I had one reason only for including The Netherlands on my Eurail pass, and it was for this: to sit in on one day of the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in The Hague. I wasn’t sure I could actually do this, nor whether or not I would have the time to get there and back, so when I finally made the mad dash to get there I was utterly unprepared for visiting this country—didn’t know a word of Dutch, didn’t have a clue where the trial was being held, didn’t even know which languages were spoken there. I felt like such a moronic American tourist…it was terribly discomforting. (Thankfully I asked a Thalys stewardess, who was French, about the language question, and she made it absolutely clear to me that English would serve me better in the Netherlands than would French, and she was even overly polite by expressing surprise that I was American when I mentioned that [this being all in French, of course].)

While the Swiss seemed placidly peaceful, I found the Dutch in The Hague to be more satisfied in their peacefulness; The Hague was full of life, and of activity, buoyant and contented. Certainly everyone was very nice and helpful, as well as patient with this clueless (but apologetic) traveller, and I’ve never seen so many bicycles in use before. My favorite amenity of the city was the clocks built into the tram/bus stops, a feature I wish all cities would implement.

After I got to town, I strolled with my bags north of the train station, trying to find a hotel away from the typical just-off-the-train crowd. It took awhile, but I finally found a little place in the middle of town (on Veenkade) with a very steep 4-floor stairway and a nice little room on the top floor, as well as a helpful woman running it. Although she didn’t know where the Milosevic trial was being conducted, I figured I’d go out for a stroll, find at least a Dutch phrasebook, and learn the answer one way or another. Alas, it was late afternoon when I arrived, and I searched in vain for a contemporary bookstore (antiquarian ones I found aplenty) before I encountered a little copy-shop with Internet access and decided to just go online and get the information from the ICTY’s website (not knowing how hard that would turn out to be).

And it was there, in the last 60 seconds of the half-hour of online time I’d purchased, after checking email and catching up with friends back home, that I read about the assassination that afternoon of Zoran Djindjic, Prime Minister of Serbia. I was devastated…he wasn’t perfect, he had his faults and probably some dodgy ones at that, but honestly he was the last hope Serbia seemed to have for moving on from its bloody way of perpetuating historical wrongs and finally becoming a modern European country.

So it was that I wandered only half-aware of the city around me after that, trying to wrap my brain around the possible repercussions of his assassination, despairing of any forward movement for that suicidal little country. One thing was certain, however: I was definitely going to sit in on Milosevic’s trial the next day, and I was going to be watching him with even more cold scrutiny than I had thought I would do, watching to see if there was even a hint of a smirk…I had (and have) little doubt that Djindjic’s assassination is Milosevic-related, though to what degree may remain unclear for awhile (although the ensuing results of the assertive state-of-emergency investigation and arrests have been more encouraging than I expected).

I walked north until I found the unassuming little building on Churchillplein where the ICTY trials took place, and I made mental note of the time it took to walk there from the area of my hotel. On my way back to the middle of town I passed the Serbian-Montenegrin embassy, where I wasn’t surprised to see most of the lights on.

The next morning I walked back to the ICTY building in the Scheveningen area of The Hague, and I found my way through the indifferent and unclear system for accommodating visitors until at last there I was, the first person in the public gallery, watching the court crew set up for the day’s sessions. The courtroom is long and shallow, partitioned into two even shallower areas by a wall of eleven floor-to-ceiling glass panels which separate the public gallery from the courtroom itself; I gather the court’s side of the glass panels is tinted or mirrored so they don’t have the distraction of seeing their viewers. The public gallery had three seating areas: press/media on the left, VIPS and guests in the middle, hoi polloi on the right. Unfortunately this meant I was on the other side of the room from the Defense area, but it didn’t matter much in the big picture.

And then there he was. Slobodan Milosevic, in the flesh. I was fascinated. Such beady eyes he has, in person; he looked like a big, colicky baby with a tie on. I don’t say that to mock him, I say it because that was exactly what he looked like. His speech pattern was especially interesting as it revealed a lot about his character that transcripts alone didn’t convey: in cross-examination he would start in a near monotone, a sort of pompous drawl, as he restated some bit of the witness’s testimony, sounding every bit the bored Communist official (which he was, after all), and then he would raise his voice in volume but generally not in pitch, to quite an intimidating boom at times, haranguing all within earshot about how this could not possibly be so…. It was interesting, but not at all persuasive, at least not in his favor.

The witness that morning was Zana Baca, art historian and archaeologist with the Institute for the Protection of Cultural and Historic Monuments of Dubrovnik. I was surprised by the fact that they had the witnesses with their back to the public gallery, but I suppose since they’re more of a closed arrangement in there it makes sense to have everybody facing the center. She seemed fairly calm, slightly uncomfortable perhaps, but this was the second of her two days of testimony and her only day of being cross-examined. Of the amici I saw only Mr Kay, and for the Prosecution Ms Uertz-Retzlaff was doing the examining. Judge May was shorter than I had pictured (Judge Robinson being the tallest of the three) and slightly overblown in his admonishments, as though he’d consulted a bad drama coach once or twice for tips; I don’t know, though…maybe that’s how judges are in the U.K…. The Usher was actually fascinating to watch in action, believe it or not—a very tall and agile young man who stooped almost apologetically to avoid blocking the cameras when he placed or removed various exhibits.

Milosevic ended Ms Baca’s cross-examination with an astonishingly tasteless dismissal of the Dubrovnik evidence in general as being “kitsch.” He really is appalling.

After the day’s sessions were over I went in search of lunch. Well, actually, I had an errand to run first: I walked back to the main north-south road, walked the several blocks northward to the coast, strode across the beach to a rocky outcropping, took off my right shoe and sock, and, in tribute to Billy Connolly, I put one foot in the North Sea. (For any Billy fans who know what I’m referring to: nothing disappeared.) Then I had a good laugh about it, dried off my foot on my pants leg, and then went to find food.

The salad I had for lunch (see sidebar) was so huge that I had to go for a long walk afterwards to process it. Consulting my map, I saw that the Hook of Holland was a ways west of where I was, and although it was unclear as to whether or not I could reach it before nightfall I decided to give it a shot. So I walked through northwestern parts of The Hague before finding a network of paths among the sand dunes along the North Sea, and I walked westward on them and on the beach itself for some hours, thinking (often out loud).

After almost two weeks of travelling alone and not having to endure the situations in my life which had made me so stressed out ahead of this trip, I finally had cleared my head enough to take a stab at analyzing what I was up against and what it would take to fix things. Work, home, lust, finances, housing, career—all this and more, each trying to be my top priority…I had to think things over. The upshot of what came as a result of this little mobile therapy session was that I had to deal with each of these challenges on its own for awhile, instead of trying to solve all of them at once with a miraculous panacea. Work and housing were going to be the two first up when I got back to the U.S., I decided, both needing to change very soon, so I spent much of my walk dealing with each of those and gauging my actual circumstances in each perspective; the question of career was going to have to wait awhile longer, and in the meantime I just had to keep pouring mental fuel into my tanks and trust that it would be of some use later; lust and the whole romance thing were going to remain moot, as they have been for several years, so there was no point in me getting worked up over any of it; and so on.

Unfortunately I was doing all this while walking on a beach in dress shoes…shoes that were not designed to support feet on such terrain. So as the bottom of the sun was about to pass the horizon, I turned around and headed back to The Hague with wearied legs and a slightly dragging step which grew more and more into a limp. At dusk I still had a long ways to go and didn’t know what to expect in the line of tides, so at the first access point I rejoined the dune path network. Night slowly took over the sky, and there I was limping along the paths by starlight and a bit of moonlight, with no other lighting, thinking how odd it was to see such a faint shadow on the ground before me, dark grey on grey….

I made it back to the hotel around 9:00 that night, which I think means I walked for 6 hours. Now, that’s not necessarily a lot of walking, for me—in early September of 2001, on a got-to-get-away-from-it-all sudden trip to Manchester, New Hampshire (don’t ask), I managed to walk halfway to Concord along train tracks and unhurried routes before realizing I still had to get BACK to my hotel in Manchester somehow, and by the time I returned to the south end of town (where my hotel was) I was limping so badly that I had to seriously consider booking a new room in the first hotel I came to just so the pain would end sooner. But in this case it was the combination of the shoes and the terrain that did me in, and it took me a couple of weeks before my right foot was fully back to normal.

Which is why even I will admit that running for a train the next day in Brussels was so excruciatingly stupid.

Previous   •   Next

Text © 2003 Mark Ellis Walker, except as noted