‘Invisible Human Engine’: Book Goes Behind Courtroom Battles at Yugoslav Tribunal

In the dead of winter in 1994, a former Australian police officer named Bob Reid stepped off a plane into the damp chill of The Hague. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, ICTY, had just been established by UN Security Council Resolution 808 as a idealistic diplomatic experiment to address the horrific war crimes then still raging across the Balkans.

There was no playbook, no judicial precedent since Nuremberg, and, as Reid recalls with a wry smile, the United Nations had not even allocated a budget for interpreters.

Armed with raw determination, Reid’s “Team 1” drove straight into the conflict zone, entering the infamous Omarska prison camp in northwest Bosnia under military escort to seize thousands of documents and floppy disks from local Bosnian Serb authorities.