Drakulić, Slavenka. “They Would Never Hurt a Fly”

Slavenka Drakulić’s non-fictional piece They Would Never Hurt a Fly (2004) stages an attempt at understanding what prompted certain indictees of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to orchestrate and/or participate in the extensively documented mass atrocities committed during the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999). Based principally on courtroom observations during her five-month visit to the Hague Tribunal, Drakulić carefully constructs the portraits of a select yet varied group of accused war criminals, both high and low in rank. Some of these include the infamous Slobodan Milošević and Ratko Mladić, but also the lesser known Dražen Erdemović and Goran Jelisić. 

Evocative of Hanna Arendt and Gitta Sereny’s writing, They Would Never Hurt a Fly adopts a semi-psychoanalytical approach to the investigation of the psychological and societal factors which either directly compelled or implicitly enabled the perpetrators’ crimes during the Yugoslav Wars. In oscillatory motions toward and away from the figure of ‘evil,’ Drakulić’s narrative challenges the notion that only a ‘monster’ could organize and partake in the systematic killing of an ethnic group. Most evidently, she achieves this by textualizing frequent and interweaving parallels between her own and the imagined childhoods and family lives of the perpetrators whose violence she interprets. Best elucidated with the example of Jelisić who she compares to her son-in-law on the basis of their age – “They could have gone to the same school […] I can imagine [him] bent over a textbook[,] my daughter explaining to him their history homework” (67) – Drakulić slowly but rhythmically implicates the wider Yugoslav community in Jelisić’s crimes. Without ridding him of individual responsibility for the killing of over 100 mostly Muslim prisoners in the Luka extermination camp near Brčko, and despite narrating his “borderline” diagnosis by ICTY psychiatrists which could have landed him the ‘evil’ epithet if taken uncritically, Drakulić says: “Together with his entire generation, [Jelisić] was cheated. Many of his parents’ generation – my generation – embraced the nationalist ideology and did nothing to prevent the war that grew out of it” (82). This complicity in the brutal dissolution of Yugoslavia is just one facet of the tragedy which enveloped the region of former ‘brotherhood and unity’ in Drakulić’s view. Her conclusion to the text, wherein she describes the luxurious treatment of the ICTY indictees in the Scheveningen detention center prior to their sentencing or acquittal, answers quite somberly the most basic question – why? Extradited and arrested for, among all else, inciting ethnic hatred, the Hague detainees (Serbian, Croatian, Muslim) formed an inter-ethnic ‘camaraderie’ in the common spaces of their detention center which, the text poses, proves the banality of the war: “the sworn enemies of the yesterday [fought] for nothing” (207). 

Although a highly insightful interpretation of the violence engendered by the Yugoslav Wars and the mindset necessary to cooperate in it, They Would Never Hurt a Fly bears some shortfalls that ought to be noted. Scholars have suggested that the figures surrounding the number of casualties presented in the text are, in some instances, erroneous. Beyond the universal complexity around assessing the exact number of deaths caused by the war, however, it is apparent that the text remains bound by the time in which it was produced, thirteen years prior to the official closing of the ICTY. For example, Drakulić’s somewhat hopeful analysis of Biljana Plavšić’s statement of guilt – whereby the former President of Republika Srpska admitted to facilitating acts of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia – is entirely tarnished by the politician’s subsequent withdrawal of her confession. 

Author of this entry: Dušan Janković.

Drakulić, Slavenka. They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague. 1st ed. New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 2004.