By Nick Mansfield
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| A photograph taken by ABA ROLI (then CEELI) staff of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. |
Former ABA ROLI (previously the Central European and Eurasian Initiative also known as CEELI) Country Director, Nick Mansfield, recalls his trip to Sarajevo alongside Judge Pat Wald with fondness after the Dayton Agreement was signed:
“In February 1996, I accompanied Judge Wald to Sarajevo. I was working for CEELI in Washington, overseeing our new program in Bosnia, and we were going to participate in a conference on judicial independence that CEELI was organizing, the first post-war event of its kind. The Dayton Peace Accords had been signed less than two months before, so the situation in Sarajevo, while hopeful, was still tense after four years of war. Simply getting to Sarajevo was quite a challenge in itself. Commercial air travel had long since been cut off, so the only viable option was to take a NATO military flight from Zagreb. This required arriving in Zagreb at least a day or two in advance to go through bureaucratic hoops to obtain a special UN card, without which one could not attempt to book a military flight. Once we had the cards in hand, Judge Wald and I went to the military wing of the Zagreb airport to try and catch a flight. This required getting our names on a mystical flight list, hand-written and ever-shifting; civilians like us were routinely bumped from the list if the military needed the spaces. On the first day at the airport, try as I might, I could not get us on the list. I had to report back to a clearly irritated Judge Wald that we would have to spend another night in Zagreb and try again the next day. The following morning we went back out to the airport. As I got out of our car, Judge Wald told me in no uncertain terms that she would not tolerate failure again. Gulp. I headed to the appropriate window, where I found myself next to a French colonel also trying to get on the flight list. He was told the list was full and stormed off in a huff into an adjoining office. I followed him. He picked up a phone and began talking to someone about his problem, and from the sound of his side of the conversation, he seemed to have gotten himself on the list. As he reached to hang up the phone, I grabbed it from his hands and managed to convince the person on the other end that I should get three spots as well (in addition to Judge Wald and me, a member of the Austrian Supreme Court was in our party).
I reported back to Judge Wald that we were in business, but the next step was a four-hour wait in a freezing cold military hangar. No problem for Judge Wald. Finally, we were told to board a C-130 transport plane that was waiting on the tarmac. Judge Wald and I and the Austrian judge were the only civilians on the flight; the other passengers were American soldiers in their camouflage uniforms wearing Kevlar and helmets. Judge Wald was wearing a trench coat and carrying a briefcase. I’m fairly certain Judge Wald had never been on a military flight before (neither had I), but she wasn’t fazed in the least. There are no seats on a C-130, just rows of facing benches. She strapped on her harness, put in her earplugs and off we went. When we landed in Sarajevo less than an hour later – there are no windows and no flight attendants cheerfully announcing arrivals on a C-130, you just feel the sudden impact of the wheels on the ground – we were told to step lively and not dilly dally on the tarmac, as snipers in the surrounding hills apparently had been known to take an occasional potshot despite the cessation of hostilities. Needless to say, we followed those instructions, making a beeline for the shipping containers stacked three or four high along the edge of the runway that offered protection from the hills. Charles Rudnick, the intrepid local CEELI liaison who had arrived in Sarajevo just a few months before, met us at the airport and drove us into the center of town, a complicated process involving crossing NATO checkpoints and what had been the front-line during the siege of Sarajevo. As we were arriving a day later than planned, there was no time to waste and we walked straight into the unheated conference hall, where our event was already underway. Within minutes, Judge Wald was at the podium, still in her trench coat and warm gloves, and calmly delivered her presentation on the principles of an independent judiciary in the American experience. The audience of judges, lawyers, law students and others, just emerging from war, deprivation and isolation, were thrilled to be in the presence of an American judge. It was an unforgettable moment.”
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of ABA ROLI.
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