BEYOND BORDERS

One day in early 2010, Wellington-born David Harland entered the gates of a prison known as Scheveningen, after its location in the wealthy northernmost district of The Hague, in the Netherlands. The prison, formally known as the United Nations Detention Unit, houses people waiting to appear before the International Criminal Court.

Having completed security formalities, Harland, who was at the time working for the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), was escorted to a cell, where he took the proffered hand of the occupant – a man called Radovan Karadžić.

That name has chilling echoes for anyone who remembers the bloody civil war that racked the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Karadžić once held many leadership positions in the nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was, from 1992 to 1996, the first president of Republika Srpska, the Serb-dominated entity of Bosnia, a position that constitutionally vested in him the supreme command of the Bosnian Serb armed forces. In these capacities, Karadžić presided over the deaths of countless non-Serbs.