LITERARY | Bosnia: Motivations of a Killer
Bosnia | Daniel J. Gerstle | November 2009
Republished November 2024
Welcome back! This story was published in our original first issue of Humanitarian Bazaar Magazine (originally called HELO Magazine) in November 2009. (Bosnian war crimes investigation board, Sanski Most, Bosnia. Image: Daniel J. Gerstle.)
To comprehend the motivations of a killer, one must explore not only their fury but also their compassion. Take, for a moment, the following case of wartime murder.
A Bosnian Muslim I interviewed as part of my work with the International Rescue Committee told me an incredible tale from his country’s civil war. Locked with thousands at the Keraterm tile factory in western Bosnia, he heard gunshots in adjacent rooms. Bosnian Serb guards came to the door and called out names. Sometimes the detainees returned, sometimes not.
One night the men in the neighboring hangar were so hungry they called for food and smashed their fists on the doors. A sergeant became so angry that he ordered machine guns brought to the hangar. The door opened on my client’s room. Guards started to shoot. Another guard abruptly shouted for them to cease fire.
“Not this hangar,” he scolded. “The other one.”
Leaving the few men already shot writhing, they took their guns to the next crowded hangar. The shooting went on for hours. A few survivors were ordered to clean up. When they returned, they described their grim task, including carrying the bodies to the clay tile ovens. Then these survivors disappeared.
I recently had lunch in New York with Serb friends from Banja Luka, a large town near Keraterm. They had had nothing to do with this crime. Neither had many of my Serb friends from Belgrade. In fact, what they saw from the Serb leadership and media during the time that the Keraterm massacre had taken place—and also at the time of massacres against Bosnian Muslims and Croats in Srebrenica, Omarska, Trnopolje, Bijeljina, Foca, Visegrad and Sarajevo—was compassion.
According to then Serb President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, the Muslim and Croat-led crimes against Serbs at that time had been furious. Evidence does link rogue Croat, Muslim, and foreign fighters to crimes against Serbs during the war, particularly in Mostar, Zenica, and Celebici. Bosnian Serbs Momcilo Krajisnik, Biljana Plavsic and others now residing in The Hague, explained in speeches that expulsions of non-Serbs were defensive measures in the consolidation of a democratic Greater Serbia.
Articles in newsstand periodicals like Politika and Nin ran stories of Bosnian Serb civilians fleeing fighting next to pieces on how the compassionate leaders were working to protect those innocents from further harm.
Based on online cases from the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia and 700 confidential interviews I carried out as a Refugee Caseworker for the International Rescue Committee in Croatia in 1998 and 1999, I want to explain how Karadzic’s team organized crimes without resistance from the Serb population.
Tribunal evidence, for example, links Serbian State Security to two former secret agents Zhelko “Arkan” Raznatovic and Milorad “Legija” Lukovic. Bosnian Serb “Crisis Committees” in towns like Bijeljina contracted Arkan’s paramilitaries, which then received support funds from Serbia, laundered and managed by Legija, to protect Serb civilians by expelling or killing the non-Serb population.
By July, guards in Keraterm, now frightened by Muslim and Croat retaliatory attacks in other parts of the country, had become so convinced of the need to get rid of non-Serbs that they did not resist orders to shoot prisoners. After jailing Dragan Kolundzija for three years for confessed participation in the massacre, the tribunal released him back to Bosnia. Still serving are the politicians who organized the camps, Keraterm’s commander, and at least four guards who killed 150 people that day.
“We guards,” Kolundzija told the BBC, “were much closer to robots than to human beings…We were all doing things which were not connected to our true selves.”
Hannah Arendt has written a great deal on killer’s detachment. In “Life of the Mind,” Arendt notes that Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi leader who organized mass killings of European Jews in the 1940s, did not behave at his trial like someone who had committed evil. Throughout Eichmann’s testimony, it appeared that the crimes had come about as a consequence of “not thinking.” Eichmann was one of many who had listened to Hitler’s compassionate rhetoric.
“Germany needs peace and desires peace,” Hitler declared. “Germany neither intends nor wishes to interfere in the internal affairs of Austria.”
German leadership justified the invasion of Poland with arguments that it was protecting innocent people threatened by Polish violence, foreshadowing Serbian leadership’s claims that the safety of Bosnian civilians was their priority. The Nazi killers maintained that their actions originated more in the unstoppable inertia of a societal system itself than from them as individuals.
We must recognize that somewhere between the “radical evil” of the killers and the innocence of the victims is a section of society that has been thoroughly and tragically manipulated because they were too afraid, too preoccupied or too trusting in their leaders.