The war crime trials at The Hague

Contemporary Review, Oct, 2004 by Amna Whiston

They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague. Slavenka Drakulic. Abacus. [pounds sterling]8.99 p.b. vii 183 pages. ISBN 0-349-11775-6.

People in the Balkans will continue to reject the war crimes tribunal for as long as they refuse to search for the truth, commented Slavenka Drakulic from The Hague, in 2001. Sadly, she was right. Milan Levar, a Croat from the small town of Gospic was killed in front of his child, back in Gospic where people treated him as a traitor, shortly after he appeared as a witness of war crime at the Hague. His killer, also a Croat, was never arrested by the local authorities. What Levar witnessed in 1991 was two Croatian military officers ordering the killing of some 120 Serb civilians. Slavenka Drakulic, the internationally acclaimed Croatian novelist and journalist, spent five months in The Hague following the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The result is this lucidly written publication in which she closely examines several war criminals, including Slobodan Milosevic, provides insights into their lives and families, and discloses shocking details about their crimes, as well as the surprising responses to these trials by their compatriots.

Slavenka Drakulic's central appeal here is the need for truth. As long as there is little desire for the truth in these societies, she notes, the justice will have to come from The Hague. She discusses World War II, noting that the interpretation of that war in the local history books, filled with legends rather than true facts, made this latest war possible. The ruling Communist Party concealed the truth from the people. The people who fought the former war, in fear of prosecution, never spoke the truth. Their emotional memories of World War II, whilst not in harmony with the official interpretations, proved to be dangerous. She then goes on to warn that if the truth about this, the latest war, is not brought out and accepted, the next generation will face the same predicament.

There is nothing new in the points the author makes about the causes of the recent war in the former Yugoslavia, and the way she insists on the truth has the political naivety of a creative writer. It is however her personalised style that makes this book particularly absorbing. When, for example, she discusses the psychological effect World War II had on people, she mentions her father who fought in it, and describes how it affected her own upbringing in Communist Yugoslavia. When she analyses the criminals she faces at the trials, she compares their faces and reactions to the people close to her, her family and friends. Some of them, as she acutely observes, reveal nothing evil in their looks and gestures. The author's psychological analysis of these war criminals bears no pretensions to a specialist in the field, and her simplistic approach is justified by her intention to engage the reader in an interplay, a moral discussion about the nature of evil. In that she well succeeds although this methodical moralistic examination makes this slim volume, at times, a little overcrowded.

Slavenka Drakulic nevertheless addresses some important issues. How was it possible that these ordinary people committed such terrible crimes? Goran Jelisic was a quiet young fisherman with a clear serene face, a man one could trust, a good neighbour, an ideal son-in-law. He was sentenced to forty years for killing more than one hundred prisoners, most of whom were Muslims. Drazen Erdemovic, another young Serb, was a romantic and in love with the Bosnian countryside. How is it possible that he took part in a massacre of Muslim men from Srebrenica on 16 July 1995? She skilfully follows the corrosion of these people's characters, placing this in the context of an unbearably politicized climate resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia, to explain how it was possible. Unlike Erdemovic, who showed deep remorse for his crime, some others, such as General Radislav Krstic, the first war criminal to be sentenced for genocide, did not. How was it possible, she asks, that a person who grew up without ethnic prejudices, ended up being accused of genocide against his Muslim neighbours. If he enjoyed ethnically mixed Sarajevo so much, why did he support the nationalist politics of Republika Srpska? Why doesn't he show any remorse? To explain this, the author draws a parallel between a socialist and nationalist society that replaced it, which is also a collective society. As she demonstrates, in both there is no such thing as individual responsibility. The author's final question points at the absurdity of this and any war. What was all this for, she laments as she observes the accused criminals, Serbs who killed Muslims, some Croats or even Muslims who killed one or the other group, now at The Hague sitting all together in a canteen, sharing jokes, meals and playing cards. Ironically, it all reminds her of Titoist Yugoslavia in miniature. The Yugoslavia of 'brotherhood at unity' that absurdly has reemerged in this very prison.