In near-empty cafe, an interview yields few clues

The following account of an encounter with Marko Boskic, a Bosnian Croat and suspected war criminal, is taken from a book by the late Elizabeth Neuffer, who reported extensively on the war in Bosnia for The Boston Globe. The excerpted passage begins the prologue to the book, "The Key to My Neighbor's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda," which was published in 2001. Neuffer was killed in a car crash while reporting in Iraq in May 2003.

Let me begin as it began for me: glimpsing evil in a man's soul.

The man I've been expecting has just swaggered up to my table in this smoke-filled caf, followed by one of his henchmen and the aroma of cheap cologne. Like any city tough, his hands are jammed into his pants pockets and his muscular shoulders strain at the seams of his cheap black leather jacket. But when he looks at me, his eyes are as empty of expression as pure glass.

He pulls up a chair, summons the waitress, and sends her scurrying to get brandy, beer, more coffee, with the arrogance of a Mafia don. He sits down on my right, blond and mustachioed, and cocks his eyebrow. The war-hardened soldiers slouching at nearby tables, their cigarettes drooping from their lips, nod with approval. They believe this man, a fellow soldier, to be a hero. But I've been searching for him for six weeks because I believe him to be something else: executioner.

I am in the Bosnian-Serb half of Bosnia and Herzegovina and it is 1996. Peace is so newly minted here in the city of Bijeljina that civilians still don't venture onto the streets. Only a mere seven months have passed since this man and others in the Bosnian Serb 10th Sabotage Unit rounded up 1,200 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and led them to an abandoned, grassy meadow at a collective farm just down the highway from here. They ordered the men to turn their backs and kneel on the ground. Then, as their captives wept and pleaded for their lives, they shot them.

At the time, I'd been reporting from Bosnia for more than two years, and I still couldn't understand what turned neighbors of long standing into killers, rapists, torturers: whether it was ideology or hate or madness or history or blood lust that made civilization's constraints vanish.

I had wanted to talk to this man's commander, General Radislav Krstic. But Krstic has quit Bosnia for neighboring Serbia, where I was rarely granted a visa. So I had set out tracking down this young soldier instead, whose name I had gotten from Bosnian Muslim war crimes investigators. I've spent nights searching for him in drafty bars filled with grimacing thugs and pounding rock music, and days hunting him down . . . I've come too far now to turn back. Never mind that I am the only woman in the room, save for my translator, Alex, and the waitress; never mind that suddenly the interview karma doesn't seem quite right. Much later I would offer the typical journalistic defense: The interview had been my editor's idea. Because Marko "Macak" Boskic was not in a cooperative mood . . .

"Where did you get my name?" he demanded, leaning over the wooden table.

"From Erdemovic," I lied, naming a soldier from his unit, Drazen Erdemovic, who had recently confessed to the executions to international war crimes prosecutors in The Hague, Netherlands. In truth, Erdemovic would later identify Boskic as part of the massacre squad.

"That traitor," Boskic sneered. I took this as an opening.

"Look, I'd like to talk to you about Srebrenica-- I want to talk to you about your side of the story," I gushed nervously, referring to the massacres, which I had been told he participated in, that followed the fall of the UN safe area of Srebrenica and left thousands of Muslim men and boys dead. "Were you ordered to kill those men? Why did you do it?"

Silence. . . .

There comes a moment in every interview when you realize things are not going as planned; in this case, I'd just realized Boskic was not going to tell me why he had executed those men, after all.

Instead, a flush appeared on Boskic's cheeks . . . His hands, when he raised them, were trembling, even as he held them out toward my translator and me as if he would strangle us like chickens whose necks he'd break with a wrench of their heads.

"Would you like to get whacked?" he hissed. "I want you to forget this street and this restaurant. It doesn't exist anymore for you. Don't come looking for me any more. I cannot guarantee the safety of your lives."

And with that he stood up and strode from the restaurant, stopping only to point us out to several Bosnian Serb soldiers sitting at a nearby table, still carrying guns and clad in camouflage, despite the war's end. One winked at us. Another glared. The waitress arrived with more coffee. We drank it, wiser -- and yet no wiser -- than we had been before.

Perhaps I was nave in trying to interview Boskic, although I had known killers to brag about their exploits. Though I found out nothing new about the Srebrenica massacres, I did learn something else, something that had eluded me in the many months I'd spent reporting on one atrocity in Bosnia after another: why victims, particularly those who knew their tormentors, struggled so to put the demons of those memories to rest. Before I met Boskic, he was a name; afterward, he became a nightmare. Once you put a human face on evil, it will not let you go . . .

This young man had allegedly killed unarmed men who had surrendered -- a heinous crime, by any measure -- and yet he walked away from my table, free. The more I thought about the fact that Boskic had flouted society's rules with impunity, the more I felt a growing sense of injustice. . . .

What I realized was that there is an innate human need for some kind of reckoning, an accounting.

Like everyone I met in Bosnia, I wanted something that would assuage my guilt, answer my fears, and punish those who were responsible. I wanted order imposed on a world that would right the wrong that Boskic and his men had committed that day. I wasn't sure what outcome was best: Boskic on trial, Boskic forced to apologize for his crimes, Boskic forced to pay reparations.

But I did know this: I wanted some kind of justice for Boskic -- whatever "justice" meant.

Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Picador USA.