Scripts of Silence: Performing Justice in Sarajevo’s Terrorism Trials
What Bosnia’s courts show, and what they leave unsaid

Open Court, Closed Questions

The first time I entered a courtroom for a terrorism trial in Sarajevo, the room was nearly empty. The defendant, in a worn black shirt, stared at the floor. The judge barely looked up. No one spoke. The silence carried the weight of a verdict already formed.

From that moment, I understood that access to Bosnia’s courtrooms was more than a procedural right. It was an invitation into theatre, where justice, suspicion, and national identity were staged before an audience that often never arrived.

These trials, mostly involving Salafi-coded men returning from Syria, were less about individual responsibility than about performance. Law was not just applied. It was enacted, with silence as a central line in the script.

The Routines of Access

By regional standards, the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina is unusually open. Hearings are announced online. Final judgments are available through request. PR staff reply promptly. Yet openness was never just administrative. It unfolded through rhythms, reputations, and quiet negotiations of trust.

One early visit remains vivid. I waited alone in the ground-floor lobby: shiny floors, whitewashed walls, once a military barrack. The receptionist dialed upstairs. Minutes later, a woman from Public Relations descended and said simply, “Follow me.” That pattern repeated every time. Request, wait, approval—each step part of the choreography of access.

Some documents came quickly. Others arrived only after weeks and reminders. Trial videos carried restrictions: they could not leave academic hands. After one leak, the rules tightened, and I was sometimes watched in the archive as I marked the pages I needed.

Interviews with judges or prosecutors were even more delicate. Emails rarely sufficed. Presence mattered. Trust was built face to face, over time.

Eventually, I was recognized. Not always welcomed, but familiar. A clerk once handed me transcripts before I asked. “You are here often enough,” she said. It was not praise, not reproach. It was recognition. I had become part of the theatre.

Curated Transparency

Access is often imagined as a path to truth. In Bosnia’s terrorism trials, it revealed something else: the perimeter of what the system was willing to show. On paper, hearings were public, files accessible, footage available. But access was curated—shaped by precedent, habit, and control.

The same curation structured the trials themselves. What unfolded in the courtroom followed a script: what was spoken, what was omitted, who was named, who was ignored. The omissions revealed as much as the evidence.

What mattered most was not only what I could access but what I could never hear. The same silences that framed the trials also shaped how I, as an observer, was drawn into them.

Being There

At first, I was out of place. A guard asked if I was lost. A lawyer waved me away. I was not part of the scene.

Over time, repetition made me familiar. My presence became routine, and the courtroom revealed itself as theatre of selective recognition. I saw which ideologies provoked prosecution. I noticed what was absent, what was never asked.

In Bosnia, where war lingers in law, courtrooms are not neutral. The judiciary remains ethnically divided, politically contested, shaped by postwar compromise. It mirrors the state’s anxieties: about loyalty, deviation, and belonging. Justice here avoided what it lacked the will to confront.

Defendants, too, learned their roles. Some performed contrition. Others withdrew into silence. No one resisted. Resistance had no script. The stage allowed guilt or silence, nothing else.

What Remains

I never saw a woman on trial for terrorism, except for Sena Hamzabegović, acquitted for financing. Their absence was telling. It reinforced the image of terrorism as a masculine threat, narrowing public imagination and leaving unexamined the roles women played as supporters, organizers, or resisters.

There were no courtrooms for far-right violence, no hearings for those glorifying atrocity, no trials of men returning from foreign far-right battalions.

Gavrilo Stević joined a pro-Russian militia in Donbas. His case was dropped because the group was not on the UN terrorist list.

Toni Bašić’s (Neo-Nazi) terrorism charge was reduced to “incitement of national hatred.”

The pattern was not incidental. It revealed the implicit code of Bosnia’s postwar legal culture. Salafi-coded defendants were punished not only for their actions but for what they symbolised: transnational religious identity, ideological deviation, and moral nonconformity.

Far-right violence, by contrast, was absorbed into the nationalist mainstream. It was not invisible. It was normalised. In this theatre of law, the courtroom did not simply prosecute. It rehearsed a consensus, decades in the making, where ethnonational boundaries were policed as much through silence as through speech.

What I learned came less from transcripts than from glances, unasked questions, and the fear beneath the law. The entire process was staged, with silence carrying as much weight as testimony. Each omission, each unanswered question, was part of the script.

I think back to that first defendant, head bowed, silent before the judge who barely looked up. The verdict was already present in the hush of the room, rehearsed long before it was spoken. In that silence, the state revealed not only its judgments but also its anxieties, performing them again and again for anyone willing to watch.

References

Buljubašić, Mirza, and Vlado Azinović. 2023. Criminal Prosecutions of Foreign Terrorist Fighters in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo: Atlantic Initiative.