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International Journal of Transitional Justice Advance Access originally published online on April 3, 2008
International Journal of Transitional Justice 2008 2(2):214-226; doi:10.1093/ijtj/ijn006
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

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

Magdalena Zolkos*

E-mail: * Izaak Walton Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, Canada; and Visiting Researcher at Coninx Foundation, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Germany. E-mail: zolkoska{at}ualberta.ca

1In this article, I analyze the conceptualization of transitional justice underwriting Slavenka Drakulic'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 Drakulic'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 Drakulic'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 Drakulic'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.


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