Croatian Author Reflects on Balkan War Crimes

The collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s led to what have been widely regarded as some of Europe’s bloodiest conflicts since World War II.

Fueled by nationalism, the wars produced a number of new states – including Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia – claimed around 200,000 lives and displaced some two million people.

In 1993 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was formed in The Hague to process war crimes that occurred during the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s. The tribunal indicted 161 people for violations of international humanitarian law in the former Yugoslavia.

In The Hague, they were war criminals, but in their homeland, many of these figures were celebrated.

Croatian author Slavenka Drakulic’s 2004 book They Would Never Hurt A Fly, takes an in-depth look at more than a dozen figures behind the war crimes.

In the book, which has recently been translated into Ukrainian, she questions whether these individuals were “monsters” or ordinary people driven to committing horrific crimes by the circumstances imposed on them by war.

Hromadske spoke to Slavenka Drakulic about her book and the impact of war on society.

When you for instance say, "it's not exactly about us unless it's in here in the city where nothing happens", you know the war is somewhere so let them go on with that.

It was like Zagreb. Exactly like that. In Zagreb we didn't have the feeling. It was one surface attack, but not in any big way. So people were going on with their normal life. But it's another thing, it changes values, it changes you morally, and also if it is so to say, a war with the people who used to live with you together, like it is the case here, it's Ukrainian and Russian, we had Croats and Serbs, and if these people started to disappear from your building from your job, from your neighbourhood, then you can ask about the responsibility. What are the normal people doing in such situations? However, there is one more thing which we should take into consideration and that is the authoritarian nature of the society. Basically people here behave and feel and do what the leadership tells them. So if you're speaking about responsibility and morale I think you're speaking about a very small, intellectually aware people. There is no such thing as general responsibility. Do you say what I am saying? It's not such an easy questions saying that we should all feel responsible in the same way. Clearly this is a defensive war, right? Clearly there are two things here, one is nationalism and the other is patriotism. Do you have the feeling here that nationalism and patriotism is different here, or is your leadership say it's the same thing? It's not the same thing, because nationalism needs an enemy, this is what constitutes the essence of nationalism, it always needs a mirror. It always mirrors itself towards the others.

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So the nationalism of Ukrainians towards Russians or the other way around. Patriotism however is something completely different. So if someone tells you that in the name of patriotism you should go and kill people, this is some kind of propaganda, or some kind of brainwashing, because patriotism is a much more private feeling. It's a feeling of what you remember about your childhood, the landscape that you like, the smell that you like. It's much more intimate, and it does not need enemies. You can perfectly be patriotic without being a nationalist in my view.

You're writing about people who had been killed because of testifying against perpetrators, but speaking decades after, would you say this fear is still there?

Of course, just because of the reason as I said, in some small place in Bosnia there is a guy who walks and when he goes to the nearby bar, he walks by the guy who was torturing him in a cab, or lives two houses away from him, and it's not even in the court or it is in the court and they cannot finish that. It is an endless pain for a terrible process and it lasts for decades. Don't forget that the Germans were forced to de-Nazify. The trials are part of that, for war criminals. I think that the worst of what is happening now is another thing, and this war and the arguments are still being used in political life, which means that 20 something years after the war, 23 years after the war, you can still pull the arguments if you need them politically, and the reconciliation seems to be one moment up on some level and then the next moment it is not even to be discussed.

The lecture you were reading here while being in Ukraine in 2014 was on the role of the public intellectuals in the war. So was it the unique role or was it in post-Soviet, post-Communist society, in Croatia, in Serbia, in triggering the war. What would you also say is the responsibility of public intellectuals?

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You know the example that Karadzic invited Eduard Limonov, this Russian poet who came to Sarajevo and was shooting from the hill, there's a documentary about that. So you can see what these "high moral beings", a poet, a psychiatrist, and another poet, are doing. They're shooting on Sarajevo from snipers. I don't think that much more should be said about that. It's simply like that, they are no higher moral beings, and we shouldn't even speak about their special role. They do the best they can. If the state pays them to write propaganda for the war, they will do that, because they choose not to be independent. In the war they can be just anything, like anybody else. The question is now what people, what writers after the war, do they have an obligation to write about the war? What kind of obligation and why? And do they write or don't they write? What about the young people, what about this idea that the people who lived through the war cannot write about it, so there are many interesting questions. So saying that someone must or should do something, for me it's already not something I would like to hear because I would like such people to be able to choose. There is no imperative that art should serve patriotism or art should serve anybody.

I should say that if you mentioned Karadzic, what is striking for instance is we have this famous Russian writer, Zakhar Prilepin, who is considered one of the best recent modern writers. And he's commanding a separatist battalion in Donbas, commanding a battalion in uniform. But at the same time, coming to the book fair in Paris and treated as a Russian writer by people taking interviews as a kind of intellectual. For us it's always, how do you treat these people?

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But how do you really? There is no answer to that. Because he is a writer also, no? Even if he's a propagandist, even if he's on the wrong side, he's still a writer. So, the moral judgement should somehow come in place, but where and how? I'm not the one who would like to decide about that.

All the things which are on the surface today with "post-truth" and discussion of fake news, a new kind of propaganda, and this invented reality with Trump, with everything which happened with Russian propaganda here. Do you mention something new? All this kind of created reality, of the leaders who are running this world, presenting to society, was there before? What is new?

What has changed is technology. With this technology it's much easier to manipulate, it's easy as that. Of course one could go into discussion, make different aspects with this and that, basically that's it. It's much easier to manipulate like this. Before the media worked in a completely different way, and now the media are so fragmented that you for example can spend all your life only watching football players and never ever knowing about any war. Where would you learn it, why would you watch a news program? There is of course the change in technology and also change in values and the way you see the world. And of course it makes it easier to deal with this kind of creation of a virtual "post-truth", fake world in any case.

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Today, somehow, at least I maybe mistaken, the European Union and the west played a big role in the end of wars in the Balkans. With the international institutions. Today we hear more and more that the west is incapable, I'm not even speaking about Ukraine but in cases like Syria. For seven years the war is there, and horrible things are happening and it looks like more and more that the discussion somewhere in New York or elsewhere are so far away and so little is done with international peacekeeping troops and everything. Do you think that the west has lost its stance in getting into the other's wars? In dealing with society? In particular dealing with cases such as refugees.

Oh no, we can't discuss all of that. It's too big of a question. Refugees are very special and a very important question that we can't. What I would say is the following, it's that you're wrong. It's not Europe that finished the war in the Balkans it was the United States. All through the war there was no Europe, there were different countries. It was very evident that the European Union does not have a common foreign policy. You have a German foreign policy, a British foreign policy, French foreign policy, and so on. It means, in the end, after five years of war, it was the United States that broke the war, and we should not forget that. For the second time, they come as liberators and it was not what the European Union did. They did not know what to do. First they didn't want to recognize there was a war going on, then they thought it was something small happening that they'll solve among themselves. Then there were two million displaced people they had to do something about, that's still something to finish, really. And then thanks to the United States, we have to say thank you. In the same way, they still do not have a foreign policy. With refugees, they don't have a common policy and they don't know what to do with refugees now. Not to that extent, but coming from Turkey via Greece and Bulgaria and Macedonia, they don't have a common policy. They don't have a common policy about Syria. They didn't have a common policy about Ukraine either. First of all I would never say "Europe" because it stands for some kind of values, but for action, they do not have one common foreign policy, and it's very hard to expect anything from them, and anything that comes from European union is always late, it's always too little, always with some kind of big obligation and it's good that Europeans thinks that they can catch up and repair and help and so on. But in these big, decisive situations, I would not count on them.

/By Nataliya Gumenyuk