Summary from Publisher's Weekly:
What causes people to participate in genocide? Respected Croatian journalist Drakulic (How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed) set out to explore the psyches of the people who turned her former country, Yugoslavia, into a killing field in the early 1990s. Observing them on trial for war crimes before the International Tribunal in the Hague, Drakulic depicts the perpetrators, from Radomir Kovac, who raped young girls, to the delusional former Serb president Slobodan Milosevic, often from the point of view of the perpetrators themselves. The novelistic imputation of imagined thoughts can be distracting. Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, the snapshots are powerful and horrifying: they include a chilling description of the slaughter at Srebrenica through the eyes of a reluctant Bosnian soldier forced to kill or be killed, and a portrayal of an entire town's complicity in the murder of a Croatian militiaman after he courageously testified before the tribunal. Drakulic's analysis of why people choose evil—fear, opportunism, propaganda, lust for power and identity, historical grievances—offers little that's new, and her conclusion—"if ordinary people committed war crimes, it means that any of us begs the question of why some found the courage to say no. But her focus on the perpetrators and their apparently inexplicable moral choices forces us to face the questions of good and evil these crimes raise.
I found it fascinating to try to get inside the minds of and understand the thinking of people who committed war crimes. This book challenged me and made me uncomfortable, and also made me worry about the state of Bosnia today. For example, I know that political corruption such as that described in the chapter about the death of Milan Levar, the Croatian war witness, is still rampant all around the former Yugoslavia today. There are still people who do not know and who won’t accept the truth, and even now “the Croatian state is still indecisive, the international community is indifferent, and public opinion remains silent” (37). When the people in power are the same as the perpetrators or are involved in conspiracy about what happened, how can there possibly be any progress?
I also think the book is very important because I couldn’t agree more with Drakulić’s conclusion that we need to stop thinking of war criminals as purely evil non-human monsters lest we fail to acknowledge that we too have the capacity to act in similar ways. It’s a terrifying thought – what does it take to make an ordinary person act in such an extraordinary way? Drakulić wonders if perhaps war can turn people with “criminal personalities” (55) into criminals who can rape and murder. However, there would have to be “thousands upon thousands of men committing such acts,” (56) and Drakulić feels it was more likely that “the war itself turned ordinary men – a driver, a waiter, and a salesman, the three accused were – into criminals because of opportunism, fear, and not least, belief” (56). She states that the either the hundreds of thousands of perpetrators actually believed what they were doing was right, or there is no explanation for the rapes and murders, and I’m not sure which side of the disjunct is scarier.
How do these things happen? As Drakulić asks, “how does our neighbor become our enemy? How do we internalize the enemy, and how long does it take to do so?” (97). She states that at the time of the Srebrenica massacre, the “Serbian propaganda machine, especially television, had been demonizing the enemy—Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians—for almost ten years” (97). This notion of the power of propaganda is especially terrifying to me. There are people in Serbia who genuinely do not realize what happened in Srebrenica because of what their media has told them. How responsible are we for the nationalist attitudes we have been fed by our news stations? Where do we draw the line between thinking independently and total skepticism over everything the media tells us? I typically have a fairly strong faith in the reliability of the media (perhaps because my parents are both radio journalists) that this book made me begin to sincerely doubt.
The ideas that Drakulić presents in the chapter on Slobodan Milošević about recreating history and revising facts to fit a political agenda struck a chord with me, because I’ve seen history being rewritten in Bosnia today. In the summer of 2005, our group attempted to hold a “friendship camp” in Srebrenica for the first time. When we arrived at the school, no children were there, which is far from the norm – we are usually greeted at the bus by a throng of eager faces. We went inside the school building to wait while our trip coordinators spoke with the school director. Hanging on one wall was a large painting of the town with small portraits on either side. The town in the painting had several Orthodox churches but not a single mosque, though the painting was obviously depicting a time long before the war, a time in which the majority of the population was Muslim. One of the portraits hanging next to the Mosque-less painting of the town was of a great Serbian author who revolutionized Serbo-Croatian language. The caption under the painting was printed in Cyrillic and English, not in the Serbo-Croatian in the Latin alphabet. One of the interpreters came over to look at the painting with me, and pointed to the caption and said “That’s wrong. It says ‘He is the greatest author of our nation,’ but he was from Serbia, and our nation is Bosnia.”
For the only time in all of my trips to Bosnia, I felt highly uncomfortable and very out of place. I got a very bizarre vibe from the school, and I stepped outside because I felt so uncomfortable. I approached another of my team members about it, an adult woman named Donna, and asked her if she felt the same way. She agreed with me, and said that it was because we were seeing history being rewritten before our eyes. (The school director claimed to have been confused over the date and apologized for his “mistake,” but I have a strong suspicion that his mistake was intentional, and that he did not want us--and our Muslim interpreters--there. The next year, there was a new director at the school in Srebrenica and we held a successful camp there, though there was only one Muslim boy in attendance.)
I scared myself reading the chapter about Dražen Erdemović, because though I hope that I would rather die than shoot innocent civilians, I really can’t say whether I would be willing to give up my life in such a situation. Over the summer I had a dream that scared me in a similar way. I was in the middle of intense preparation for my part of NJ Synod’s display about the Bosnian War at the ELCA National Youth Gathering. I was responsible for information about Emsuda Mugajić and concentration camps and for coordinating workshops about our Bosnian interpreters’ war stories and a war simulation game.
I don’t remember all of the details, but I dreamed I was in my old high school, and a friend ran up to me and told me I had to go outside to the field. There were masked men with guns outside, and they had lined all the students up and were screaming at us, telling us to get down on the ground and cover our heads. I felt absolutely terrified as I took my place in line with the other students. A man started walking down the line of students, poking random students with the butt of his gun and yelling, “YOU! GET UP AND COME WITH ME!” I knew that the students he picked were going to be taken to a wall and shot by a firing squad, with no chance of escape. As he walked down the line, I could only think one thing – don’t pick me, don’t pick me, Dear God, please let him pick anyone but me.
The man tapped me with his gun, shouted a number, and dragged me to my feet. I felt panicked and I couldn’t breathe. All I could think was “this cannot be happening, not to me – I have so much potential, so much before me, I haven’t lived my life yet . . . I still need to go to graduate school and become a philosophy professor, I can’t die now!” I woke up, and I was very upset, not by the dream itself but by my reaction in the dream. I was terrified of death, and I would have done anything to avoid it – to the point of wishing that the guard would take someone else, would just take anyone but me. I also, for the first time, stopped to try to imagine what it would really be like to be in an ethnic cleansing situation, and I still couldn’t wrap my mind around it. I didn’t like the way I responded in the dream at all, and though I know it was a dream, it made me wonder how I would respond in a similar real life situation.
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