They Would Never Hurt A Fly Analysis

When I first started reading They Would Never Hurt a Fly, I thought it to be a real page turner which I found would enthral even the most disinterested of readers. The use of language and the author’s personal narrative approach was refreshing to me. The book itself is split up into story like essays of Drakulic’s measurement of the accused men and women, including an analysis of the proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Drakulic follows the stories of the Hague war criminals in her former country of Yugoslavia. The several short stories of the various different perpetrators’ flowed together nicely, I never discovered myself to be losing interest in what I was reading – it seemed to be the complete
The author talks about her first ever experience in a court room. The men on trial were accused of the murder and torture in the Omarska and Keraterm camps in Bosnia. Drakulic talks of how painstakingly long and tediously boring the trial is. We are informed at how the trials we see on the television are too glamorous and how they differ in reality. These are real events, real lives and real people. Drakulic’s attention is caught by a guard on trial for shooting prisoners he claims were trying to escape. The judge is curious as to how there was blood on the walls. This is where our narrator realised “I see what I did not see before, not their dull faces but a room with walls splashed with blood”. It is obvious that Drakulic doesn’t identify herself with a war criminal, she is in fact disgusted at their “inhuman” and barbaric approach to things, as am I. Our author then interacts with her readers asking how ordinary people, just like you and I, can become war criminals. It is true that some are complete psychopaths, but Drakulic opened my eyes to another possibility in her last chapter. What if these war criminals were just ordinary people pushed to their limits? Maybe it was a psychological or social pressure from the propaganda used. It is explained however that it wasn’t something that happened in a blink of an eye, rather a long process which took a number of years to come into
It was too soon after World War II so everything was still raw. They were still rebuilding their lives as people who fought in the war including Drakulic’s father were still alive. As a reader I was perplexed that people would be happy to live with a lie rather than confront the truth. Yes, there was a majority who did petty crimes like stealing from the houses of those Serbs and Croats who “went missing” or ran away. But you also have those who played a major part in the mass murdering of those innocent people who when brought to the ICTY were just marked as “missing”. There was very little justice to the lives lost and ruined in the war, with most cases only being really looked into some ten years later. There was a brutal attack on a young girl Aleksandra Zec who was killed along with her Serbian parents. The murder was confessed but the killer was still at large with little evidence to take it any further. In the Balkans, The Hague was a source of controversy with the Judicial System also corrupt and this is evident in Aleksandra’s