Ristić, Katarina. “The Media Negotiations of War Criminals and Their Memoirs”

Katarina Ristić’s study of the memoirs written by three Serbian war criminals convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) investigates how their works reframed individual criminal responsibility in order to construct a ‘heroic’ public persona in Serbia. In developing the notion of the ‘ICTY Celebrity’ within the framework of cultural criminology, Ristić sets out to analyze to what extent the ICTY detainees’ ego-documents and their portrayals in mass media succeeded in bestowing the convicts with a ‘celebrity’ status. The three memoirs – Biljana Plavšić’s I Testify (2005), Veselin Šljivančanin’s I defended the truth (2012), and Milan Lukić’s Confessions of the prisoner of The Hague (2011) – along with a total of 237 press articles from different media outlets in Serbia concerning the books’ publications and promotions, as well as the prisoners’ sentencing and release, are thus examined using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘decoding’ and ‘encoding.’ 

Using Kooistra and Penfold-Mounce’s three-part paradigm for analyzing the mediation of criminals into fame, Ristić first considers how Plavšić, Šljivančanin, and Lukić renegotiate the [1] nature and [2] context of their crime along with [3] their own public image. While interpreting the context of the Yugoslav Wars quite differently – Šljivančanin notably avoids ascribing ‘guilt’ to specific ethnic groups whereas Plavšić sees Muslims (Bosniaks) and their leadership as unequivocally responsible – all three war criminals vehemently reject the Tribunal’s accusations and present themselves as the defenders of Serbs (and Yugoslavia in Šljivančanin’s case) against “the enemy court.” The media’s validation of this plea for recognition as Serbia’s heroes, Ristić demonstrates, varies among the authors and news outlets. The dominant discourse of the accused’s innocence is reverberated by most right-wing and centrist newspapers except for Lukić whose responsibility is universally accepted, depraving him of the ‘celebrity’ status the other two have garnered. Despite this, Plavšić enjoys a lesser amount of public interest than Šljivančanin. Ristić attributes this to Šljivančanin’s ambiguous narrative of the past – as opposed to Plavšić’s nationalist and genocidal account – which in tandem with his ‘insignificant’ wartime role – a minor army officer and not a head of state like Plavšić – reaffirms the absolution of collective guilt and the demonization of the ICTY among the Serbian public. 

This article may be of particular interest to literary and media scholars researching the renegotiations of criminal guilt through the processes of (re)mediation, considering that Ristić’s elaborate theoretical framework may be used as a blueprint for further research. Although the study’s implications could have been addressed more thoroughly, “The Media Negotiations of War Criminals and Their Memoirs” offers a methodologically robust approach to the investigation of the ICTY’s legacy in Serbia with respect to mediation of criminal guilt.

Author of this entry: Dušan Janković.

Ristić, Katarina. ‘The Media Negotiations of War Criminals and Their Memoirs: The Emergence of the “ICTY Celebrity”’. International Criminal Justice Review 28, no. 4 (December 2018): 391–405.