Free The Exception by Christian Jungersen

course, but the stories kept coming. They’d always begin with something like “Have you heard what they’re saying about Mirko? That he …?” Even then the talk was about the kind of crimes he’s 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 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 – she’s 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 recognised the voice. It was impossible, she said, to put the receiver down.
    ‘We heard these things and couldn’t make sense of them.
    ‘Mirko was still only twenty-one years old. We, the women who had stayed behind, discussed the rumours. I argued that the more frighteningly 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 cafés 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 stone-washed 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 shouldn’t let him hug me, but he did. I told him what I’d been doing, speaking quickly. I didn’t want any gaps where I’d 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 I’d ever heard.
    ‘I’m a Serb. I wasn’t 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 I’d 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 DCGI. I found it impossible to resist trying to put her account into a theoretical context. Several researchers connected to the DCGI are currently working on studies of men who have engaged in genocide.
    Christopher Browning has carried out one of the major classical investigations into this type of behaviour. 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 and, once there, had been ordered to kill Jews. These are his findings:
    10–20% applied for other tasks and were transferred, usually without any problems;
50–80% did not apply for other tasks. They carried out the killings they were ordered to do, but stopped afterwards;
10–30% started killing more