ABSTRACT
In a recent exploration entitled ‘Zones of Justice’, my analysis was inspired by a passage in a novel by Mathias Énard. 1 His protagonist/narrator is Francis Servain Mirković, a former soldier who participated in atrocities while a fighter in a Croatian militia during the Balkans War. Having been reformed, he is on a train from Milan to Rome with an archive of atrocities that have occurred in the ‘zone’ (the Mediterranean region), which he intends to deliver to the Vatican. The passage is his recollection of seeing his former Croatian commander, Blaškić, on trial at The Hague’s War Crimes Tribunal. Blaškić is:
in his box at The Hague among the lawyers, the interpreters, the prosecutors, the witnesses, the journalists, the onlookers, the soldiers of the UNPROFOR who analyzed the maps for the judges commented on the possible provenance of bombs according to the size of the crater determined the range of the weaponry based on the caliber which gave rise to so many counter-arguments all of it translated into three languages recorded automatically transcribed … everything had to be explained from the beginning, historians testified to the past of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia since the Neolithic era by showing how Yugoslavia was formed, then geographers commented on demographic statistics, censuses, land surveys, political scientists explained the differential political forces present in the 1990s … Blaškić in his box is one single man and has to answer for all our crimes, according to the principle of individual criminal responsibility which links him to history, he’s a body in a chair wearing a headset, he is on trial in place of all those who held a weapon … 2
