This week we went to both the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court. Originally we were supposed to see a hearing for Karadzic but that finished early so we missed it. Then we were going back to see a contempt hearing for Vojislav Seselj. You watch one of his other contempt hearings here. He manages to be offensive and spout off ideology within the first minute. I only watched the first three minutes and my favorite part is when he says that he plans another seven proceedings for contempt of court. Hopefully we will get to see an actual hearing there at some point. We got to see the Chambers and hear a presentation about the Court. My favorite part of that was when they showed us pictures of all the accused war criminals hanging out in the detention center at Slobodan Milosevic's birthday party.

At the ICC the opposite occurred. We missed a presentation by the prosecutor's office so that we could see the sentencing hearing for Thomas Lubanga, which is the first case ever decided by the ICC. He was convicted for the use of child soldiers in the DRC. We saw the tail end of the Prosecutor's statement. It was his very last day. He really did a horrible job at prosecuting this case, which ultimately helped lead to my ACCEPTED comment proposal. (Woohoo!) The explanation of the problem I am writing about is here. So it was especially exciting for me to see this hearing since I will spend approximately 200 hours working on this paper. Lubanga himself made a statement for the first time throughout the trial. He didn't admit to using any child soldiers and thus didn't apologize for what he did. However, in some ways he appears to be a scapegoat for the greater powers within the conflict in the DRC. He was put in prison by the president and then they are the ones who handed him over to the ICC. I'm not saying he didn't do anything wrong - he was convicted - but I think a lot of these cases are more complicated than they appear. He also pointed out how far removed we are from the conflict in the DRC and he would have preferred for the hearing to be witnessed by people from his own community who could judge him properly. The ICC only takes cases when the country's own courts cannot genuinely prosecute the case. He wouldn't have been able to be fairly tried by a jury of his peers either, but it was a poignant moment.

I'm really interested in the DRC because of a piece I wrote about it several years ago (available here). I also researched another article that involved the DRC and coltan, which just makes my heart hurt. And last summer I saw a play called Ruined at Arena Stage and it was just amazing. It has really stuck with me.

Unrelated topics: I really love blood orange juice. It's one of my favorite things in Europe. The other day I bought tzatziki yogurt and got really excited about it. Totally wasn't tzatziki, though. Nope, not even a little bit like the deliciousness of tzatziki.

The Netherlands is out of the running for the Euro Cup. I vegged out watching it the other night and enjoyed making up a fake soap opera between the players and the refs. They also had a commercial for a bank that showed Castro making a speech with Dutch subtitles and the crowd going nuts. It was something you would never see in the States and was hysterical. And last night I learned that the Dutch makes jokes about WWII. The soccer game was between the Netherlands and Germany and a Dutch guy was telling us that the announcer said "Tonight we have a chance to get revenge for the five year occupation of the Netherlands." And at another game some fans had a banner that said something like, "Our Dutch grandmothers want their bicycles back!" Because there's a joke here that all of the Germans rode away on bikes when they left. Ironically, his girlfriend is German and she was like, "Yeah, it's way too soon. It's good that the Dutch people are over it and can joke about it, but we still have a lot of problems with it." I think it's better than the situation in India, in which there were several times that someone would make an anti-Semitic comment and then I would find out they had never even heard of the Holocaust and really just truly believed antiquated Jewish stereotypes. Teaching moments. The interesting part of that to me is that while Ghandi was awesome and all, ultimately Indian independence happened because Britain couldn't afford their colonies after WWII and these university-educated Indians had never learned about WWII at all. But India was a very India-centric country, probably very similar to how they would view the US and our knowledge of South Asian issues.