The Exception: A Novel Part 4

Were not much good at warfare, though. Were so easy to find on the Internet. If notorious war criminals want to know whats been written about them in the media, they can find us, no problem.

It sounds to Malene as if Iben truly believes that her life is in danger. She seems to be going through many of the same feelings Malene has endured for years, ever since learning about her illness. Malene feels more connected to her old friend than ever before. She smiles and says shes going to get another gla.s.s of wine. This time Iben wants one too.

Back at the table, Malene quickly checks the dark street outside once again. Why now, do you think?

Because weve challenged somebody.

She sits up straight. Thats it. Someone thinks were making a difference. Enough for him to feel uneasy.

Malene wants to call Rasmus and goes outside to escape the music. Blgrd is a quiet pedestrian street. She looks around for Ibens men with swarthy faces and a military bearing. There are dozens of them. At this time of evening the street is full of immigrants gathered in small groups, almost all of them male.

Rasmus replies this time. Hes in a taxi, taking a few clients to a bar.

Malene tells him about the e-mails and Pauls advice. She adds that Iben is taking the threats much more seriously than she might have expected. Ive never seen Iben like this before. At least now she seems ready to admit that there was no one in her apartment.

Two years younger than Malene, Rasmus has a laid-back, boyish style that makes their age difference more p.r.o.nounced. Nevertheless, he is sensitive to her moods and able to s.h.i.+ft instantly from being narcissistic to being supportive. If only I were at home with you. We could find out more about this together.

They talk for a few more minutes. Malene feels happy because she has someone special to lean on, but shes aware that if she discusses her concerns even her illness for too long, Rasmus becomes restless. She hates to thinks 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 h.e.l.l have e-mailed via an anonymizer site. If he has, we wont be able to trace him so easily. But lets make sure. E-mail 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, well have him cornered. If not, it will give us the name of his service provider, so well know which part of the world hes mailing us from unless he uses an anonymizer site, that is. If he does, well 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?

Dont worry. Well try it when I come home. Rasmus doesnt sound eager to get off the phone, but he has to go. Well track down this lunatic, no problem.

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

Thanks.

And they had loads of ideas about who mightve e-mailed 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 dont know where to begin.

Lets move to an Internet cafe.

Malene hasnt finished her wine, but she understands that collecting information is Ibens way of dealing with stress, so she drains her gla.s.s quickly.

While theyre getting ready to leave, Malenes cell phone rings. Its Lotta from the Swedish Study Program on the Holocaust and Genocide.

Iben called me earlier. Her phone has been busy so I thought Id try yours. I wanted you to know that Ive phoned around. n.o.body seems to have received any e-mails. Thats 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 Ibens list. Thanks. Thats great.

Youre 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.

She did? I thought it was you.

No, I didnt. She did. Iben must have left out her byline in the Word version of the article. Then it hits her what the mistake means. Christ!

Whats the matter?

Malene has to make sure. Lotta, that article, is it on your Web site now in my name?

I think so. I mean, what we publish in print instantly goes onto our Web site as well. Automatically. Not that I Iben interrupts. Tell me. Whats happened?

Malene needs to sit down, but somewhere else, where they arent visible from the street. Holding the phone, she puts her arm around Iben.

Iben, Im 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 couldnt be anyone else, could it?

Malene doesnt like the tone of her voice. No.

Mirko Zigic is the only one weve 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 HJGAARD.

Mirko was a guitarist in the band and composed most of their music, says Ljiljana Peric, who was at secondary school in the same cla.s.s 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 hed 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 elevator one afternoon, Peric touched on her early friends.h.i.+p 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 high 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 cafes and bars, not only for his own band but for others too. He might have made it if the fas.h.i.+on for U.S. 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 pa.s.sionate about music, always insisting that everyone should subscribe to his favorite music and not waste time on dumbed-down pop.

We were a mixed school Serbs, Muslims, Croats but we never paid much attention to ethnic 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 traveled to places like Budapest for concerts or theater. 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 ident.i.ty 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 soldier. n.o.body 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 ma.s.sacres, 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 repet.i.tion 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 realize what youre saying? How do you know? Who says that this is whats 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 its 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 wasnt the only one who did far from it.

IT MUST BE A MISTAKE.

The war went on and on. Tens of thousands died, neighbor turned against neighbor, and old friends informed on each other, leading to imprisonment or execution. It was incomprehensible. We couldnt trust the radio or the television, yet endless stories made 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 afterward. And hed 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. Theyd always begin with something like Have you heard what theyre saying about Mirko? That he ? Even then the talk was about the kind of crimes hes 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 he would 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 shes 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 recognized the voice. It was impossible, she said, to put the receiver down.

We heard these things and couldnt make sense of them.

Mirko was still only twenty-one years old. We, the women who had stayed behind, discussed the rumors. I argued that the more frightening 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 cafes 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 stonewashed 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 shouldnt let him hug me, but he did. I told him what Id been doing, speaking quickly. I didnt want any gaps where Id 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 Id ever heard.

Im a Serb. I wasnt 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 Id 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 DCIG. I found it impossible to resist trying to put her account into a theoretical context. Several researchers connected to the DCIG are currently working on studies of men who have engaged in genocide.

Christopher Browning has carried out one of the major cla.s.sical investigations into this type of behavior. 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 during World War II and, once there, had been ordered to kill Jews. These are his findings: 1020 percent applied for other tasks and were transferred, usually without any problems; 5080 percent did not apply for other tasks. They carried out the killings they were ordered to do, but stopped afterward; 2030 percent 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 theyd use the inhabitants as targets for shooting practice. Often theyd 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 thats 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 Parkinsons 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 partic.i.p.ants in genocide do not have any trouble distinguis.h.i.+ng between the time for killing and the time for peace. This a.s.sumption is based on studies of German perpetrators, which show that after the end of World War II 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 behavior. Among German war criminals the notable aftereffects included nightmares, concentration deficits, reduced work capacity, and high incidence of suicide but not increased criminality.

However, its now clear that one should not generalize 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.

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

Mirkos 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 a.s.sumed 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, traditional Serb-Orthodox beard.

I would turn down a side street the moment I spotted his tall figure, but I knew sooner or later I wouldnt 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 hadnt happened. The parties were part of that: trying to avoid the past.

I realize, of course, that we have to look forward and rely on old friends.h.i.+ps in order to build a new nation. Its just that people have very different limits of how far theyll go to maintain an acceptable social atmosphere. I mean, you might be hanging out in the kitchen at three oclock in the morning, chatting away to some men, and then, suddenly, you realize 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 rumor 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 theyd say that the boy was different when they were alone together: hed be relaxed and was so sweet and kind that we wouldnt recognize him. Was it the other way around 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 didnt.

THE NEXT MORNING.

Peric had something to add when we met the following morning.

Ive listened to those who say they always knew what Mirko was really like. Its what they want to believe now that they know the truth. I used to go on bicycle rides into the woods alone with him. Now that I know hes a rapist I would like to think that I had sensed a deep flaw in him, but the fact is, I didnt.

anne-lise.