They Would Never Hurt a Fly

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They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulić is a 2004 book discussing the personalities of the Hague War Crimes defendants from the former Yugoslavia (see International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia). Most chapters are personality profiles of an individual war criminal, rather than expositions of hard facts. Most of those discussed are already convicted. Radovan Karadžić is not covered at all, Slobodan Milošević and his wife each rate their own chapter, and Ratko Mladić is portrayed as a Greek tragic figure. Usually only the crimes for which the subjects have been convicted are mentioned. There are no pictures, although the physical appearance of the characters is continuously mentioned.

A common theme is how those on trial in the Hague were not monsters but ordinary people who did terrible things in the circumstances they were in. Drakulić takes this stance not to sympathize with them, but because she feels people should not label such people as human. By treating such people as something other than human, she argues, they put them in a different class of people that they could never be a part of. As a result, they refuse to believe that such acts could be committed by themselves, their neighbors, their co-workers, thus allowing such things to happen to begin with.

The book ends noting the strange coexistence that the accused war criminals have together in the Scheveningen prison in the Hague. Despite containing people who had committed atrocities at all levels on all sides, there was only one incident, which occurred when Slobodan Milošević was first brought to the "detention unit". As Irish director of the "unit" Timothy McFadden says, the accused are held as innocent until proven guilty, and thus are treated to better living conditions than anywhere else in Europe, and possibly the world. They can watch television shows in their own language (via satellite), have fairly spacious cells, can have visitors whenever and as often as they want, can take classes in English or art, and so on. Drakulić notes the disparity between their living conditions and the crimes they are accused of, then asks what the war was for if the greatest architects of it can get along in peace. The answer, she concludes, is that it was for nothing.

[edit] People Covered

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