IT WAS A DAY OF RECKONING for Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb war criminal, and a day of reckoning for me.

On March 24 I stood outside the United Nations war crimes tribunal in the Hague, surrounded by dozens of men and women who had survived massacres and concentration camps and rapes during the Bosnian war. I had joined the gathering on Churchillplein before the announcement of the tribunal’s verdict for Karadzic, who was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. I noticed a female security officer from the U.N. weaving back and forth through the crowd, trying to reach me. I realized, as the officer grabbed for my wrist and tried to put handcuffs on me, that my freedom was at issue on this day, too.

“She’s crazy, she has no jurisdiction,” I shouted at a Dutch police officer who stood before me stone-faced. I didn’t try to run. I was on Dutch territory so I assumed the Dutch police would not allow a U.N. officer to arrest me. Having no police powers, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia had always depended on member nations to execute its warrants—but this was about to change. Ironically, the tribunal’s first arrest by one of its own officers was going to be of a journalist who had reported on warlords and mass killers, rather than an actual war criminal.

Within the time it took to do an interview on Croatian television recounting the U.N. security officer’s initial and failed attempt to arrest me, backup from the tribunal had arrived. I understood what was happening when the Bosnian survivors around me began to yell, “She’s ours, we won’t let you take her away.” I was in the middle of the fray, protected by the already-martyred bodies of women and men who had come to receive justice from the very same tribunal they were now opposing by trying to defend me. I was ashamed, angry, shocked.