They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

THEY WOULD NEVER HURT A FLY: WAR CRIMINALS ON TRIAL IN THE HAGUE by Slavenka Drakulic is a nonfiction work to follow her fictional piece about the war in the Balkans: S: A Novel about the Balkans. In this book, Drakulic writes chapters on various accused war criminals from the war in the former Yugoslavia. To write the book, she traveled to the Hague and observed the trials. She is a native Croatian, and now lives most of the time in Sweden.

Drakulic's writing is clear and strong. At times she imagines the homelife of the various accused invidividuals or what their thoughts or surroundings might have been as they proceeded through the war, doing what would eventually land them in The Hague, but her imaginations aren't unethical or posed in a way that is difficult to separate from the facts at hand. Drakulic is really an "everyman" trying to understand crimes which seem incomprehensible to others. She struggles throughout the book to do so by examining individual cases in depth.

The various chapters deal with different crimes and individuals in the various regions of the war in Yugoslavia. For example, in chapter 3, "A Suicide Scenario," her first chapter about an individual, she writes about a Croatian man who testified for the authorities against other people in his village, and who was eventually killed by a bomb in his backyard after the war was over. She writes about the "You took a television" defense among townspeople in small villages after the war (and the war crimes) ended. Perhaps someone saw someone execute a Muslim or a Serb citizen in the street, but if he were to mention it, the perpetrator of that crime would remind him that he stole things from the home of that murdered man, and he would fall silent, ashamed of his own act, not recognizing the differences in the crimes, not willing even to take responsibility for a stolen TV. As the chapter on the murdered Milan Levar (the man murdered for cooperating with investigating authorities) shows, many Croatians despised the tribunals, wanting to try people themselves. But what they wanted more was to ignore the crimes, according to Drakulic.

Another chapter that was fascinating was "He Would Never Hurt a Fly" about Goran Jelisic, a Bosnian Serb. Jelisic liked to fish, and before the war, he was involved in minor criminal activity, but was a very relaxed, friendly man. She writes that he looked like someone you could trust, and since he is the age of Drakulic's daughter, she imagines him as a friend of her family's, coming over, sitting around, talking. The Tribunal sentenced him to 40 years for executing 13 civilians; however, it is believed that he actually killed more than 100, most of whom were Bosnian Muslims. In his trial testimony, people spoke of how he helped them during the war. In fact, even Muslims from his town testified about how he helped to save them. Yet in the camps, in which Muslims were rounded up and imprisoned, he randomly chose men to shoot in the head, and he made them place their heads over a grate because he hated the mess. He seemed to revel in his power and kept a running tally (out loud) of how many people he had killed.

Other interesting chapters deal with a man who was a Serbian soldier and was brought one day to a field near Srebrencia. Then the busses started coming and unloading men. All day he shot men, Muslims from Srebrenica (where ultimately around 7,500 civilian Muslim men were killed). And in the beginning of the day when he protested, the other men in his group threatened to kill him. In fact, there was one he knew didn't like him and wanted him gone (because he had mixed parentage). Or the chapters deal with more famous men on trial: Ratko Mladic, a general in the Bosnian Serb army, and the suicide of his medical student daughter after she took a trip abroad (did she find out about what her father was doing while in Russia?) and Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, Mira Markovic, their strange bond, and their ruinous (former) control over Yugoslavia and Serbia.

The final chapter, "Why We Need Monsters" and the epilogue are powerful statements on the vignettes Drakuliæ has told in her book about the trials, the individuals on trial, and therefore the very personal side of war. Drakulic wants to know how ordinary people can turn into horrifying demons in a time of war. Why are some people so willing to kill? What would another do in the same place? Given that personality is emergent, it's a frightening yet fascinating question.

"The more I occupied myself with the individual cases of war criminals, the less I believed them to be monsters. What if they are ordinary people, just like you and me, who found themselves in particular circumstances and made the wrong moral decisions? What might this tell us about ourselves?" (pp. 167-168).

It is this understanding of what might lie within the "normal" man or woman that we don't want to know. As she says, we would rather study an exotic insect in the Amazon than understand what we have at home.

The heartbreaking epilogue is about the prisoners in Scheveningen detention unit in The Hague, where the accused are housed as they await trial or their verdicts. The Croatians, the Serbs and the Muslims accused of crimes who are housed here seem to get along. They cook for each other the food from their homelands, even though the disputes over those lands led to the deaths of 200,000 in Bosnia alone. Drakulic realizes that the fact that these men, who were leaders in the conflict and key instruments of its terror, can get along when they choose to means that the war was for absolutely nothing.

Subtitled "War Criminals on Trial in the Hague", this 2004 book is the third that I've read by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic. Born in 1949 and growing up under communism in the former Yugoslavia, she never expected that Communism would collapse and she'd be thrust into a war where formerly friendly neighbors started murdering each other. More than 200,000 people were killed during the Balkan wars in the early 1990s and there are over 80 people now in The Hague on trial for war crimes. Ms. Drakulic recently spent a full five months observing her trials. And this book is the result of her observations.

The trails are poorly attended. Sometimes she was the only observer there. The people on trial come from various backgrounds and from different countries. Each has been accused of mass murder. And they all were surprised to be arrested, thinking themselves as heroes, not as criminals. Thus is the way of war.

The book is short, a mere 206 pages, broken into 13 different chapters, each chapter dealing with a different person. Of course there is a chapter on Slobodan Milosevic as well as his wife Mira, who was the most feared woman in Serbia, writing a column that could end someone's political career or sending a person to prison. But there are also chapters on lesser known war criminals. What about the soldier who was assigned to the killer squad which did nothing but shoot bound and blindfolded prisoners who were delivered to their place of murder by bus? And what about the soldier who made sport of going into the prisoner's barracks and selecting out a few each night for torture and murder? There are people on trial who gave the command to murder thousands. And lesser known criminals who do not have anyone willing to step forward and accuse them.

One interesting fact is that these people are all in a detainee center together now awaiting trial. They are not fighting each other though. To all intents and purposes they are friendly and cordial to each other, getting along well and seemingly forgetting the horror that they have recently inflicted on each other.

All this is told through the author's eyes, of course. She discusses her own life and uses it as a mirror to better understand the minds of the accused people. She respected and feared her father, not unusual in her country. She was friends with people of different ethnic groups. And, most of all, she never thought that such bloodshed could happen in the country she loved and had her life disrupted by the war. This book is also a personal examination of her own feelings.

This is a good book although sometimes not pleasant to read. But I do acknowledge the author for writing it. And, for me, it definitely did shed some light on the recent tragedy in the Balkans.

As Drakulic admits toward the end of this slim book, she cannot get away from 'the war'. Though she is Croatian, 'the war' is the entire breakup of Croatia and Bosnia from 1991-1995.

Instead of another story about the victims of that war, she looks at the perpetrators and studies the war crimes trials at the ICTY in The Hague.

The book is an attempt to paint a selection of the perpetrators not as 'monsters', which is the easy and obvious thing to do, but as human beings. It's an attempt to be honest for a moment, though not a complete attempt. But she takes a selection of known and not so well known accused war criminals and tries to show something about them as people, something that shows that these are human beings that are being accused and convicted of unspeakable behavior.

Among the well known figures are, of course, Slobodan Milosevic, whose chapter is called Beast in a Cage. It's a very good, if not obvious observation about this man. Despite so many articles, and stories, and at least four biographies, there is very little the outside world seems to know about this man's personal life, about him as a person. In the end, he really does look very gray, the ultimate bureaucrat who figured out how to stay in power for a long enough time before it all came crashing down. She depicts him as a man of no warmth whatsoever, which is consistent with many other descriptions of him. She invokes the thought that 'Evil is the absence of empathy', which is certainly relevant in many of these cases.

Other notable characters from this rogues gallery include Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb army, and still at large. Responsible for one of the most heinous atrocities of that lousy war, the Srebrenica massacre, Mladic is depicted as a man who did evil to others, and was punished from above by the suicide death of his daughter. Drakulic believes that not only will he be punished for life by her loss, but also by his likely failure to ever understand the reasons.

There is an executioner from the aforementioned massacre who received a 'light' sentence due to the circumstances--complete fear and being trapped and surrounded by death-intoxicated comrades. Two women get the consideration as well, the ladylike Biljana Plavsic, who plead guilty at The Hague and expressed remorse, and Mirjana Markovic, wife of Milosevic, who is living in her own world, it seems. While not on trial, she escaped to Russia, now wanted by the Serb government.

The writing is smooth and simple and the book is filled with memories of Drakulic's childhood as she relates to some of the characters via common references to a country that no longer exists. The ending two chapters about 'why we need monsters' and some final thoughts becomes a bit much since much of it is indeed obvious, as is she requires praise for speaking what more and more commentators should be speaking about these trials. The people involved were indeed human, they were 'ordinary' in some circumstances, even, but a combination of pressures, and circumstances, and elements inside them made them act in ways that horrify and mystify us. Yes, indeed, looking at these people from ground level, and not from above, will help us learn something about ourselves, which is of paramount importance.