The alternative Balkan postal system

It’s still dark while I go down to Petrarkija Street, toward the Music Academy, disoriented and confused with the reality of the early Sarajevo morning. From the bell tower of the cathedral, right there around the corner, six o’clock rings out.

With the last toll of the church bell, the irritating sound of a Viber call pierces my sleepy mind. What is it now? I pick up the phone.

“Hey, where are you?”

She sounds angry.

I glance at my phone: 6:02. Damn cathedral. Is it possible God slept in this morning too?

“What’s the problem? I’m only two minutes late!” I say, getting angry myself. “We aren’t in Switzerland!”

At that moment I see her below — right at the corner of Štadler and Pehlivanuša, where we’d agreed, as she squats in front of her car. She spots me too. We both put our phones down. “Hajde, hurry up!”, she calls to me.

Rada doesn’t like when passengers are late. And not because she can’t be patient. When her job requires patience, she will wait, even for hours if she has to. But not today. Rada has a very tight schedule. At 6:05, just above Parkuša, we pick up a package. Dobrinja, 6:25, a young guy is waiting for us, he’s going to work in a hotel on the Albanian coast. Then at 6:30, in the Mojmilo neighborhood, across from the King Fahd Mosque — the biggest in Sarajevo, a gift from Saudi Arabia — we pick up a doctor. An upstanding woman, she often takes this ride. And then towards Pale, from where Ivana, a programmer, is heading to Belgrade for a work meeting and a family visit.

Rada knows that if I’m two, three or five minutes late, everyone else will need to wait at least that long, or perhaps longer, if we get caught at a traffic light. And Rada hates for her passengers to wait. Those awaiting her passengers and those who aren’t awaiting passengers but rather the packages Rada carries with her, which are usually not any less important, also hate to wait. Above all, Rada wants us to reach the Drina River and cross the border before traffic gets bad, which starts around 8:30. If we fail, all these people will wait a lot longer.

“You get it now, what the problem is?” she asks brusquely, after giving me an in-depth rundown of the situation as we blast down the empty Tito Street toward Marin Dvor at the speed of light.

I’m a bit ashamed.

“But what are you gonna do? We’ll get there,” she says. “How are you? What’s new with you? How’s your mother?”

***

Since she started taking passengers between Sarajevo and Belgrade 20 years ago, Rada has been performing an additional, but no less important, transport function, working as part of an informal postal network. She transports anything anyone wants to send, as long as it’s legal and can fit in a car. In most cases it can.

“One time a woman came up to me in Belgrade, she’d bought everything you can imagine, just walked into shops and started filling her bags. Gimme this, gimme that. She brings two huge sacks and asks, will there be enough room in the trunk? I take a look and on top of one of the sacks sits a giant bag of popcorn. Well, alright ma’am, I think to myself, do you really need to send the popcorn too? There’s popcorn in Sarajevo! But what can you do, she is sending it to her mother. We’ll find the room!”

This time around, it’s not just Rada on the job. My bag is also full of packages. I’m bringing a carton of Sarajevo’s Drina-brand cigarettes for a friend and the night before I was given an envelope with documents — what they are or who they’re for I don’t know, but it’s important that they arrive in Belgrade as soon as possible — as well as a pouch full of some strange powder with big chunks and a coarse texture. The man who handed me the pouch said the name of the substance but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Then he repeated it. I still didn’t understand but I decided to pretend I had. Now I’m wondering if it’s legal. I hope it is. He looked like a fine guy. The person who put us into contact to hand the package off also seemed fine. At any rate, better not to mention this to Rada. If there is room for the popcorn, there must be room for my weird powder.

***

A leap of 300 kilometers in distance and a few months in time, into a bustling spring afternoon at the Belgrade bus station.

With broad strides I head toward the hall of ticket counters. My steps grow tighter; the narrow hallway between the counters and the departure platforms is packed with passengers, suitcases, shouts, rushing, confused looks, hugs and kisses.

Amid the commotion, my eyes are drawn to an old analog station clock. The long white hands show a calming sight: it’s 15:49. I love it when I arrive early, even if it’s just one minute.

At that moment, my phone rings. “Where are you?” He doesn’t sound angry but it does sound like he arrived before me, and on time. I start saying that I was the one who came early, but then I glance at my phone. It’s 15:52. Oh God.

We meet at the entrance to the platform. We don’t know each other but recognize each other easily. He is holding a large box with a synthesizer inside, a package I need to deliver to a mutual friend.

I take the box. “Okay, that’s that,” and we part ways. I’m a mailman on an important mission and I don’t have the time to waste on courtesies. I run to a counter and buy a ticket.

Outside, at platform number four, the bus for Prishtina is filling up.

***

I started my “job” as a mailman in autumn 2020, when I first began traveling between Belgrade and Prishtina so often that people started noticing, and for people to notice it’s enough that you’re traveling more often than, well, never.

And so one day I got a call from a friend I hadn’t spoken with for a while but who somehow knew about my recent travels. A family from Prishtina was on vacation in Belgrade and their daughter had left her doll behind when they returned home. While the weather map on Radio Television Serbia shows Prishtina as part of Serbia, as far as the Serbian postal service is concerned, this city doesn’t exist, just like other places in Kosovo where Serbs aren’t the majority. Private delivery services are way too expensive. The only way the doll could reach Prishtina was for somebody to take it with them.

Would you mind doing that? It’s not urgent. But, actually it is. It’s her favorite doll.

The next time, a request came from the other side: Hey, do they still have that Skenderbeg drink? Please pack two for me, I really miss it! Then, in Prishtina: It’s not easy to find film for analog cameras, and there’s that one shop in Belgrade where it’s not expensive. Can you bring me some? A few months later, on the list of my successfully completed tasks were vinyl records of Belgrade’s New Wave, a kilogram of dried sausage, the keys to someone’s apartment, and the books by Petrit Imami about the common history of Serbs and Albanians (happily, but ironically, they had immediately sold out in Belgrade).

And that’s when I started noticing that almost all the personal exchange that exists between Kosovo and Serbia — between close family members, cousins and friends, between those who left, those who fled, those who stayed and those who were caught somewhere in-between — all this exchange depends on three buses that run day and night between Belgrade, Prishtina and Prizren, and on the small group of people who travel on these buses.

***

While the drivers in neat white shirts are hurriedly loading luggage, my attention is drawn to an old lady in black who is standing next to a giant plaid bag. It’s not clear to me how she got it here. She’s patiently waiting in line. She smiles at me. I think she likes me. We start talking.

“Where to in Kosovo?”

“I’m not traveling, son. I’m sending things to my family.”

I start to ask her what she’s sending them, but one glance at the enormous Chinese-made bag answers my question. It’s full of homemade food packed carefully into plastic ice cream boxes and large glass jars. Is that sarma? I also see an old plastic box of a brand of cheese from Sombor, wrapped in thick rubber bands so that whatever mystery it holds, perhaps a salad, doesn’t spill out during travel.

Her sister lives with her family in Gračanica, near Prishtina. She hasn’t stayed with them since corona broke out. She hopes to visit soon, perhaps next month, when she is done with some medical check-ups.

“Are you often sending things?”

“Not that often. They have food there, it’s not that they don’t. But they love it when I cook for them. Recently, my granddaughter celebrated her birthday. So, there is cake! It’s convenient this way, I just put it on the bus. Otherwise, it would be impossible.”

I stop and think how it would look at the counter in the post office to send homemade food. The serious face of the clerk looks you over through the glass. What’s in the box? A strawberry cake and sarma with dried ribs! How fast do you want it delivered? Immediately, so that it doesn’t go bad, you see how hot it’s been these days! Declared value? Priceless!

***

As I will find out through several trips and dozens of conversations with people who send and receive things across the Balkans, it’s not all just an issue of food and its perishability.

Uncle Pera is returning to Lipjan; that’s where his home has been for over 60 years. He had been on a visit to Belgrade. We are sitting together on a bus. Somewhere around the toll ramp at Bubanj Potok, I offered him some Plazma cookies. In return, when we stopped for a pause at a gas station somewhere around Pojate, he gave me a cigarette. I ask him whether he sends or receives anything from Serbia by mail. He decidedly says “no.”

“You never know with them! Two months ago, my son was looking for some car documents from a friend in Kraljevo. They still haven’t arrived.”

Uncle Pera clearly doesn’t trust institutions. And judging by the number of things that travel by bus everyday, he isn’t alone.

Sitting with the drivers in the semi-dark of a roadside cafe with the longing name of “Evropa,” I’m trying to figure out what everyone is sending. Most of the travelers sit outside waiting for the sign for departure.

“Are you trying to see if we’re carrying any drugs?” one guy asks me gruffly, as he offers me a piece of chicken he just pulled out of some aluminum foil.

He offered me chicken out of common courtesy. He asked the question out of open distrust. A journalist who writes about people who are sending stuff by bus? Why would anyone do something like that? And what does that exactly mean — are they sending some interesting things? What could be interesting there?

“Don’t worry, I’m not a police officer,” I tell him. I take out my journalist’s credentials. Afrim wipes his fingers and takes a look with genuine curiosity. A thought comes to me that people in this cafe have probably taken many things out of their pockets, but it is certain that this was the first time that somebody had taken out a card from the International Federation of Journalists. It seems to have some effect on him.

“What are people sending? Well, everything. Documents mostly,” Afrim says. “Paperwork for pensions up there, in Belgrade, for those who worked in firms before the war, for real estate, if somebody is selling something in Kosovo. Medicine. People also send money. Mobile phones, clothes. All types of stuff.”

“Do you sometimes experience any trouble?” I ask. Afrim gives me a sharp look. He again thinks that I’m a cop.

His colleague Edin enters the conversation: “It happens sometimes that people don’t show up to pick up their things. Or they ask us to wait for them someplace else… How the hell am I supposed to wait?”

“What happens with those things?”

“We return them to the agency and the sender goes to pick it up there.”

“Does it sometimes happen that no one picks it up?” I ask, imagining a magical antique shop, with various objects scattered around because people forgot about them over the years, each with its own history, ordinary and unusual story… Now, that would be something!

Afrim rudely interrupts my fantasy. “No, never. They always come. Come on, let’s go.”

***

Sending packages by bus or taxi, by driver, friend or acquaintance, is one of the most functional social inventions in the Balkans. It’s as fast as the speed of a car or bus. And in a place where railway and airline connections have been destroyed or simply canceled, it’s the fastest way to send or receive things.

One specific person — driver, friend or acquaintance — takes care of the delivery. It is a person you either know or at least met, someone you’ve shaken hands with at some point and exchanged a few words. It seems in those 30 or 60 seconds a level of trust is built that is so much greater than it’s possible to establish with any postal service worker, hidden behind the counter with their promotional stock photos of yellow vans that always arrive on time.

Who would you trust more, a company with a slogan that guarantees your shipment will be delivered in the next 48 hours, and which offers you the possibility to follow your shipment through a special code, or a driver who, when asked “when will it arrive, approximately?” — asked bashfully so as not to appear as if you are, God forbid, rushing him because he has every right to get there whenever he wishes — first looks into the distance, inhales a smoke, and exhales: “it depends on the rush hour, but not before nine”? And they always give you a time that’s too early. Better for you to wait, than for the whole bus.

Somehow, for an astonishingly high number of people in the Balkans, the right answer is B.

***

Finally, there is the issue of pricing.

When you send by mail, there are a number of relevant criteria. The weight of the object, its value and the distance and speed of the delivery. Postal websites and applications are filled with detailed tables and calculations enabling you to estimate the price down to the cent. With a calculator or without one, it’s often quite high. For example, to send a half-kilogram package from Serbia to Bosnia, without a return receipt, separate handling or air transportation, it will cost you around 18 euros. If you want to send that package to Kosovo via DHL, the price is around 50 euros.

But when you send it informally, that’s when you enter the field of a magical Balkan ritual, bounded by clear rules within which absolutely nothing is clear. When a friend or acquaintance takes a package, offering money for the service is like cursing their mother. An unwritten rule calls for inviting the helper to a glass of juice or coffee, but discreetly, to make it look like you aren’t inviting them only because they helped you out, but because you really want to get a drink with them.

At the same time, it is almost expected that they will reject the refreshment because neither of you has time nor desire for drinks. If the two of you wanted a drink, you would drink, without any packages. Though without that drink, you become indebted to the helper. Rest assured, if you ever do anything to displease this person, they will go around and say how they foolishly helped you when you needed it and this is how you repay them!

When it comes to bus drivers, things are a bit different. Every day, sometimes twice a day, they carry packages across borders, taking a risk (although, they often check what is inside; if it appears illegal, dangerous, or that it could break easily, they will refuse no matter how much money they are offered). They carefully keep track of what they are carrying and for whom and where people will await them. They write down names and phone numbers, call senders from dimly lit stops by the side of highways, arguing with people who are late or have simply forgotten to show up to pick up their packages.

To put it shortly, they expect you to pay them, and for good reason. But transporting things by bus isn’t quite standard, nor do the bus companies officially permit it, so there usually isn’t any official price list. It depends on what you’re sending and sometimes on the mood of the driver, but some charge the equivalent of a full bus ticket, others a half. Others allow you to independently set the price for the service.

And so we arrive at the precious social rule known as “However much you can give” (“Kol’ko daš”). As with everything else in this region, the rule isn’t what it claims to be. On the surface, you are free to independently assess the value of the service. However, what you are actually assessing is the assessment of the other side of the transaction, that is, how much money will it take so the other person is not offended. That’s why more often than not you pay more than the service is really worth.

All the same, it’s still cheaper than the postal service, and incomparably more fun.

***

We’re on a tight schedule but Rada allows for a quick break at the gas station because someone needs to go to the toilet. I use the opportunity to grab a cigarette, or rather, that’s what I wanted to do when I realized that I have none left. Luckily, I have a carton of Drina cigarettes that I brought to deliver to my Belgrade friend Bojan. He won’t mind.

The terms Drina and Sarajevo play a significant role in his life, and not just because of cigarettes. Bojan belongs to a small group of journalists in Serbia who have been bravely and consistently writing about Serbian war crimes in Bosnia of the 1990s. Every week, links to articles arrive in my inbox that, I fear, almost no one reads.

But Bojan isn’t giving up. He is currently working on a documentary about The Belgrade Circle, a not-so-small group of liberal intellectuals and peace activists that stood up against Milošević’s regime, wars and crimes in the early 1990s. Thirty years later not even a distant echo of their voices remains in Serbia’s political scene. It’s now just a memory in the heads of a small circle of devotees.

While we drive through Romanija, I feel like we are traveling through one of his stories. We pass through the beautiful nature of eastern Bosnia and see road signs with some of the most horrible toponyms from the war, places that many in Serbia have only heard about from Hague testimonies, as symbols of massacres, rapes, and ethnic cleansing. Here, just before Sokolac, that’s where we find the turn to Rogatica. You travel upward to reach Han Pijesak, then you go to Vlasenica, then Milići and Zvornik, and if you were to travel south from Zvornik, you’d reach Srebrenica.

Rada, a Serb refugee from Sarajevo, who fled the city at the start of the war, now lives in Pale, with a distinctly clear attitude about this topic: “We were lucky. Neither my family nor I were hurt by anyone, nor have we inflicted harm upon anyone.” If it were any different, I suspect that it would be impossible to do her job: “I went to Sarajevo immediately after the war. I have nothing to hide.”

Finally we reach the Drina River.

“I used to smoke Yorks from Rovinj,” Bojan tells me, “until all ties were severed with Croatia in 1991, so I switched to Drinas.”

Bad call, Bojan, because the ties with Bosnia didn’t last long either. He started smoking them again in the early 2000s in Sarajevo. Bojan loves Sarajevo; sometimes he just disappears there and comes back more alive than ever.

And why the heck am I bringing him Drinas, aren’t there any in Belgrade? Somehow, in March 2022 the 140-year-old Sarajevo Tobacco Factory, located in a country where almost a third of the adult population are passionate smokers, shut down. Old Drinas are still in stock though, and Bojan wants to smoke them as long as they last.

I wonder if we could claim the same thing for The Belgrade Circle. The anti-war idea in Serbia has broken down, and we have been smoking stocked goods for years. But they’re dwindling.

***

Gone are the days when the Merdare border crossing was a place where you expected problems, either as a Serb at the Kosovo checkpoint or an Albanian at the Serbian checkpoint. Nevertheless, as we approach from Kuršumlija, the bus somehow always settles down and the atmosphere becomes darker and tenser. There’s a feeling of sinister anticipation. Perhaps the scenes of desolation all around us contribute to that. Empty fields, empty streets, empty houses. And a completely empty road, which seems to lead to the end of the world.

Here and there, on signs along the road you see Albanian toponyms: Kastrat, Ljuša. The village Arbanaška is also nearby. But there have been no Albanians here for a long time. On a hill near Degrmen, two kilometers from Merdare, arise the dark ruins of Beć’s church, which was built starting in 1912 with money from Serb immigrants arriving from the Sandžak, Montenegro and Zubin Potok, who came for the lands of Albanians and Turks who fled to Kosovo after the 1876 Serbian-Ottoman War. Due to the poverty after World War I, work on the church was postponed for better times, which never came. There are not many Serbs left here either; the crumbling road to mythical Kosovo takes you through one of the poorest municipalities in Serbia.

The call echoes through the bus in Serbian and Albanian: “Prepare your IDs!” In honor of the mutual non-recognition of Serbia and Kosovo, for Kosovar and Serbian citizens, passports are invalid here. First, the Serbian policeman enters. In dead silence, he collects our IDs and carefully sorts them in his palm, and then goes out. After the check, the driver brings us our IDs back, but we get to keep them only for a minute, as it is now the Kosovar policeman that enters. The entire procedure is repeated.

All of a sudden, there’s a problem. The customs officer is lingering around the back trunk. He argues with the driver and shows him something. Passengers on the right side of the bus stare at him intently, and the left-side passengers stare intently at those on the right side because they can’t see the customs officer. What did he find? Will they let us through? Deeply buried fears rise to the surface. Suddenly, we know that anything is possible.

The driver shakes his head. The customs officer also shakes his head. It’s as if he doesn’t want to have to deal with this stuff. He slams the trunk door closed. I had the feeling that we all could breathe again.

We enter Kosovo. Now we begin seeing signs with Serbian toponyms, but no Serbs.

***

Belgrade, late May.

Lula greets me in the inner courtyard of an old villa in the center of the city. The street is packed with a hellish noon crowd. In the yard, full of delicate red and yellow flowers, there is complete silence.

Lula is just like that villa in many ways: elegant, sad and turned inwards. “I haven’t been out at all in a long time,” she tells me. “This is no longer my city.”

The letter and the bag were delivered to her neatly and on time. I decide not to inquire about the contents of theenvelope. I assume there was a reason that it was sealed. But I can’t bear to not ask about the bag of mysterious powder.

“Tarhana,” Lula smiles. “A soup mixture. My aunt Ešrefa from Travnik prepares this for me, and sends it through my nephew. They prepare it differently in Serbia. It’s good too, but I like hers. In Serbia, they usually say ‘tarana,’ as they don’t like that ‘h’ here because it was adopted from Turkish. Just like in Bosnia they started to insert it in places where it doesn’t belong.”

Lula has plenty to say about the packages that are sent between Belgrade and Sarajevo. Born in Sarajevo, she has been living in Belgrade since the end of the 1960s. She’s a person who, immediately after the beginning of the Sarajevo siege, collected and shipped humanitarian aid to the besieged city. She struggled for every shipment to reach who it was intended for. And she fought for thousands of them, shipments and people. “When I see cardboard boxes today, I feel nauseous.”

I leave her on the terrace of the old villa, carefully observing the flowers, while she slowly chews over the memory of a time when some resistance existed.

***

We are sitting in the restaurant Kraljevo, not far away from a big parking lot on Sarajevska Street in Belgrade, where Rada traditionally picks up and drops off passengers. Where else?

She spent the whole day in the car and is very tired but she finds the time to talk. She tells me how she has been fainting lately. The other day, she barely got in the car, but she didn’t give up. She transported her passengers and packages. She is receiving regular therapy now, and things will get better.

It’s a hot day. We order a light lunch, soups and cabbage salad. The tavern is empty and the waiter is bored, so he makes inappropriate jokes. Rada charmingly ignores them.

“Anyway, I have a story for you,” she tells me:

“In Sarajevo, there is this woman, Mirsada. She had a husband and a son. And the son had a friend, Marko, who didn’t have parents. She liked him a lot. So, anyway, Marko… Until then no one cared about what names people had. Normal people didn’t care about names. But that’s when the war started. She wondered what to do with him. Mirsada hid Marko in her house, so he wouldn’t get killed. She told me, ‘Rada, I kept him in the freezer. My child went off to the battlefield, and Marko was in the freezer.’

“She hid him until she found a person, somebody she could trust, so that she could get him into the territory of Republika Srpska, and then to Belgrade.

“And so, time goes by, and Marko becomes a very successful man. He starts a family, starts a business and everything goes flawlessly for him. And Mirsada, her husband dies, she stays with her son. And I don’t know the details, but somehow they got in touch with Marko. Imagine, after all these years…”

“And then,” Rada pauses, “then her son dies too. And Mirsada is left alone, and Marko becomes the only light in her life.

“Since then, since I’ve been working, he keeps sending her stuff. A bag of beans, peppers, walnuts, kajmak, a jar of honey. And he makes sure to send some money, 50 or 100 euros, but always with some food.

“So, I asked him once — Marko, my boy, you buy this food, and she has to go out and collect it and carry it back up to her apartment — wouldn’t it be easier for you to send her the money so she can buy it herself?

“He tells me, ‘Rada, I tried doing that but she is happy when she gets that box of kajmak and she can say — look at what my dear Marko sent me!”

And that’s when I finally got it. It’s not things that travel, it’s people. And only when people can’t, do they send things. But even then, in actuality, it’s not things that travel — but people’s feelings.

Editor’s Note: By request of the interviewees, some of the names in the text have been changed.

The travelling tribunal

Outside the courtroom, the sea shimmers. Atlantic waves roll in with white crests of foam. Through the window you can see the bungalows of a holiday resort, an infinity pool, and sunshades made of palm fronds. There is no one on the beach this early in the morning.

It is 17 March 2021 in Paynesville, a suburb of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, in West Africa. In the meeting room of a hotel, which has been converted into a courtroom, a woman is talking about how her son was murdered, some 20 years ago. She is wearing flip-flops, a purple skirt, and a pink headscarf. She bobs her leg and thumps her foot on the stone floor: clap, clap, clap.

Around the witness sit foreigners, white people: four Finnish judges (two male and two female), two Finnish prosecutors, the defendant’s Finnish lawyer and three interpreters. Despite the heat outside, the men are in suits and immaculately ironed shirts. The women wear dark blazers.

“When I reached my parents’ house, soldiers approached me at gunpoint,” the witness says. “The soldiers said, ‘stop! Don’t take another step’.” She describes how the soldiers hauled out everything her father owned from their hut. How they tied up her son, and set the whole village on fire. Her voice becomes quiet and anguished. “Then they shot, and my son was dead.” She begins to cry. From her pocket she pulls a small handkerchief to wipe the tears on her face. The session is adjourned.

After a quarter of an hour it continues. One of the two Finnish prosecutors asks:

“Do you know what the commander’s name was?”

“Yes, I remember it well.”

“What was his name?”

“Angel Gabriel Massaquoi.”

Angel Gabriel, like the Archangel, a messenger of God, and the accused’s surname: Massaquoi. A strange amalgamation.

Gibril Massaquoi is his official name. He was a warlord in the civil war in the West African country of Sierra Leone more than 20 years ago. After the war ended, a Special Court, backed by the UN, was set up to try the most serious crimes. Massaquoi testified as a crown witness, in return for which he was promised immunity from prosecution for his deeds in Sierra Leone. In 2008, he went to Finland, where he lived a peaceful, undisturbed life for more than a decade. Then his past caught up with him. A human rights organisation in Liberia had collected evidence. They accused Massaquoi of crimes committed in neighbouring Liberia, where a civil war was also raging at the time. They alleged that he had murdered, tortured, and raped. And since Massaquoi lives in Finland, it was a Finnish court that took on his case.

In recent years, many states have prosecuted crimes according to the legal principle of universal jurisdiction. It is a principle that only applies to the worst crimes: war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. In universal jurisdiction cases, the location of a crime does not matter. The crimes are prosecuted even when they occurred in a country thousands of kilometres away. It also does not matter if the alleged perpetrators have long since left their home countries. They are tried by the countries in which they now live.

In recent years many countries have applied the principle of universal jurisdiction: Germany has initiated proceedings against torturers of the Assad regime in Syria and against fighters of the “Islamic State”, France has convicted genocidaires from Rwanda, Senegal has tried the former president of Chad, and Sweden an Iranian executioner. Presumably, crimes committed during the war in Ukraine will also soon be tried in faraway courts.

The Finns, however, took this idea further than most. That’s why lawyers of a Finnish district court are now sitting 7,000 kilometres away from their hometown, asking a woman about the most traumatic moments of her life. Normally, the jurists work in a brick building in the centre of Tampere, Finland’s third largest city. Their experiment has been hailed as the “Finnish way” in international criminal law: Whole courts, with prosecutors, judges, defence lawyers, are travelling in pursuit of crimes – to hear the witnesses in the places where they live, to visit the crime scenes, to get a better understanding of what happened. They hope that this will bring them closer to the truth.

In the spring of 2022, after more than a year of proceedings, the Finnish court will finally pronounce its verdict in the case against Gibril Massaquoi. The result will turn out to be different to what everyone might have expected.

Juhani Paiho, 55, is the man presiding over the trial. He is tall; his head looks like it is carved out of hard rock. In March 2021, more than a year before the verdict, Paiho is sitting by the hotel pool in Monrovia, describing how he came to be the presiding judge in the trial. The other judges were horrified, he says, when the biggest war crimes trial in Finnish history was referred to their small district court in Tampere. But Paiho had googled Liberia on his phone and thought to himself, “You’ll never get a case like this again.”

Paiho is a civil-litigation judge. His bread and butter is maintenance payments, custody disputes, unpaid tradesmen’s bills. But he is also one of the few judges in Tampere with international experience. Years ago, Paiho worked for the European Union in Kosovo for some months. Because of this experience, small as it might have been, he was not only made one of the judges on the trial, but also given the court presidency.

Paiho has seen a lot since then. He drove for three days through the Liberian hinterland to look at crime scenes. He saw dirt roads dissolved in a thunderstorm. He stayed in a hotel where they gave him a bucket of well-water for showers in the morning. One night, he braved a termite invasion. Now he is back in Monrovia, still struggling to reconstruct what exactly happened in Liberia 20 years ago. “We are often unsure if two witnesses are really talking about the same event – or if they are talking about two completely unrelated crimes,” he says. He also mentions how strange the experience of testifying was for some of the witnesses that were brought to Monrovia from faraway villages. Several of them were petrified when they saw the ocean in front of the hotel. They had been told that evil spirits live in the sea.

It is often difficult for the Finnish jurists to tell how reliable the witnesses are – the cultural distance makes everything much harder for them; to interpret what is being said, to probe it, confirm it or disprove it.

Akaa prison in Finland is a 40-minute drive from Tampere, on a lake surrounded by birch and pine trees. 127 people are imprisoned there. One of them is the defendant, Gibril Massaquoi. In Liberia, the Finns could not guarantee his safety, so he stayed back in Finland. He attends his trial mostly via video link from a small room on the ground floor of the prison.

Massaquoi comes into the visiting room wearing a turtleneck jumper, trackpants and slippers. He has been here for two years. The circles under his eyes are deeper, his face gaunter than in the video footage from the war. But he still looks a decade younger than his 52 years.

Massaquoi was a spokesman for the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, of Sierra Leone. The rebel group started a brutal civil war in 1991 that lasted eleven years and is estimated to have cost the lives of 30,000 to 50,000 people. The RUF also chopped off the arms of thousands of men, women and children. Beforehand, the fighters often asked their victims, the cynical question: “Long sleeve or short sleeve?”

The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia were closely intertwined. Many soldiers fought on both sides of the border. The RUF supplied diamonds from Sierra Leone’s mines to Liberian president Charles Taylor. In return, the rebel group received weapons.

When talking to Massaquoi one has to remain careful and vigilant. Massaquoi is a media professional. As a spokesperson for the RUF in the late nineties, he regularly gave interviews to foreign journalists. He deflected, denied, and blamed others. When the RUF kidnapped several hundred United Nations blue-beret soldiers in 2000, Massaquoi stood in front of the world press and suggested that the soldiers might have merely got lost in the forest. He offered to send out a search party.

Shortly after the war, in 2002, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission began its work in Sierra Leone. Its final report said Massaquoi was “unique in the RUF” in that he remained a mystery even to those who were very close to him.

“Mr Massaquoi, the other fighters said after the war that you were a mystery to them. Why do you think that was?”

“Because they were jealous.”

Massaquoi never gets loud or aggressive in conversation, even when confronted with the most serious accusations. He instead politely says “thank you for the question”.

In the courtroom in Monrovia, a man tells the Finnish court how his wife and sister were murdered while they were preparing palm oil in the forest. He describes how their bodies were found: his sister lying on the ground, with a baby on her back. The small child survived, miraculously. Another man relates how he buried the half-decomposed bodies of his neighbours. The witnesses describe what happened to them with great emotional force. They show the judges the scars all over their bodies, their arms, and legs, and faces.

The first doubts about Massaquoi’s guilt begin with something that seems trivial in the face of all this visible, undeniable suffering: markers of time. For many Liberians, time is something they do not measure in months and years. It is more defined by the seasons, by the growth of fruits and crops. The illiteracy rate in the country is 51.7 percent. Many people are only able to vaguely estimate their own age.

In a courtroom, however, questions of time become crucial. Massaquoi’s Finnish lawyer, Kaarle Gummerus, asks each witness over and over again: When did this happen? In 2001 or possibly later, in 2003? Gummerus sits at his table, 57 years old, a stiff face like a poker player, and keeps repeating his questions about time until they begin to seem pedantic, almost cruel. The witnesses are often helpless. At one point, a former Liberian soldier says exasperatedly, “I can’t remember everything. My brain is not a computer.”

Gummerus, however, has a good reason for this line of questioning: Massaquoi has an alibi for the entire period after 10th March 2003.

Massaquoi never concealed who he was from the Finnish authorities. They knew who they were bringing into the country. When the United Nations Special Tribunal began its work after the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone, Massaquoi realised more quickly than others what was at stake. He offered to help as a key witness. The investigators of the Special Court for Sierra Leone interviewed him for weeks. The transcripts of his interrogations run up to 1735 pages. Thanks to him, several of the biggest war criminals were arrested and convicted. Massaquoi was not only guaranteed immunity from prosecution for his crimes in Sierra Leone, he was also included in the court’s witness protection programme. Investigators suspected that sooner or later word would get around in Sierra Leone that he was the traitor, who had talked to the investigators. Massaquoi was given round-the-clock armed security guards. He lived in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, until 2008. Then Finland, which had been very supportive of the special tribunal’s creation, offered to shelter him.

For twelve years Massaquoi led an inconspicuous life in Tampere. He lived with his family in social housing on the outskirts of the city. He cleaned the ice-hockey stadium, delivered newspapers on frosty nights. The Finnish police left him alone.

That was until the day the Finns learned that Massaquoi was suspected of having committed war crimes not only in Sierra Leone, but also in Liberia. No one had promised him immunity from prosecution for such acts. In May 2020, the Finnish police arrested him. It was still night, he had just returned from his newspaper round.

The police officers were amazed how calm Massaquoi was after his arrest. He lay down in his cell and fell asleep.

Why was he so visibly unimpressed?

When asked, he says, “I slept well because I am innocent.”

“But what about all the witnesses?”

“They are lying. All 91 witnesses.”

The Finnish trial of Massaquoi is the first war-crimes trial in Liberia. Unlike in Sierra Leone, key players in Liberia’s war remained in prominent positions after it ended. Almost all of them avoided criminal proceedings. Only the former Liberian president Charles Taylor was tried in The Hague in the Netherlands. Otherwise, none of the country’s warlords, generals and executioners have ever been prosecuted. And this despite the fact, that the war in Liberia was even more brutal than the one in Sierra Leone. According to estimates, 250,000 people died between 1989 and 2003, about ten percent of the population.

The perpetrators are in parliament today. They are presidential candidates. You meet them at the headquarters of Charles Taylor’s old party, the National Patriotic Party, which is now part of the governing coalition again. They live in large houses not far from the hotel where the trial is taking place. The Finns have entered a world where the past lives on beneath the surface.

Police inspector Thomas Elfgren has spent so much time in Liberia in the run-up to the trial that his driver has arranged a special number plate for the SUV he uses to drive around Monrovia, which reads: Tuffe1. Tuffe is Elfgren’s nickname. The Finnish police have made multi-week visits to Liberia on five occasions. Elfgren, 67, is tanned and slim. He walks around the city in short-sleeved shirts, three-quarter-length trousers and sandals.

On a morning in March 2021, the inspector is driving through the city’s dense Waterside market district. It is one of the three crime scenes where Massaquoi is alleged to have killed or tortured people. The SUV drives very slowly through the traffic jam. The alleys of the market are narrow, packed to bursting, with piles of stiletto-heeled shoes and pink bras, wheelbarrows full of T-shirts, toilet paper, mangoes, and prickly pears – a fruit that looks like a green, spiky heart.

At a crossroads, Elfgren points to the right and says: “This is where the dead were lying in the street back then.” Today there is a shop selling cooking spoons.

A few metres up the street was the shop where, on one occasion during the war, hungry people broke in to steal food. Soldiers came and opened fire. A witness says in court that he saw Gibril Massaquoi there, shooting people with a pistol. Another claims that Massaquoi had a knife and used it to cut a man’s throat. Still others say he did not kill with his own hands, but gave the orders. The versions are so different that no clear picture emerges of what actually happened that day. Nor can the witnesses say exactly when it happened – they cannot put a date on the murders.

However, they agree on one thing: the battle for Monrovia had already begun. The war had arrived in the capital. And that defines a precise time window for the murders: the battle for Monrovia began in June 2003 and ended two months later.

Massaquoi has an alibi for this period. He was in Sierra Leone, where the war was already over and the work of the special tribunal had already begun. Massaquoi was guarded 24 hours a day by the court’s security guards. Nevertheless, numerous witnesses claim they saw him in Monrovia at the time.

Something is off. Something is not right.

A storm comes in from the sea, fast and without warning. The rain pelts the corrugated iron roofs. It sounds like the growl of a huge, faceless monster. Then comes the thunder, so loud that the prosecutor, Tom Laitinen, winces. As a bolt of lightning flashes over the Atlantic, he covers his ears like a child.

52-year-old Laitinen has a prudent temperament. He often takes long pauses in conversation, as if he needs to sort out his thoughts. The pressure on him is immense. It is an expensive trial. It was Laitinen who suggested moving it to Liberia. He believes you understand things better when you see them in front of you. “We have to assess the whole person, his facial expressions, his gestures, how he speaks. You can’t do that nearly as well on video as when you’re in the same room.”

Laitinen admits the witness interviews are nevertheless often unpredictable for him. “It’s still not clear to me what questions I need to ask to elicit their most important memories.”

In few areas of modern politics is the belief in “progress” as strong as in international criminal law. The dream: a world in which organised, mass cruelty is banished by law. A future where the thought of a prison cell deters potential mass murderers from unleashing their troops.

In reality, justice crawls behind the violence with agonising slowness, often years or decades late. The business of justice is costly, frequently thankless and not infrequently futile.

When the Finnish police arrested Massaquoi, they found a book manuscript on his computer. 372 pages, entitled: The Secret Behind the Gun. Massaquoi says he started writing it more than two decades ago, while he was still in the RUF; it is a mixture of biography and political treatise.

In it, Massaquoi says his family was so poor that he often only ate one meal a day. When the RUF forcibly recruited him, he was in his early twenties and a mathematics teacher at a Catholic school in Pujehun, in southern Sierra Leone, on the border with Liberia. “Actually, I would like to have been an accountant,” he says.

In the text, Massaquoi remembers his first meeting with the leader of the RUF, Foday Sankoh, at a training camp. In an awestruck tone, Massaquoi writes: “We jogged alongside him. It was an electrifying moment.” Later, Sankoh made the young Massaquoi his personal assistant. In the most brutal scene in the book, Massaquoi describes how Sankoh, who was not to survive the civil war, had a woman killed. Sankoh ordered his soldiers to douse her with hot palm oil and then tie her feet to a tree “where she hung,” Massaquoi writes, “until she died”. In our interview in prison, he calls Sankoh a “caring man”.

The Finns are friendly and reserved guests in Monrovia with a curious two-part daily routine. From morning until afternoon, they are their professional titles: a judge, a prosecutor, a defence lawyer, and a policeman. In the evening, they take off their official hats for a few hours. Gummerus, the defence lawyer, and Laitinen, the prosecutor, sit together and eat spaghetti bolognese in the humid night heat. Paiho, the judge, chats by the pool with Elfgren, the police inspector. They talk about their children, their hobbies, about stomach upsets. They are not only closer to the witnesses here, but also closer to each other than they would ever be in Finland. In the end, they will have spent 16 weeks together in West Africa.

In court, it quickly becomes clear that the prosecutor Laitinen is not getting anywhere against Massaquoi’s alibi for the murders in Monrovia. But there are two other alleged offences. Massaquoi is also suspected of being responsible for crimes in the interior of the country that happened earlier, sometime in 2001, long before he turned crown witness for the Special Court.

Lofa County is beautiful and poor. The landscape is hilly. Along the roadside are kapok trees, 70 metres high, the oldest of which were already standing when slave traders dragged people from this region onto their ships 250 years ago. Plumes of smoke rise above the forests. Farmers are clearing land for rice fields.

The village of Kamatahun Hassala is situated on a hill. The houses are made of mud bricks, the roofs of corrugated iron. There is a small mosque. The witnesses in court described this village. In their memories it appeared as a hellish place. During the war, hundreds of people from the surrounding area were rounded up here. Dozens were burnt alive in huts.

Witnesses claimed in court that a soldier who called himself Angel Gabriel gave the orders. One man said this commander tortured him with electric shocks and then urinated in his mouth. Another said that Angel Gabriel had a man killed in order to make soup out of him. In the narratives in court, he is the decisive figure in the massacre.

But when you go to Kamatahun Hassala alone, without a judge or prosecutor, to talk to survivors on the spot, a different picture emerges.

Varfee Konneh lives in a small two-room house. In the bedroom hangs a poster of the American singer Alicia Keys. Konneh grows rice in cleared paddies, just outside the village. When the soldiers came, he was 12 or 13 years old.

He says he saw everything. How people were herded into one of the houses, young men and old, women and children. The fire. The dead.

He only survived because the soldiers used him as an errand boy, says Konneh. He was cooking food and fetching water. Then, while collecting water, he fled.

Who was the commander of the soldiers? Konneh says only one word: “Zigzag.”

Joseph “Zigzag” Marzah was a notorious commander in Charles Taylor’s army, a man who bragged about eating people, even after the war. Few names have spread such terror in Liberia. Marzah is a free man today. He never had to face justice for his crimes.

Three other men in the village who say they were eyewitnesses to the massacre mention this name to DIE ZEIT. They all say Joseph Marzah gave the orders.

Konneh says that fighters from Sierra Leone were also involved in the killings in Kamatahun Hassala. But neither Konneh nor any of the other men can remember a man who called himself “Angel Gabriel” or Gibril Massaquoi. None of these villagers have appeared before the Finnish court.

When Konneh returned to the village with a small group after more than a year on the run, everything was empty and overgrown with plants. “The first few nights,” he says, “we heard voices in the darkness.” They were ghosts, he says.

What did they say?

“Alilor e va ngor? Zizamazza lov e par ngor.”

Who killed me? Zigzag Marzah killed me.

Kaarle Gummerus, Massaquoi’s defence lawyer, sits in his hotel room in Monrovia in a polo shirt and gym shorts, pointing at the screen of his laptop. He has listed all the witnesses interviewed by the Finnish police. Most of them were shown a selection of photos with twelve faces, one of which was of Massaquoi. The witnesses were supposed to identify him.

In the Excel spreadsheet, the lawyer sorted the witnesses by location and date of interview. If someone chose Massaquoi’s picture, the tile is dark green. Those who did not identify Massaquoi show up as a blue tile, and those who were not sure as grey.

Gummerus points to the block of witnesses from Lofa County: it’s almost all blue, with a few grey blocks in between. Not a single tile is green. Not one of the witnesses from Kamatahun Hassala or the surrounding villages identified Gibril Massaquoi as the perpetrator.

71 of the 91 witnesses were shown the photos, and only eight identified Massaquoi. They all came from the capital Monrovia. Massaquoi has an alibi for all their accusations.

“Strange, isn’t it?” says Gummerus.

The man who started the case, who brought it to the Finnish authorities, is sitting on the rooftop terrace of the Boulevard Palace Hotel in Monrovia. Up here, the city is just a distant roar and muted honking. Hassan Bility shows off his scars, one in the crook of each arm. “This is the mark he left behind.” He means Massaquoi. That’s where the rope cut into his flesh, he says. Bility is a short man with ears that stick out. He is the best-known human rights activist in Liberia.

The scars he shows are the result of a common torture method during the Liberian civil war: the arms are tied so tightly behind the back that the tips of the elbows touch. It is immensely painful. Within minutes you lose all feeling in your arms. Bility says it was Massaquoi who tied him up like this, in 2002, in a Taylor-regime torture cellar in Klay Junction, 35 kilometres north of Monrovia. It is the third alleged crime scene. The Finnish prosecution has charged Massaquoi with torture based on Bility’s account.

Bility was a journalist, one of the few who dared to write critically about Charles Taylor. Taylor’s security forces arrested him several times, tortured him, and finally expelled him from the country. Bility went to the USA. After the war, he came back and founded a non-governmental organisation, the Global Justice and Research Project. Bility’s organisation collects evidence against Liberian war criminals living abroad and forwards it to European and American prosecutors. Several war criminals are already in prison as a result of his work, including in Switzerland and the USA.

In 2009, Bility appeared as a witness in the trial against Charles Taylor in The Hague. There he mentioned for the first time that Massaquoi had tortured him. Bility recalled it thus: “He asked me if I knew what the name Gibril meant and I said yes because I speak Arabic. I said it means Gabriel. He said, ‘Okay, I am your Angel Gabriel’.”

At the time, no one cared about that statement. The case was about Taylor, not Massaquoi. It was only years later that Bility’s organisation gathered more evidence of Massaquoi’s guilt – triggering his arrest in Finland.

The strange thing is: Bility was the only one who ever mentioned that Massaquoi had called himself “Angel Gabriel”. In none of the many texts about the RUF, in no interview, in no other source – not even in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Sierra Leone, which is several thousand pages long – is this nom-de-guerre ever used.

Until the Finnish trial, that is. Then suddenly the vast majority of witnesses were saying that Massaquoi had called himself “Angel Gabriel”.

How does all this fit together?

Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that the Finnish police officers around Elfgren needed help when they came to Liberia for their investigation. They needed someone who knew the country, who could find witnesses and translate interviews. They needed a fixer.

Anyone who knows as little about a country as the Finns do about Liberia is at the mercy of their local assistants. The interpreters control what the outsiders understand and what they don’t. The Finns hired a man named Albert Kollie, who was one of 14 employees of Hassan Bility’s NGO. The Finns used him for several months, paying his salary during that time. Kollie was absolutely indispensable to them. He located almost all the witnesses in Monrovia and Lofa County who testified against Massaquoi in court.

Kollie was not supposed to interview potential witnesses himself, but only to pass them on to the Finnish police, who would then conduct the interview. This was important: memories are easily manipulated. The mere naming of a suspect can lead witnesses to believe that they recognise him as the perpetrator. The victims have to come up with the name on their own.

In court, Kollie described his approach as follows: “I asked the witnesses if they would be willing to talk about the activities of the RUF. I did not give names. I told them to just tell the police what they had experienced. Some then wanted more information, but I told them: No.”

Anyone who proceeds in this way will run into many dead ends, and have numerous conversations with people who remember the war, remember murders – but do not remember the suspect. Normally, a lot of time will be wasted, before the right kind of witnesses are found.

But that didn’t happen.

In just three and a half months, Kollie found dozens of witnesses who blamed Massaquoi for countless crimes in Monrovia and Lofa County. He had a spectacular rate of success. When Kollie is asked to explain in court how he managed to do it, he says he simply went around the city. “I go to the Ataya shops”, he says – places in the centre of Monrovia where mint green tea is served. He also claims that he found other witnesses on public transport, in buses and shared taxis. He discovered one man buying soap. Each time he overheard people talking about the war. Kollie says he never explicitly asked for Massaquoi.

Massaquoi’s lawyer finds this increasingly implausible. He asks why every single witness Kollie found could remember Massaquoi, of all people.

“I don’t know, I just accepted what they told me,” Kollie said.

Did he insist that the witnesses mention Massaquoi?

“No, not at all.”

Albert Kollie says he came across Gibril Massaquoi at every turn.

This, almost certainly, cannot be true. In other, much more thorough investigations, like the 2009 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Liberia, there is not a single trace of him. The commission recorded more than 17,000 testimonies from the war. But neither Gibril Massaquoi nor “Angel Gabriel” are ever mentioned. If Massaquoi committed war crimes in Liberia, it was in secret. There cannot be that many people who have stories to tell about it.

Why didn’t the Finnish investigators notice that something was wrong?

At one point during our interview, presiding judge Juhani Paiho said that people tend to smooth out stories, look for coherence, fill in gaps. Especially in a foreign country. There is often no other way to proceed.

Albert Kollie gave the Finnish police investigators what they wanted: a guilty person. They willingly accepted the gift.

Furthermore, in doing so, the Finnish court unwittingly provided an incentive that made it easy to manipulate witnesses. Everyone who testified in the trial was given a travel allowance that was small by Finnish standards but huge by Liberian ones. Most witnesses went home with around $100, and some who said they came from far away pocketed up to $500. The daily allowance, without travel expenses, was $20 for witnesses was.

Juhani Paiho, the presiding judge, says he cannot imagine that this massively influenced the witnesses. But the Finns sometimes do not seem to grasp just how poor the people sitting in front of them are. The median daily income in Liberia is two dollars. Many of the witnesses took home enough money to feed their families for several months.

There is no guarantee that physical proximity will bring you closer to the truth. You can be very close and still only see the wrong thing. You can travel a great distance and still misunderstand everything. At the same time, the courtroom is a good corrective. In cross-examination, inventions often fall apart.

War crimes trials must leave the possibility of acquittal. They must demonstrate that, under the rule of law, the consideration of evidence is wide open. Even someone like Gibril Massaquoi, who was deeply involved in one of the cruellest wars in recent decades, must be able to hope to go home a free man in the end, if the crimes he is accused of cannot be proven. Even the acquittal of a bad man can be right.

It is a cold, rainy day in November 2021 in Tampere. All the witnesses in Liberia have been heard, the alleged crime scenes have been visited. The court is back in Finland and Massaquoi is being questioned a second and final time. He is wearing a black bomber jacket and a grey turtleneck.

His defence lawyer asks him, “How many times did you go to the special tribunal in the spring and summer of 2003?”

“Several times, whenever they needed me.”

“Did it ever happen that the investigators wanted to see you and you weren’t there?”

“No, never.”

Massaquoi gives detailed information from 9.30am to 6pm that day. He remains calm, he takes notes, everything he cites sounds plausible. At the end he says: “Nobody in their right mind would do what the prosecution is accusing me of.” No one would go from the safety of a witness-protection programme into a war zone, into the realm of a megalomaniac dictator who had his confidants killed by the dozen because he suspected them of treason.

Massaquoi has an alibi for the murders in Monrovia. Of the alleged witnesses in Lofa County, no one can identify him. And in the case of the torture in Klay Junction, it’s one man’s word against another’s. “I was never there,” Massaquoi says.

All this does not mean that Massaquoi is innocent. Maybe he did kill in Liberia, maybe he really did torture Hassan Bility. But it cannot be proved.

The verdict comes on 29 April 2022, in writing, and sent by email: “The accused Gibril Massaquoi is acquitted on all charges”, it says on page 31 of 850 pages.

Kaarle Gummerus, Massaquoi’s defence lawyer, says on the phone that he will demand compensation for his client of several hundred thousand euros for the long period in prison.

Tom Laitinen, the prosecutor, appealed the verdict earlier this week. Massaquoi himself says he wants to write a PhD thesis – about his own trial.

Translated by Voxeurop.