The bad guy controls the conversation in “My War Criminal”
My War Criminal By Jessica Stern (Ecco/harper Collins)
What happens when an author tries so strenuously to empathize with her subject that she loses control of her own book?
It’s a question that kept coming to mind as I read “My War Criminal: Personal Encounters With an Architect of Genocide,” Jessica Stern’s mystifying account of her conversations with Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who was convicted in 2016 of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, and is serving a life sentence in prison at The Hague.
Stern, a scholar of terrorism and trauma who served on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, conducted 12 interviews with Karadzic over the course of two years — making hers the first such study, she says, of a leader tried for war crimes at an international tribunal since the Nazis were evaluated at Nuremberg.
Karadzic was found guilty of orchestrating the massacre at Srebrenica, a Bosnian Muslim town and United Nations-designated safe zone where Serbian forces murdered 8,000 men and boys in 1995, burying them in mass graves. Four years before, he had given a speech to the Bosnian Assembly threatening Muslims with “annihilation” if they voted to secede from the disintegrating Yugoslavia. White supremacists across the world, including mass shooters in Norway and New Zealand, have looked to Karadzic for inspiration.
Stern’s interest in Karadzic isn’t purely academic. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she writes about her “deep curiosity about the causes of evil,” and of a persistent desire to make “creative use of the sequelae of childhood trauma.”
A prefatory note explains that her method for interviewing terrorists and perpetrators requires losing her sense of self, at least temporarily: “When the interview is going well, I enter an altered state in which my subject’s feelings become more central to my experience than my own.”
The problem with “My War Criminal” is that Karadzic — a psychiatrist who wrote bad poetry before becoming the president of Bosnia’s hard-line Serbian nationalist party — apparently knows enough about her determination to write a book about him to turn her own method against her. Karadzic gets fashioned here into the charismatic character Stern so clearly wants him to be. “I had forgotten how tall Karadzic
is, how good-looking,” she marvels, calling him a “Byronic figure.” She listens patiently to his long-winded yarns about epic poetry and an idyllic childhood in the Montenegrin hills. Having posed as a faith healer during his 13 years as a fugitive, he offers to show her how bioenergetic healing works, waving his hands above her head.
Stern says she was skeptical through it all — to a point. “It was not a good idea to take at face value the words of an indicted war criminal,” she dutifully writes, describing how after the interviews she made a habit of looking up anything factual Karadzic had said. During the conversations, though, she deliberately avoided challenging Karadzic in any way. She was so committed to surrendering to his “idea of himself” that the one time she said something off-script, asking a truly anodyne question during one of his grandiose disquisitions, she felt a spasm of anxiety.
“I utter it before having a chance to worry he’ll turn against me, tell me never to return,” she writes, patently relieved when “he didn’t kick me out, which would have made it harder for me to finish my book.”
Stern inflates the drama of her narrative, framing it as a “cat and mouse” story, “or maybe cat and snake.” The title of the book is tellingly sentimental. A list of people at the front is presented as “Dramatis Personae.”
When she discovered that Karadzic’s father, long before Karadzic was born, had killed a cousin for spurning his marriage proposal, she writes: “I let it wash over me like a story. Like the libretto of an opera.”
More disconcerting than the awkward literary affectations is how Stern writes about the actual history of the war. Stern says she isn’t trying to deny a genocide, nor is she trying to redeem Karadzic. But in her attempts to “follow his moral logic,” she entertains his tortured excuses and grotesque fantasies. “This, I believe, could well be the trap that Karadzic fell into — the feeling he had to protect his own people,” she writes, opening herself up to Karadzic’s odious insistence that he and his fellow Serbian nationalists did “perceive a real threat” before beginning their campaign of extermination.
It’s exasperating to watch a smart woman play possum like this — not just in the interviews but in the writing, especially when her conclusions don’t tell us anything we didn’t know before. Karadzic weaponized history and identity to stoke hatred and fear and turn the people who listened to him into killers. Stern wants the truth to be more complicated and less banal than it is.
“I had been harboring a secret, megalomaniacal dream — that I was going to get him to apologize,” Stern writes.