Petrović, Vladimir. “The ICTY Library”

Vladimir Petrović’s article provides an overview of the literary production of 22 indictees of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) between the years of 1993 and 2017. Situating this corpus within the ever-growing but nonetheless ancient genre of prison literature, Petrović takes inventory of the subgenres and content of the 119 books and booklets which comprise the ‘ICTY Library.’ He contends that the mere size and formal variety of this literary output – composed of 8 fictional works, 22 pieces of non-fiction, and 89 compilations of documentary material – impart the possibility of a multi-disciplinary study of the Yugoslav Wars, the ICTY trials, and the region’s reckoning with its violent past. 

A historian by training, Petrović scrutinizes the viability of the indictees’ works as potential scholarly sources, in the process outlining potential avenues of research. Arguably the least generative are the documentary compilations, albeit the most popular subgenre. While these thematized volumes of documentary material (i.e., transcripts and documents used during the trials pertaining to specific points of the procedure) may help historians sift through larger databases, the selection and veracity of the documents which constitute them must always be considered, cross-checked and traced to their original source where necessary. By contrast, Petrović finds more heuristic and hermeneutic value in the works of fiction (novels, poetry collections, a book of aphorisms, an apocryphal book) and non-fiction (memoirs, diaries, speeches and interviews, studies) produced by the alleged war criminals. Veselin Šljivančanin’s memoir Son, be a man (2012) written from his perspective as a former officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, for instance, may help expound the complex (para)military systems operating during the Croatian War of Independence. On the other hand, Momčilo Krajišnik and Biljana Plavšić’s memoirs – respectively How Republika Srpska Was Born (2011) and I Testify (2005) – provide insights into the dynamics between Serbian wartime elites, both within the territory of Bosnia’s Serb-majority Republika Srpska and in relation to Slobodan Milošević. Moreover, those interested in the lyrical components of the corpus may find Momčilo Perišić’s Poems from the Hague (2013) particularly important, given that the poems mediate the unexpected ‘camaraderie’ which the ICTY indictees formed while in the detention unit, regardless of their ethnic background. 

Though Petrović reminds the reader that a high degree of caution and scrutiny is paramount in using these works as primary sources, “The ICTY Library” may serve as a guide to those interested in studying perpetrator testimony produced in relation to the Hague Tribunal. And while the author does not directly discuss the type of readership and responses these works garnered, scholars of history, political science, literature, media, and psychology will find his survey especially helpful in further research. 

Author of this entry: Dušan Janković.

Petrović, Vladimir. ‘The ICTY Library: War Criminals as Authors, Their Works as Sources’. International Criminal Justice Review 28, no. 4 (December 2018): 333–48.