The Time That Was Broken, the Home That Was Razed: Deconstructing Slavenka Drakulić's Storytelling About Yugoslav War Crimes

摘要

1In this article, I analyze the conceptualization of transitional justice underwriting Slavenka Drakulić's book, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, on the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. I adopt a critical and deconstructive strategy of interpretation that reveals Drakulić's idea of ‘justice for the Balkans’ as not only internally incoherent and fractured but also politically problematic. I introduce two concepts as central to Drakulić's storytelling about transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia: (i) the idea of a ‘broken time’ and (ii) the idea of a ‘razed home.’ I conclude that Drakulić's narratives of justice are aimed at repairing broken time and rebuilding the razed home in a way that reveals the author's redemptive, rather than political, thinking about transitional justice.