A reflection paper on the fictional works of Brother Dejan and The Politics of Exile
What is the place for storytelling when analyzing the consequences of ethnic conflict like the war in Bosnia? The mainstream ways of reporting on such events as well as research produced in Western institutes may only offer one side of the story, albeit through a Eurocentric or Orientalist lens. But, as we see in Bakur Bakuradze’s film Brother Dejan and Elizabeth Dauphinee’s book The Politics of Exile, the roles of victim and perpetrator; the guilty and innocent cannot always be clearly defined. Both fictional works reveal an alternate reality where complex layers of the human experience are revealed; a reality where war criminals appear weak, lonely, loving, confused…and simply, human.
By Bridget Carter
Both the Politics of Exile and Brother Dejan were well-crafted fictional stories based on real events. In both works, the audience is invited to enter an alternative universe where perpetrator and victim are not clearly defined. They are given more humanistic qualities of love, pain, longing, and loneliness. As an international relations academic graduate student, I read scores of scholarly research papers and books pulled from library shelves on all-things IR. Student assignments (i.e. for those of us studying in the West) are, often times, saturated with Orientalist leanings. Arrogant scholars claiming fame to expert analysis on “other” regions and curious intelligentsia examining the East like a peculiar specimen contribute to the influences of Western-centric influences. As a result, students often consume this perspective as the one and only, making it so they view the world as a black and white, east and west divide.
This tendency is also reflected in media and news: a clear victim can be seen weeping while helplessly kicking and screaming for the loss of their son, husband, brother, father. Or, a menacing perpetrator can be seen smugly galloping across the screen as the one who got away, and the one who must be captured and put to justice. We are bombarded with such news and atrocious historical events that it becomes somewhat normalized and we perhaps, sadly, become numb or simply accustomed to it. Scholars and media alike portray the evil of the world with clearly defined victims and perpetrators. But, as the character Stojan says in The Politics of Exile: “[B]elieve me when I tell you that there was no one in Bosnia with a gun in his hand who was innocent” (Dauphinee, 118).
Story-telling in this sense offers alternative perspectives of those who are involved in war. And, perhaps story-telling can offer a more realistic – despite its fictional framework – portrayal of events. The telling of stories can also more easily enable relatability to the complex layers of the human experience. The news spits facts; scholarly journals provide research. Neither offer emotion in the way that story-telling can.
The humanistic portrayal
The humanistic side of an otherwise cold, evil figure is portrayed in Brother Dejan when Commander Dejan Stanić (meant to portray Serbian General Ratko Mladić, who was in command during the Srebrenica Massacre in 1995 when 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were executed), shuffles slowly through the scenes constantly on the run. His unkempt, exhausted shell of a body can be seen staring blankly into space while lying in bed or sitting at the dining table. He appears weak, frail, vulnerable, and almost child-like: the kaleidoscope of human conditions and emotions.
He is completely at the mercy of his friends who he himself does not completely trust: “Trust no one completely,” he tells his son. This can be seen as foreshadowing his eventual capture by the police while hiding out at his comrade’s farm home. His naked, tired body bathes while one of his protectors brings him freshly washed clothes; his cold frail frame is dressed by another comrade; and he lays in a colorful bunkbed while a group of young men talk obscenities in the other room. All of this is portrayed on screen through a camera lens peeking through doorways or paneled walls making him appear all the more vulnerable. His loneliness, despair, and exhaustion are palpable in the fog of the forest or the silence of a room.
Yet, despite his pathetic loneliness and exhaustion, he does not appear to show any remorse or regret. The viewer is almost forced to feel sorry for him but his apparent lack of regret keeps her from fully being able to do so. He still carries his polished handgun engraved with “to commander from your soldiers” as what seems to be a memento that he is not willing or able to let go of (the object or the past). This is further highlighted when his comrade suggests that he leave the gun behind, in which he simply states that he will not. In the eyes of many Serbs, he is still seen as a national hero, which further adds to his inability (or unwillingness) to repent as this would mean that he would betray all of those who are loyal to him. Furthermore, showing remorse could equate his current state of suffering to mere meaninglessness – what was it all for? As a result, he is stranded in his remorseless state of isolation.
No remorse
More recently, this lack of remorse can also be seen in various trials of war criminals from the former Yugoslavia: Mladic was known to incessantly interrupt his trial in protest, Milosevic insisted he did not recognize the authority of the tribunal, and Slobodan Praljak – a Bosnian Croat commander – drank poison in court and died after hearing his sentence.
Similarly, the first time the professor meets Stojan Sokolović in The Politics of Exile he is wearing shoes that are falling apart and pants that are too short for his tall body, characterizing him as slightly pitiful and helpless. The reader later learns of the terrible murders he committed in the small town where he killed four people (including a child) during his mission to shoot 30 Muslims in order to receive leave for his brother’s funeral. Stojan committed terrible things, yet his humanistic side dominates Dauphinee’s story. He saves a kitten from the street, cares for a prickly plant, and peels oranges while sitting cross-legged on her office floor. He is deep, caring, serious, funny, and, like Dejan, slightly child-like. Still, the reader cannot help but ask herself: How could he do such a thing?
Consequences
“[You say] that everyone can choose freely and then be personally responsible for all the consequences,” Stojan notes. “What if we can’t see the consequences beforehand?” (Dauphinee, 30). Dauphinee slowly peels back the layers, like Stojan peels his orange, and reveals the complexities of ethical decision making. Stojan said that Bosnia is so covered in lies that “you can almost never know if you’ll ever know the truth” (Dauphinee, 57). This runs contrary to the notion of Western-centric academia that it is always possible to uncover the truth. But if the truth is unknown, or carefully guarded by, those who actually participated in such perplexing events, how is it possible to uncover it, much less understand it? Figures and body counts may contribute to some form of the truth, but do numbers tell us anything about how war was experienced by those who were there? “I know what Serbs did,” adds Stojan. “You can’t tell me with your theories . . . when I read [the books on the Bosnian War] I felt like I was reading something that took place on Mars . . . for me it was not as they described it” (Dauphinee, 118). “They” being non-Serb or non-Bosnian Western intellectuals.
Dauphinee’s other character Milan, who was involved in the murder of Stojan’s brother Luka, says that the war made everyone a liar and one could not distinguish between what was true and what was false. Those who carried out executions “did not know why they were doing so” (Dauphinee, 142). They covered up bodies because that’s what they were told to do, and it was their job to make things ‘clean’ – there was no logic in anything that was going on (Dauphinee, 138), “there was only the sense that [they] had to defend [them]selves” (Dauphinee, 55). The lack of logic is further solidified when Stojan’s brother, a Serb, is shot dead in the forest by “the Ivan,” also a Serb soldier. Stojan shot and killed multiple Muslim Bosnians out of revenge for his brother’s death, when in fact it was a fellow Serb, thirsty for death, who shot his brother dead.
Serbian (a)historicity and memory
Both Boose (2002) and Korac (1998) note the phenomenon of Serbian (a)historicity and memory of Turks as the enemy. The (a)historic memory of the impalements that the Serbs endured during the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 contribute to the Serb’s deeply rooted sense of victimization further “justifying” their brutalities toward the Muslim Bosnians during the war. “We are here to defend the territory behind us if the Chetniks in front of us get overrun by the Turks,” says Pas in Politics of Exile while sitting in the trench waiting to shoot at the next Bosnian. Stojan finds it strange, or at least takes note of the fact, that he refers to Serbs as Chetniks (royalists from WWII) and Muslims as Turks (Dauphinee, 103).
So, once the anger and confusion subside and the reader absorbs the pool of complex human emotions and desperation that Stojan was feeling, she becomes less cross and more sympathetic – though further confused as she asks herself, how could you possibly feel sympathy for a heartless murderer? The answer seems to be in the fact that he is not heartless – his heart is just in pieces.
Yearning for what once was
Nostalgia cuts through both storylines like a clean incision. In the film Brother Dejan, glowing, nostalgic-esque views of crisp shirts hanging in a wardrobe, a well-stocked market scene, vibrant young men playing soccer, and robust soldiers roaming the woods cut into focus. Dejan’s desire for the past becomes clear when the film jumps back-and-forth between the gloomy present and bright past, spurring “the awakening of a remembered past,” as said in Gapova’s (2017) words. Dejan longs for a place but could actually be yearning for a different time that may never have existed in the form which it is imagined” (Gapova, 191). Stojan, too, is “homesick for something that doesn’t exist anymore . . .” (Dauphinee, 103), making them both slaves to their current environment.
One cannot help but see the irony in Dejan’s “slavery.” The film takes his character back to what should have always been: the option to be a human being who can live absent from ethnic disparities, hatred, and killing. He sits amongst vast rolling meadows, stares contemplatively into the river, and roams the forest trails. Yet, the most unfortunate thing is, because of his past actions, he is not free to just be and live in his Serbian homeland that he fought (and killed) so hard to “protect.” He is a slave and he is forever haunted by the ghosts of those he slayed. He cannot wash the blood from his hands – but one cannot help but wonder if he wants his hands clean.
Both Dejan and Stojan are running: Dejan from and Stojan towards the truth – and both are exhausted and dreary. Emmanuel Levinas said in On Escape, as told byDuaphinee, that, “The necessity of fleeing oneself is put in check by the impossibility of ever doing so.” Despite both characters running, running, running, neither can escape the atrocities they have committed. Neither will ever be absolved from their doings, and they know that more than anyone else. But, the lines between victim and perpetrator, guilt and innocence are not so defined for “. . . we all laugh and mourn and love and hate with the same breath of air in our lungs,” declares the Priest in Politics of Exile. “We are guilty and innocent. There is only the difference of a hair between these.” (Dauphinee, 200). Possibly the most important thing to take away from both fictional works related to the Bosnian War and its maniacal actors is: “He is possibly a war criminal . . . but he is also something more and something other than that” (Duaphinee, 201). We are confronted with the complexities of war and the humanistic qualities of men like Dejan and Stojan who are forlorn, vulnerable, unyielding, fragile…and human.
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References
Bakuradze, Bakur. “Brother Dejan” (2015).
Boose, L. (2002). Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society. 28(1), 71 - 94.
Dauphinee, Elizabeth. The Politics of Exile. Routledge, 2013.
Gapova, Elena. “The Land Under White Wings: The romantic Landscaping of Socialist Belarus.” Rethinking Marxism: A journal of Economics, Culture and Society. 29:1 (2017): 173-198
Korac, M. (1998). Ethnic-Nationalism, Wars and the Patterns of Social, Political and Sexual Violence Against Women: The Case of Post-Yugoslav Countries. Identities, 5(2). 153 - 181.
For more on the Slobodan Praljak tribunal trial: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2017/nov/29/un-war-crimes-defendant-claims-to-drink-poison-at-trial-in-hague-slobodan-praljak