Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has found Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić guilty of genocide for his part in the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, among other atrocities. Slavenka Drakulić reflects on a photograph from the first days of the Bosnian conflict, and what it tells us about the nature of evil. This text is based on a presentation made by the author at the Central European Forum in Bratislava on 18 November 2017.

We all think we know what evil is – and what it looks like. We have enough examples from history, both from recent history and even from the present day. But in order to illustrate what we are talking about today, it seems to me useful to take another look at it – and I mean literally so.The concept of evil is ancient, and all religions include in their first sets of rules instructions on how to fight it. Interestingly, we have not come up with a better, more appropriate concept to this today. Let’s turn to the photo by Ron Haviv here: what do we see?

Photo: Ron Haviv. Source: Courtesy of Ron Haviv/Biography of a Photo

 A soldier kicking the bodies of dead or dying civilians. It is initially hard to detect the soldier’s insignia or nationality from the photo, but we know that it was taken on 2 April 1992 in Bijeljina, Bosnia. The uniformed men are Serbian paramilitaries, Arkan’s ‘Tigers’, on a killing spree against the Muslim citizens of that small town – what later became known as ‘ethnic cleansing’. It was very effective: only 10% of the original Muslim population was left in that region after the war.

I do not remember where I saw this image for the first time – whether it was in some foreign newspaper, or someone pointed it out to me – yet it stayed with me, in me. In 2003, when Predrag Lucić, the editor of Feral Tribune, a small publishing house in Croatia, suggested we put it on the cover of my book on war criminals, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, I, of course, agreed – despite knowing only too well that not many readers in my country would reach for a book with such a cover. Indeed, publishers in the 15 countries where it was later translated did not accept the photo as a cover image. They were appalled by the idea.

However, this same photo was selected, by Time magazine and an international team of curators, to be among the 100 most influential photographs of all time. What I do remember well is how I felt watching the photo that first time: the sudden lack of air, as if I had forgotten to breathe for a moment; the void it created in my chest; and the dismay that it created in my mind when my eyes met the two women and the man lying on the asphalt, blood oozing from under them.

Maybe it was because of that woman. Note that the woman in a white hand-knitted pullover, whom the soldier is about to kick, has her hands folded above her head; if you are not careful, you might ignore that gesture or even think – foolishly! – that she is pretending to be dead or hiding her face. But when you take another look, when you pay attention, you can see that it can only be a hopeless attempt to protect herself from ending up like the woman next to her. Her neighbour’s head is cracked, you can see the open wound above her ear; the ground beneath is still wet from her blood.

Now let us turn to the left-hand side of the photo for a moment: it looks as if the situation on the left-hand side has almost nothing to do with what is happening on the right. Two soldiers in paramilitary uniforms are passing by the bodies on the ground. They look ahead, paying no attention to what their companion is doing. The two parts of the same photo could stand apart, even though one of the soldiers has almost stumbled over the foot of the dead man, so close are they. Judging by the way they are holding their guns, they look as if they are searching for more civilians to kill. 

According to the ICTY, before which this same photo was used as evidence by the prosecution, on that day alone they killed between 48 and 78 Muslim civilians, but are suspected of killing many more: between 250 and 1,000. So, really, why should they bother about those who had already been killed? It is precisely this imbalance – between their detachment and his engagement – that directs our attention back to the soldier about to kick the woman with his right boot.

He, or rather his gesture, exudes a variety of emotions. It is easy to read them: even students in high schools and colleges, when seeing the photo (as they do as part of a documentary, Biography of a Photo, that the photographer and co-director Lauren Walsh are currently filming, trying to understand what other people see in his photo), recognise in his aggression his anger, fury, contempt, hatred.

Yet, that is not all that one can see here.

Because – again, you have to look carefully – somewhere in the middle of it, there is a tiny detail that is actually the most telling of all, the key to the whole scene. In his left hand, the kicking soldier is holding a cigarette butt. It is almost invisible, but it is there. This cigarette butt is telling us, the viewers, a background story. It is telling us that the soldier, while smoking and walking, perhaps taking a break from the killing (you cannot shoot people non-stop; you need a pause) – makes a detour in order to stop and kick these people on the ground. Evidently, even during his break, he could not resist the impulse to hit out at their bodies, even though the job is done – they are dead… read more.. http://www.eurozine.com/evil-framed/