They Would Never Hurt a Fly

There were many other men in Bosnia doing even worse things to women. Why them, why were only the three of them being so severely punished? Looking at these three men, I could tell that they would serve their sentences regretting only that they were stupid enough to be caught or tricked into surrendering.

In a way, the children of the late sixties are the first “normal” generation. Their grandparents fought in World War II. Their parents grew up in poverty. They grew up in a time of security and abundance. I had to eat all the food on the plate, but my daughter did not. War for them was something they learned about in history class or saw in movies. It had happened more than twenty years before they were even born, and it was not quite real. For my generation, the war was much closer.

We tend to believe that good-looking people are good, as we tend to see ugly people as mean. It doesn’t have much to do with reality, of course. But I had never seen such a compellingly naïve, boyish face belonging to a killer, and I must say that I was overcome with surprise.

Yet it was not so long ago that his name was a synonym for fear to thousands of Muslims in Bosnia, so powerful was this man. Mladić was the person who kept Sarajevo besieged for three years, a city where he had a house and where his mother and his friends used to live, a city that he knew well. Twelve thousand people were killed in Sarajevo before he had to withdraw his forces. Then he moved on to Goražde and Srebrenica.

There is an air of tragedy about this couple. They have not met with the same violent end as the Ceausescus, but they suffer from the same affliction. They have no conception of the idea that people have to pay for their deeds in one way or another. They refuse—or are perhaps unable—to understand why all this is happening to them. If reality does not adjust to their ideas, well then, so be it. So much the worse for reality—until reality finally, brutally, intruded into their lives.

Milošević and Mira’s world is far removed from the outside world and impervious to reality. The Serbian journalist Slavoljub Djukić, in his biography entitled On, ona i mi (Him, Her and Us), writes that for Milošević and his wife “reality has no importance at all.” Because they had power, they created their own reality; this is what power meant to them. They still see themselves not as they really are but as they want each other to be—and want others to see them.

She was Milošević’s main, if not his only, political adviser. For a man who liked to decide everything single-handedly, as if state institutions did not exist, he depended heavily on her opinions. His biographers agree that she had such a hold on her husband that some of his political opponents used to whisper that he was under petticoat rule.

But written by Slobodan Milošević’s wife, such words are sheer cynicism because she deliberately chooses not to acknowledge her husband’s role in what she calls “bloody orgies.” This was the time when Sarajevo was still under the siege and snipers were killing people lining up for water or bread.

Mira and Slobodan are completely devoted to each other and to their children, and nobody outside their little autistic haven can touch or move them. Only she could turn this cold, calculating man into a caring and tender person.

If it were not for The Hague, Kunarac, Kovač, and Vuković would still be sitting in a café in Foča’s main street, smoking, drinking brandy, and telling anecdotes of the war. They would be met with the respect that war veterans get there.