B.C. lawyer takes on Milosevic Peter Goodspeed National Post The Associated Press Dirk Ryneveld When a defiant Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, made his first appearance before an international war crimes tribunal this week, he angrily stared his accusers straight in the eyes -- and the man he faced was a Canadian. Dirk Ryneveld, a 55-year-old lawyer and former deputy regional Crown prosecutor from Victoria, has just been handed what will likely be the most challenging legal assignment of his career -- prosecuting the first world leader ever to be brought before a court on charges of committing crimes against humanity. In a 30-year legal career, most of it spent prosecuting high-profile murder cases and all Crown criminal appeals on Vancouver Island since 1985, Mr. Ryneveld says he has never faced so complex or important a case. "It's a humbling experience and an awesome responsibility," he told the National Post in a telephone interview from his office in The Hague, in the Netherlands. "We're at the cutting edge of developing international humanitarian law." As the lead prosecutor on a five-person team, Mr. Ryneveld will be responsible for proving Mr. Milosevic had "command responsibility" for a terror campaign of murder and deportation against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo carried out from January to June, 1999, by the Yugoslav army and police, the Serbian police and Serbian paramilitary units. Legal experts say the burden of proof being placed on prosecutors in the case is tremendous and the outcome of the trial may hinge on prosecutors proving that, while Mr. Milosevic may not have been directly involved in the Kosovo killings and deportations, he should have known about them and taken steps to prevent them. "There are a number of historic firsts that will be dealt with in a case of this nature," Mr. Ryneveld explained. "First of all, the magnitude of the case itself. There is no domestic jurisdiction case where you have got this multitude of victims. You just don't have this on such a massive scale. "Then there's the fact this is the first time you have got a head of state who is charged with crimes against humanity. Even the Nuremberg trials [of German Nazi leaders after the Second World War] didn't prosecute a head of state. It's a very, very significant thing." "And finally, when you consider that the victims are looking to the ICTY [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] in order to see that justice is done, the responsibility for seeing there is a fair trial and that all the rights of the accused are protected and the sheer mass of evidence to be dealt with, is all overwhelming." It's a long way from dealing with impaired driving cases, street crime and domestic violence on Canada's West Coast. The sense of history unfolding is compelling, but Canada's decades-old commitment to seeking justice in the international arena is what really motivates him most, says Mr. Ryneveld. "Canadians have a remarkable history of being at the forefront of the development of international criminal law," he says. "Canadians, generally, aren't aware of the role their country is playing. It's not only the lawyers -- people who get most of the attention -- but there are police officers, forensic scientists, court reporters and a whole host of Canadians who are working their butts off over here for the enhancement of international law." It's a Canadian tradition that goes back to a time when Clarence Campbell, the former governor of the National Hockey League, served as one of the chief international prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. In the Milosevic case, the initial secret indictments that were issued against the former Yugoslavian president were prepared by Louise Arbour, a Canadian who served as the war crimes tribunal's chief prosecutor before being appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. Now, Mr. Ryneveld, who was born in the Netherlands but immigrated to Canada with his family when he was six, is picking up the case and prosecuting it after Mr. Milosevic's historic arraignment in The Hague on Tuesday. "The fact Madame Justice Louise Arbour was working here at The Hague made a big difference in my decision to apply" for the job as a war crimes prosecutor, Mr. Ryneveld said. "I had a tremendous amount of respect for the work that she was doing." As a Crown attorney in British Columbia, Mr. Ryneveld took charge of most of Victoria's murder cases over the last 25 years, including the prosecution of the teenage killers of school girl beating victim Reena Virk and the case of a man who claimed he suffered from multiple personality disorder when he raped and murdered 16-year old Dawn Shawn in Victoria in 1993. He joined the war crimes tribunal in the Hague as one of six lead prosecutors in 1999 after taking a five-year leave of absence from his job in Canada. Mr. Ryneveld made legal history earlier this year as the chief prosecutor in a case that established, for the first time, that systematic rape and sexual abuse of women is a crime against humanity. In that case, three Bosnian Serb soldiers were convicted and given sentences ranging from 12 to 28 years in prison for raping and sexually enslaving Muslim women in a prison camp in the town of Foca in 1992. The trial, led by Mr. Ryneveld, heard how Muslim women and girls were rounded up by Serb soldiers, imprisoned in a school and sports hall, enslaved, tortured and constantly raped or gang-raped for a year. In one instance, a 12-year-old girl was raped almost daily for 35 days before her "owner" sold her to a fellow soldier for about $165. She was never seen again. "We've found there have been injustices [in the Balkans] that were exposed by the international media in our living rooms on a daily basis" during the wars that followed the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Mr. Ryneveld said. "One could not simply see the plights of those victims and not feel that justice had to be done. "We represent the hundreds of thousands of victims who have no other way to vindicate what has been done to them," he added. "Their rights are in our hands and we are very much aware of that and want to do it right. It's a real heavy responsibility." http://www.nationalpost.com/news/national/story.html?f=/stories/20010705 /609917.html Miroslav Antic, http://www.antic.org/ Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
