peter young’s listopia

18) Slavenka Drakulić, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, 2004
The recent capture of Ratko Mladić has reinvigorated my interest in what's going on politically with the fallout from the break-up of Yugoslavia and the war crimes trials at The Hague, which this book specifically covers. I bought this book a few years ago so it predates both Slobodan Milošević's death and the arrest of Radovan Karadžić, yet although chapters cover Milošević (and his wife), Mladić and Karadžić, these big players are not the main focus of this book, more the seemingly ordinary and everyday people who somehow became willing executioners before their surrender or capture. As we know, they're not all Serbians: Drakulić is a Croatian and she has a special loathing for the Croatian tendency to deny its own equally disturbing indulgence in the blood-letting, even though the numbers don't match the Serbian toll. There are only two small drawbacks to this otherwise worthy book: Drakulić's tendency towards flowery pop-psychology in her speculations on the backgrounds and motives of the accused, and the chapter on Dražen Erdemović, which emotionally manipulates the reader in the accused's favour yet does try to get inside the head of someone who (thankfully) didn't actually want to do what he was forced to (this contrasts with the chilling chapter on Goran Jelisić, truly a scary character). This book also required me to fill in a few gaps in my knowledge of the region's political map, such as how the Republika Srpska relates to Bosnia and Serbia – the complexity of what happened to Yugoslavia is astounding and, as Drakulić asks in her epilogue, what was it all for? The only possible answer: nothing. A depressing book, as expected, yet also a useful one that urges people to keep their eyes open for dangerous political opportunism, if other fractured countries are to avoid a similar fate.