She said, We both feared the court would not decide to place the rapes within a larger program of ethnic cleansing. It was a difficult legal bar to meet. We struggled to prove intention.

Here was the problem, she said. Our case was focused uniquely on Foča even though rape had happened throughout the region. Because of this it was still possible to see the rapes as the depravity of individual men in one place and not as part of a widespread genocidal campaign. As the trial progressed, we sometimes had a cup of coffee together before going home. One of these times, William confessed to me that he was racking his brains trying to figure out what would meet the standard of widespread and systematic attacks on civilians.

I told him I’d never been exactly sure of the meaning of this English phrase, racking the brains.

I liked to tease him about language but he was not very accustomed to language play. So he answered seriously, It means tortured stretching.

I laughed and told him that it was exactly what I too had been suffering.

I told him that in the Srebrenica trial that was being conducted at the same time, patterns were becoming clear to me. There were three tactics in ethnic cleansing: kill a portion of people, beat a portion of people and rape the women. Life becomes so unbearable that anyone alive tries to escape. The intended result is that all the people leave.

William said, And so, in Foča, we know men were murdered, others were beaten and the women were raped over and over. In a single year, the entire Moslem population of the town was murdered, imprisoned or left.

Suddenly, from our refined articulation of the pattern, a new pattern appeared. It was our epiphany moment in this trial when, aha! we saw what we had been searching for.

We could finally see that the rape camps—throughout the region—were part of widespread and systematic attacks on civilians, and were not just the idiosyncratic behaviour of a few men in Foča.

We had finally stepped back together to see the larger picture. We had finally articulated a pattern that now appeared obvious. Rape was not about war booty or spoils. Rape was part of a widespread attack meant to result in the extermination of a people. Ethnic cleansing. It seems so obvious now. But for us at the time it was a consciousness shift. A new idea. And so obvious that we were certain we could make it hold up.

The law seeks truth but it does not define truth. People define truth. Now we had to take this truth to court.

—

I often made sketches of Dragić’s eyes. The eyelids drooped, as if he could doze with his eyes open, like a bored boy at the back of the classroom. When he was called to speak, his eyes were unnaturally open, two burning stones in bloodshot snow. He only relaxed when he spoke about military leadership. His eyes knew how to adjust to mountain darkness and how to threaten men into submission.