The Exception

by Christian Jungersen

  They talk for a few more minutes. Malene feels happy because she has someone special to lean on, but she’s aware that if she discusses her concerns – even her illness – for too long, Rasmus becomes restless. She hates to think about it, but he seems to have less and less patience.

  ‘Would any of your IT specialists know how to trace a sender?’

  His voice becomes animated at once. ‘Actually I know quite a bit about that. If your sender is smart he’ll have emailed via an anonymiser site. If he has, we won’t be able to trace him so easily. But let’s make sure. Email his mail-header to me. You should be able to find his IP address if you right-click on the mail. Choose Properties and then Details. If he uses a fixed Internet link we’ll have him cornered. If not, it will give us the name of his service provider, so we’ll know which part of the world he’s mailing us from – unless he uses an anonymiser site, that is. If he does, we’ll write a spyware program and send it back to him by using Reply. If we do it right, the spyware will pick up his personal details and mail them back to us.’

  ‘Is it hard to write spyware?’

  ‘Don’t worry. We’ll try it when I come home.’ Rasmus doesn’t sound eager to get off the phone but he has to go. ‘We’ll track down this lunatic, no problem.’

  In the café the music has changed from Steely Dan to Gotan Project. Iben has been in touch with people in England and France and is feeling energised. ‘They all send their regards.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And they had loads of ideas about who might’ve emailed us. I borrowed a notepad from the bar and began a list. Here, look.’ The list already has more than twenty names.

  Malene sits down. ‘I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Let’s move to an Internet café.’

  Malene hasn’t finished her wine, but she understands that collecting information is Iben’s way of dealing with stress, so she drains her glass quickly.

  While they’re getting ready to leave Malene’s mobile rings. It’s Lotta from the Swedish study programme on the Holocaust and Genocide.

  ‘Iben called me earlier. Her phone has been busy so I thought I’d try yours. I wanted you to know that I’ve phoned around. Nobody seems to have received any emails. That’s all, really. Except, everyone I spoke to came up with people who might have done it. Do you have pen and paper handy?’

  Malene adds to Iben’s list. ‘Thanks. That’s great.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Take it as a thank you for your article. It was great.’

  ‘What? Which article?’

  ‘“A Guitarist from Banja Luka”. About Mirko Zigic. We had it translated and printed it in our weekly paper.’

  ‘But Iben wrote it.’

  ‘Did she? I thought it was you.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. She did.’ Iben must have left out her by-line in the Word version of the article. Then it hits her what the mistake means. ‘Christ!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Malene has to make sure. ‘Lotta, that article, is it on your website now in my name?’

  ‘I think so. I mean, what we publish in print instantly goes on to our website as well. Automatically. Not that I—’

  Iben interrupts. ‘Tell me. What’s happened?’

  Malene needs to sit down, but somewhere else, where they aren’t visible from the street. Holding the phone, she puts her arm around Iben.

  ‘Iben, I’m so very sorry. In Sweden your article about Zigic was put on the Internet under my name.’

  Iben backs away. ‘I see. Now we know. It couldn’t be anyone else, could it?’

  Malene doesn’t like the tone of her voice. ‘No.’

  ‘Mirko Zigic is the only one we’ve both written about.’

  A Guitarist from Banja Luka

  Old friends of Serb war criminal Mirko Zigic still cannot grasp that their schoolmate is wanted by the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

  By Iben Højgaard

  ‘Mirko was a guitarist in the band and composed most of their music,’ says Ljiljana Peric, who was at secondary school in the same class as Mirko Zigic.

  ‘No question about it, he had something special. He believed he could make a living as a rock musician after leaving school. His band played a kind of intense, poetic guitar rock that only became the “in” thing a few years later. He was good, and we all wished him well, but no one really believed that he’d make it apart from the boys in his band and a handful of groupies.’

  Ljiljana Peric is a political scientist from Serbia, who attended the Oslo conference, Strengthening Democratic Media in the Aftermath of War. Our hotel rooms were on the same floor and, chatting in the lift one afternoon, Peric touched on her early friendship with Mirko Zigic. Zigic has been charged with war crimes and is wanted by the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

  We agreed to meet in the hotel bar that evening, and that I would bring my tape recorder.

  The good years: until 1990

  That evening, Peric began by describing the secondary school in Banja Luka, the town where she and Zigic grew up.

  ‘It was a large school, with more than a thousand pupils and was built in the 1970s. Mirko was good-looking, and had a mane of blond hair and a thin face that made him look like a rock star. He arranged gigs in cafés and bars, not only for his own band but for others too. He might have made it if the fashion for US grunge music had arrived a few years earlier and not when the war started.

  ‘I used to gossip about him with my girlfriends. Some of them were crazy about him. And I have such a clear image of Mirko putting up posters for concerts that he had arranged himself. He was so passionate about music, always insisting that everyone should subscribe to his favourite music and not waste time on dumbed-down pop.

  ‘We were a mixed school – Serbs, Muslims, Croats – but we never paid much attention to racial divisions. After the economic crisis of the eighties the future looked bright for young people. The Yugoslav economy was buoyant and the country politically independent of both the Eastern and Western blocs. Lots of people went shopping for clothes in Italy and travelled to places like Budapest for concerts or theatre. The recent communist past meant that tickets were much cheaper.

  ‘In 1990, one year after we had left school, there were occasional TV reports about small paramilitary groups stopping cars at roadblocks to check identity papers. It seemed to be happening only in the countryside, so we figured it must be gangs of peasant blockheads who had nothing better to do than play soldiers. Nobody I knew even imagined it might be a precursor to war.

  ‘But only a few months later, the war began. Suddenly, these stupid peasants morphed into real soldiers. The TV news was full of massacres, one after the other. The broadcasters would advise viewers several times a day to send children and old people out of the room because they were about to show Serb bodies that were decapitated or half-decomposed, floating down rivers – that sort of thing.’

  The propaganda

  ‘These images made us very sad and angry, of course. We all shared a desperate wish to help, to do something.

  ‘This was Serb-controlled TV and just when the viewers were at their most upset and vulnerable, the screens would fill with war propaganda. We were told that Muslims and Croats were on the rampage, killing Serb civilians, reminding us that this was a repetition of what happened during World War Two when “they” murdered four hundred thousand of “us”. We watched this kind of thing day in and day out.

  ‘Naturally we discussed what was going on, but the Serb government had a tight grip on all information. Then, one day, a Muslim friend of mine said: “Ljiljana, listen to yourself. Do you realise what you’re saying? How do you know? Who says that this is what’s really going on?”

  ‘I had to admit that the propaganda had affected me. I, who had felt so sure of seeing through their lies! I decided to avoid the official spokesmen from that day on and stopped watching TV, listening to the radio, or reading the newspapers – but it’s hard
to do when your country is at war.

  ‘Not everyone had friends who could help them hold on to the truth. Anyway, before long, our generation was scattered all over the world. People escaped to Britain, Scandinavia, Italy, the United States. Not just Muslims and Croats, but young male Serbs who wanted to avoid military service. Many of our young men were called up and others volunteered. The majority of us could not understand what went on in the heads of those who went willingly to war. Still, Mirko wasn’t the only one who did – far from it.’

  It must be a mistake

  ‘The war went on and on. Tens of thousands died, neighbour turned against neighbour and old friends informed on each other, leading to imprisonment or execution. It was incomprehensible. We couldn’t trust the radio or the television, yet endless stories did the rounds.

  ‘We heard about Mirko by word of mouth. What was said about him was different … well, even worse. As a squad leader he had turned up with his men at the home of his Muslim second cousin and raped her. He killed her afterwards. And he’d cut the ears and the tongue off a young Serb soldier who had talked about deserting.

  ‘None of this was reported in the papers, of course, but the stories kept coming. They’d always begin with something like “Have you heard what they’re saying about Mirko? That he …?” Even then the talk was about the kind of crimes he’s now being charged with at The Hague. He was said to have asked for camp duty purely for entertainment. He would make prisoners rape and murder each other and watch, with that big, bold grin of his.

  ‘A friend of mine has another female friend who knew Mirko well. Her boyfriend, a Muslim, had been sent to the Omarska camp. One day a man phoned her – she’s sure it was Mirko. The voice on the phone asked how she was. Then he told her he held a hammer in his hand, that her boyfriend was with him in the room and, because she was going out with a Muslim, she should stay on the line and listen hard. She listened as her boyfriend was beaten to death. He was screaming. She felt sure that she recognised the voice. It was impossible, she said, to put the receiver down.

  ‘We heard these things and couldn’t make sense of them.

  ‘Mirko was still only twenty-one years old. We, the women who had stayed behind, discussed the rumours. I argued that the more frighteningly he came across in these stories, the more people would want to back out of the war. Maybe he was inventing lies, sacrificing his reputation in order to save innocent people.

  ‘We all wanted this to be true. Wanted it so much.’

  Do you ever see any of them?

  ‘One day, some two years after the beginning of the war, I met him in Banja Luka, on the pedestrian street called Gospodska Ulica.

  ‘It was a bright, sunny day. Everything looked so peaceful. One of the cafés on the other side of the street was playing dance music. The air smelled of cement dust from the restoration work at the Serbian Orthodox church. Trucks were rumbling to and from the site.

  ‘Mirko was still slim but more muscular. He was wearing stone-washed jeans and his hair was as long as ever. He stepped out of the door of a shoe store. No escort of soldiers or military insignia in sight.

  ‘He looked pleased to see me. I felt I shouldn’t let him hug me, but he did. I told him what I’d been doing, speaking quickly. I didn’t want any gaps where I’d have to ask what he had been doing.

  ‘There were no telltale signs in his face – he might have had a job in insurance or sales or something completely ordinary like that. Then he asked: “Do you ever see any of them – people from the past?”

  ‘The saliva seemed to dry inside my mouth. A chill ran down my spine. I looked away. These few words were worse than anything I’d ever heard.

  ‘I’m a Serb. I wasn’t in any danger, but I had to leave at once. Even today I cannot understand how, from that moment on, I knew that everything they said about him was true. I spent the rest of the day crying and several more phoning old friends telling them I’d seen Mirko. I had to find release for the pressure inside me. It was like the strain you feel when a friend suddenly dies.’

  Other soldiers

  Ten years after these events, Peric was still deeply affected. We sat in silence for a while.

  She asked me about my work at the DCGI. I found it impossible to resist trying to put her account into a theoretical context. Several researchers connected to the DCGI are currently working on studies of men who have engaged in genocide.

  Christopher Browning has carried out one of the major classical investigations into this type of behaviour. We have described his work in an earlier Genocide News article called ‘The Psychology of Evil’. Browning based his observations on a study of five hundred ordinary German men, who had been sent to Poland and, once there, had been ordered to kill Jews. These are his findings:

  10–20% applied for other tasks and were transferred, usually without any problems;

  50–80% did not apply for other tasks. They carried out the killings they were ordered to do, but stopped afterwards;

  10–30% started killing more Jews than ordered, and carried on murdering when off duty.

  This last group of men might go straight from pubs or cinemas to the Jewish ghettos, where they’d use the inhabitants as targets for shooting practice. Often they’d go on a spree of torture, rape and murder.

  But statistical data do not capture what drives an individual. What are the men like who manage to avoid such tasks? And what about the men who seem prepared to take the killing farther than they were commanded? We spoke for a while about the mystery of cruelty.

  Peric told me about another boy from their year at school who had volunteered together with Mirko Zigic.

  ‘Predrag wanted to be an engineer, but that’s out of the question now. At school he probably looked up to Mirko. After volunteering, they were placed in the same paramilitary unit, but no Predrag stories ever circulated in Banja Luka. When he was sent home nine months later, his head was shaking as if he had Parkinson’s disease.

  ‘Predrag never spoke much after that, and refused point blank to say anything about Mirko or their wartime experiences together. Friends made him see a doctor, but his tremor was incurable. Of course, we all knew what the cause was. Many of the returning soldiers suffered from strange medical conditions.’

  After the war

  Before meeting Ljiljana Peric, I had read about what happened to Mirko Zigic just before the Dayton Peace Accord. He had been dismissed from his paramilitary unit and emigrated to Russia where he linked up with Slav extremists, possibly with the Mafia as well.

  Until recently, it was generally thought that active participants in genocide do not have any trouble distinguishing between the time for killing and for peace. This assumption is based on studies of German perpetrators, which show that after the end of World War Two these men had no higher rates of criminal convictions than other men. In other words, although in wartime some men will shoot a civilian in the street for not greeting them properly, in peacetime they are as capable as anyone of controlling their behaviour. Among German war criminals the notable after-effects included nightmares, concentration deficits, reduced work capacity and high incidence of suicide – but not increased criminality.

  However, it’s now clear that one should not generalise on the basis of the post-Holocaust findings. Presently, war criminals in the former Yugoslav states show a significantly higher rate of violence and criminal acts and many have joined the Mafia.

  Banjal Luka, the biggest town in the recently declared Republic Srpska, was only approximately fifty kilometres from the Prijedor concentration camps. Peric had tried to avoid meeting Mirko Zigic after the war, but saw him about from time to time.

  ‘Mirko’s skin had changed. It had cleared up since his teenage days, but it looked oddly rubbery, almost as if it were coated with wax. His teeth used to be in poor shape, but now they were white and regular. I assumed that he wore dentures, even though he was not yet twenty-four. He tied his long, blond hair back in a ponytail and had a full, traditi
onal Serb-Orthodox beard.

  ‘I would turn down a side street the moment I spotted his tall figure, but I knew sooner or later I wouldn’t be able to escape his company. Some of our mutual friends would invite him to parties without warning the rest of us.’

  In the company of friends

  ‘You must take into account that before the war we all went to the same parties – would-be victims as well as would-be executioners. We tried again after the war, but the atmosphere was so strange. For instance, radio stations played music from the seventies and the eighties only. And in many other ways we behaved as if the nineties hadn’t happened. The parties were part of that: trying to avoid the past.

  ‘I realise, of course, that we have to look forward and rely on old friendships in order to build a new nation. It’s just that people have very different limits of how far they’ll go to maintain an acceptable social atmosphere. I mean, you might be hanging out in the kitchen at three o’clock in the morning, chatting away to some men and then, suddenly, you realise that they were in the White Eagles or one of the other notorious paramilitary units.

  The first time I found myself face-to-face with Mirko in a crowded room was shortly after a new rumour had started making the rounds. Apparently he had killed two Croatian journalists after the war. A friend and I left the party to go and sit in a garden a few houses away. Unlike many others at school, I was never in love with Mirko, but the woman I was with had once been his girlfriend.

  ‘One thing I asked her was: “Do you remember how we would quiz girls about the boys they were going out with? – how could they stand this one or that one? And they’d say that the boy was different when they were alone together: he’d be relaxed and was so sweet and kind that we wouldn’t recognise him. Was it the other way round with you and Mirko? We all thought he was a sweet, poetic kind of guy, and only cared about his music. We took for granted that you two had a wonderful time together. Did he change when you were alone? – show a completely unexpected side?”

  ‘She said that he didn’t.’