They Would Never Hurt a Fly

Our children believed that we, their parents, would sort out the political mess. But we did not. When the war broke out, they did not understand that they, born in the late sixties or early seventies, were expected to fight in it. But who else could? This was a paradox: this generation, in a way, had to fight the war of their grandparents. The price was high: many of them were killed, wounded, or turned into invalids; many others fled the country.

But what exactly happened in his mind before that, before Jelisić raised his arm and fired the bullet that decided not only the future of the prisoner in the photo but his own as well? For after that shot, there was no way back for Jelisić. On that day in May, he started out on a road that six years later brought him to the tribunal in The Hague.

One can hardly defend oneself against such propaganda if there is no common history that everybody can believe in. Under the pressure of emotions, a thin layer of rationality easily falls away. The history that we learned—which was not in fact history—made it easier for us to abandon reason in favor of pure emotions.

For my generation, living in a Communist country, jeans were a product of the Western bourgeois society and a sign of decadence; my father would never have allowed me to wear them. But communism meant little to my daughter’s generation, and Tito even less. They were young children when he died in 1980 and hardly remembered him at all. They were not marked by the cult of Tito as much as we were.

More likely, the war itself turned ordinary men—a driver, a waiter, and a salesman, the three accused were—into criminals because of opportunism, fear, and, not least, belief. Hundreds of thousands had to have believed that they were right in what they were doing. Otherwise, such large numbers of rapes and murders simply cannot be explained—and this is even scarier.

He was a good and loyal friend. In the late eighties he did not take Serbian nationalism seriously. He did not pay much attention to the idea that Serbs should all live in one state, and, anyway, politics was for politicians. It had nothing to do with his life, with his friends and fishing. But he turned out to be wrong.

Public opinion is not an abstract concept. It is about us, what we the citizens of Croatia stand for. The failure of public opinion is therefore our failure. We did not react; we have nobody but ourselves to blame. Our personal paranoia, petty theft, and sealed lips all contributed to the bomb that killed Levar.

The task of propaganda is to shape this difference so that it creates a feeling that there is a threat from the other side and strengthens the urge for homogenization. Most important is the method of introducing hatred: it is most effective if people get used to it slowly, step by step, until they have absorbed it into their daily life.

When I see Karremans standing there in front of Mladić, so frightened that he is probably thinking, this is it, this is my end, I understand that he could not have defended anybody, not even himself. It is clear that Karremans will obey Mladić, whatever he demands. Karremans is defeated, the UN troops are defeated, Srebrenica is defeated; and I read it all in the face of the Dutch commander.