ABSTRACT
The initiating provocation for this chapter is a long passage in Mathias Énard’s novel Zone(2010). The novel’s protagonist, Francis Servain Mirković is a French Croatian who had enlisted to fight in the ethnic purification-driven Croatian independence war, motivated by the neo-Nazi ideology he had absorbed as a youth. As one line in the novel puts it, “the truth is that there were loads of neo-Nazis, hooked on the mythology of victory over the Serbs, on the mythology of the single ‘independent’ Croatian State scoured clean by the partisans.” 1 The novel is structured as one sentence of reflections for 517 pages (there are no periods, only commas), narrated by Mirković while on a train trip from Milan to Rome to deliver an archive of the war crimes that had occurred in the “zone” (an area comprising Mediterranean nation-states) to the Vatican. The passage that inspires my analysis contains his recollection of the day he saw his former Croatian commander, Blaškić, at his war crimes trial, a “multilingual circus of the ICJ.” 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 1990’s ... 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
