They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague,   ISBN:9780143035428

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From a reader's, not a literary critic's perspective, this is a very interesting book. It does become a bit confusing to follow the "Who's Who" of the Balkan War, so it is beneficial to have read previous works about the infamous struggle. The author has injected the book with personal anectodes of the many criminals facing the International Court of Justice and their victims. I mostly enjoyed her observations and analysis regarding the human potential for cruelty in the last pages of the book. Good read.

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I enjoy this author's short books about the situation in the former Yugoslavia. In this book, she details the criminals who caused the deaths of 200,000 in the former Yugoslavia. Not only were these individuals from common people, but it was hard to distinguish them from the rest of the population. She details a person who executed close to a hundred people in 18 days. She also details the life of Mladic and one of his generals. In the trial of this general, the general lies about orders ordering the execution of people. Then the prosecutor plays a tape of the general ordering the execution of the 7575 Muslim men. These were all ordinary people who didn't differ from the rest of the population. Is it possible that similar situations can happen in the future.

This is a very readable book. The author does not spare her own Croatian people. They also murdered, although on a lesser scale than the Serbs.
This is an interesting short read.

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Drakulic is quite disappointing in this latest work. In the past, she has always had critical but credible insight into the many trials and tribulations her country faced - whether that was Yugoslavia or Croatia. One has enjoyed reading her books, not only for the obvious passion and openness with which they were written, but also because of her tendency to be a thorn in the side of the ruling government or authority.

Drakulic tended to stick to subjects she knew a lot about or had personally experienced, either on her own or through her associations with others, and this made her work credible and enjoyable. She portrayed the hypocracy of communism and some of the people in power during and after its inception. She also portrayed its affects on the common man, in a comical and insightful way.

In her latest work, however, she deviates from some of the same qualities which have made her so eminently readable and enjoyable. For one, she takes sides. Obviously Serbs are her target here, as she skims lightly over crimes and atrocities committed by other nationalities. She also spends a great deal of time attempting to knock down what she terms as "Serbian myths", without showing any credible proof (other than perhaps personal predisposition or hatred) for her statements.

Her "analyses" of "Serbian monsters" include prolonged pitter-patter of the wanderings of her own imagination...for instance, rather than attempting to analyze and offer insight into the Milosevic family, she chooses to spend pages and pages criticing Mrs. Milosevic's poor taste in clothing and grooming, as if this is somehow significant to what happened in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Too, she enters some kind of mystical state when describing the suicide of Mladic's daughter...attempting to put blame for the daughter's suicide on the father's actions, which, even she admits is no more than mere speculation...as if somehow she has the ability to "punish" him for the crimes he has been accused of.

But, perhaps the worst regression for Drakulic is her mouthing of the West's version of what has taken place in Yugoslavia. Either she has whole-heartedly bought into the version of the wars propagated by the West, or she has simply chosen not to take part in dissecting what actually happened in her country due to the pain it causes her; portions of her chapters read like "lifts" from rags like the New York Times or the Washington Post. And, most humiliatingly, they besmirch not only the Yugoslavian people but Mrs. Drakulic as well, who has, until now painted herself as a fresh voice of her country, explaining to Westerners what has, in fact, happened there and why.

One can perhaps understand Mrs. Drakulic's disappointment with her country and her comrades, but this does not allay the fact that she is, in fact one of them, and by virtue of that responsible for some of the crimes of which they are also accused. Just because she is a writer and lives a good portion of her life abroad does not absolve her of the responsibility to explain what actually happened there or why. Otherwise, what is the point of reading her work; one could merely refer to the Western press which, heaven knows, has spent years demonizing and degrading, not only Serbs, but all nationalities who lived in the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, Mrs. Drakulic chooses to do neither in this latest work.

One might speculate that, perhaps, she has no further fodder for her works and this latest one, both in title and content is merely an attempt to capitalize on the situation in the country by mouthing that which the West wants to hear.

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These stories of people on trial, or yet-to-be-captured, for war crimes and crimes against humanity are a good introduction to the way in which war screws people up. Even good-natured, everybody's pal, types of people become animals when handed a weapon and absolute power to use it.

Blood is like any other drug. It creates a dependency, an addiction, that has to be sated.

Ms. Drakulic obviously has her sympathies with the Croats and the Bosnians who were brutalized by the Serbs. This, however, does not detract from her ability to tell a good story about some of the most inhuman behavior we have witnessed in our lifetimes, and to portray the perpetrators as the demons that may lurk inside any of us, to be unleashed if and when circumstances allow. The same demons ruled in Rwanda for quite a blood-feast. They still command much of Sudan. Liberia and Sierra Leone are only licking their wounds now.

While much will likely be written about those places, and some good work has already been done to document the crimes there, I don't think we'll ever see justice in the Hague or any other court for the people who carried out those massacres. Thank God Ms. Drakulic had a court in which to base her accounts of the Yugoslav slaughter.

Can you keep your demons bottled up? For now? For ever?

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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.