All rise!

I must admit that there was a slight case of the butterflies when i walked into the Cantonal Court in Sarajevo yesterday. Bosnian courthouses are quite a phenomen to me. I first walk through the metal detector with a wide range of metal objects on my person. The machine rightly beeps and alarms the policemen observing me in a more than uninterested manner. He sort of looked at me like 'what the fuck are you doing here?' He decided not to check me, or any of the other potential bomb toting terrorists entering the courthouse. He was simply there to listen to the sounds of the beeps, beeps that proceded my entire wait in the courthouse lobby.
The walls were splatted with barely visible no smoking signs. Their visibility was blurred by the plumes of smoke rising from almost every sole in the lobby, sort of like a chain smoke-along. My lawyer finally enters - he is a young, blonde haired, blue eyed looking Slav. Although i had contacted him months earlier, this is the first time since my first de-breifing that we have met. Hopefully the other lawyer is less serious than mine, i thought. Thankfully, i was soon to find out, he was. A scruffy, messily dressed man in a Tito-era suit was sitting in front of the judges office. That would be my opponents lawyer. Luckily his rhetoric would be as poor as his dress as he immediately began to barrage the judge with irrelevant mumbo jumbo, as they say.

From the very beginning i was a tad concerned on how this slander case had been processed so quickly. Each civil suit judge has an approximate backlog of 1,500 cases. A week later, i am summoned. So i called to the mighty protectorate OHR for assistance. The OHR has a special unit for court observation -- which means that a young, talented and neutral legal expert will observe the case from beginning to end. After all, the man and his machine is well known for trying to buy his opponents -- and he mananged to persuade the entire parliament of the Federation of his victimhood. This move of mine could work for me or against me -- but the gamble goes a bit like this. There is always a chance of something really dodgy going down when it comes to the mighty businessmen of Bosnia and Herzegovina. They enjoy similar freedoms as the mobsters of New York and Chicago did in the 1920's. My request could piss the judge off, but then again, many of them are fully aware of the absolute lack of 'rule of law' that currently dominates Bosnian life. The court observation is quite simply a psychological boost for me....and even the judge. She must, of course, be more careful and thorough than usual i'm sure, but she is also rid of any pressure coming from the idiots corner.

So it was me, my young blonde lawyer, the scruffy opposing lawyer, the sharp dressed man from the OHR court observation unit, the kind judge and her clerk of the court. The room was blanketed in stacks of green folders. All cases long gone or yet to come...i could not decipher, however, which was which. The sharp dressed man kindly suggested that the judge request a shelving unit for the mess in her office, she nodded and claimed she hoped by the time we come back for the final hearing she would have sorted that out. I am willing to bet my left arm that the stacks of green folders will only be larger and wider spread in a months time, but who am i to judge? Anyway, off we went. The judge went around the room introducing everyone and making official statements for the court records (which were actually being typed into a computer!). It was long and boring, but i was glad to be there. I was not required by law to be present this time, but i felt that at least a tiny chunk of my future was at stake so what the hell.

I won't go into the long and boring bits....i shall spare you of the torture I had to endure. In the end, the opposing lawyer whined that he was being targeted by the eco-mafia (that's me of course) and that all the other ecological crisis' in the country were being ignored. He went on with even more irrelevant BS until the judge kindly intervened and inquired as to the relevance to the case. The scruffy man couldn't come up with an adequate answer and the judge asked him to move on, please.

What struck me more than anything was not the socialist style setting, the improvisation by almost everyone in the room, or the disorganization of the entire system, but rather the seemingly genuine gest of the scruffy man to make jokes and get to know me. He constantly made references to the talk shows for which i am being sued, playfully laughing at the duels me and his client had on national television. I, on the other hand, didn't find it amusing at all. Yet he kept on, and no one around really reacted. So i just sat there, slightly dumbfounded, realising that this is just a game to him....and whether he wins or loses is not really the point. The point became rather obvious -- we threatened and bribed you to shut up, you wouldn't. So now we will hassle and trouble you with this miserable bureacracy until you either give up or buy shares in the sand quarry that the man and his machine have become millionaires from. The stall tactic is by far the best one. Bury it in the sea of reforming and transitional public court system and my sand quarry is guaranteed to keep on truckin for at least another few years until this fun is over. Democracy, maybe. Speedy trial? No fucking way.