Croatian expatriate Drakulic (S., 2000, etc.) offers a
philosophically charged indictment of onetime Yugoslavians now
standing before the International War Crimes Tribunal. Ordinary
people do not commit monstrous crimes; and because we are ordinary
people, we could not have committed monstrous crimes in the past.
So goes the human impulse to explain away atrocities; so goes the
refusal, throughout the former Yugoslavia, to admit that something
horrible happened not so very long ago. "But once you get closer to
the real people who committed those crimes," writes the Croatian
expatriate Drakulic, "you see that the syllogism doesn't really
work." Ordinary people do indeed do terrible things. Sitting in a
courtroom in The Hague, Drakulic searches their faces and their
files for signs of madness, an explanation for their deeds as
something other than a sick response to peer pressure or a cosmic
dare. (Explaining why those 80 or so men-and a couple of women-shed
their ordinary lives to become killers is of paramount importance,
Drakulic holds, because otherwise they will be eulogized as war
heroes back home.) Their trials are dull matters, she admits, a far
cry from the witty back-and-forth of Hollywood film, but from them
bits and pieces of truth emerge. Some of the killers are
pathological, likely murderers in peacetime or war, but otherwise
the proverbial guy next door; in the title essay, one defendant, in
his mid-20s at the time of slaughtering more than a hundred people
in a single month in 1992, remarks, "It is nice to kill people this
way. I kill them nicely. I don't feel anything." Others, such as
the former Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic, killed (or had
others kill) out of ambition: in Milosevic's case, it appears that
he thought war would keep him in power. Others were bureaucrats,
anxious to please the boss. Still others merely went with the flow.
And thousands died. Take it from Drakulic: Ordinary people suck.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Slavenka Drakulic attended the Serbian war crimes trial in the
Hague. Her book is an accessible, involving and moving account of
how ordinary people commit terrible crimes in wartime. Drawing
readers into this difficult subject, Drakulic explores everything
from the monstrous Slobodan Milosevich and his evil "Lady Macbeth"
of a wife, to humble Serb soldiers who claim they were "just
obeying orders". She enters the minds of the killers, but also
reveals stories of bravery and survival, both from those who helped
Bosnians escape from the Serbs and from those who risked their
lives to help them.
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