more than 10 years, Kandic has loudly exposed atrocities and human-rights abuses committed by Serbian forces during the breakup of Yugoslavia. She launched the HLC in 1992, after years as a union activist, and quickly set about producing detailed reports on ethnic cleansing and mass rapes in Bosnia. The day when NATO started bombing Yugoslavia, in March 1999, was probably the most dangerous moment in her life. "I knew terrible things were about to happen," she remembers.
So Kandic jumped into her car and drove some 400 km by herself, dodging NATO missiles and police roadblocks. When she got to Podujevo, in Kosovo, she was shaken by what she saw. "I spoke to women and children who were robbed, then held in burning houses for intimidation. I saw the houses, the rooms in which the bodies had been burned. I saw bones among the ashes."
She believes the truth is slowly trickling out. "The courts are starting to seriously consider some war-crimes cases from Kosovo. And more and more people from security forces are coming out to admit abuses," she says. Lately, Kandic succeeded in persuading several ethnic Albanians, who saw their relatives killed by soldiers, to come and testify against them in a Serbian court. "This will be a benchmark case," she says. "The wall of denial is cracking."
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