The Media Negotiations of War Criminals and Their Memoirs
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Author | Katarina Ristić |
| DOI | 10.1177/1057567718766218 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Criminal Justice Review
2018, Vol. 28(4) 391-405
The Media Negotiations
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DOI: 10.1177/1057567718766218
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Memoirs: The Emergence
of the “ICTY Celebrity”
Katarina Ristic´1
Abstract
The literature on transitional justice in former Yugoslavia holds that the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) proceedings, meant to establish the facts about the past,
punish the perpetrators of mass violence, and even facilitate reconciliation, have led to the
unexpected transformation of convicted war criminals into heroes in their home countries.
Drawing on cultural criminology, the article looks at the phenomenon of “criminal celebrity,”
which emerges at the juncture between public personality, intensive media attention, and high
audience resonance. Considering that this transformation largely depends on the ability of different
actors, including the convicts themselves, to create socially acceptable public personalities by
reframing crimes, and their contexts and perpetrators, this article looks at the attempts to create
such alternative accounts in the memoirs of the convicts, and in the media. This article argues that
the mediation of war criminals in the ICTY facilitated a new type of criminal celebrity—the “ICTY
celebrity,” who emerges from his/her relation to an allegedly unjust legal authority, rather than to
the crimes. The ICTY celebrity is not a hero, known for heroic deeds or achievements—instead,
his main function is to represent a flattering and consoling narrative about the past, enabling wide
identification within the ethnic community.
Keywords
ICTY, celebrity, war criminals, memoirs, Serbia, media
Snimi facu idiotu
Ceri se u sudnici
K’o da je dobio na lotu
Postat će celebrity
1 Hochschule fur Technik Wirtschaft und Kultur Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
Corresponding Author:
Katarina Ristic´, Global and European Studies Institute, University Leipzig, Leipzig 04105, Germany.
Email: ristic@uni-leipzig.de
392
International Criminal Justice Review 28(4)
Look at that idiot!
He laughs at the court,
He thinks he’s won the lottery:
At last he’s a celebrity!
Hladno pivo, “Udarna Vijest”
“Theoretically,” Austin (2004) writes, “for violators of the criminal law, the process of stigma-
tization begins with the arrest and conviction, public events that are intended to produce shame” (pp.
175, 176). Stigmatized persons are “dehumanized and considered defective or unwholesome” (Aus-
tin, 2004, p. 175). Stigmatization is yet another manifestation of the enmity felt toward a criminal
offender, or, as Mead (1918) puts it, of the “shared hostility to the lawbreaker as an enemy to the
society to which we belong” (p. 585). In other words, hostility and stigmatization are creating new
boundaries between an in-group and an out-group, casting a felon out from society. In contrast with
such social responses to criminal offenders, war criminals in former Yugoslavia receive remarkably
positive public treatment.
Siding with the accused of the same ethnic group, political elites and the national media have
celebrated released war criminals, reframing them into national heroes (Ahmetašević & Tanner,
2009; Džihana & Volčić, 2011; Ristić, 2014; Subotić, 2009). Simić (2011) has discussed this
inability of international criminal justice to translate into local justice as a demonstration of the
disrespect felt toward International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgments,
enabling the perceived interchangeability of “the labels of war criminal and war hero” (p. 1407).
Pavlaković (2010) notes a similar process in Croatia where Ante Gotovina has come to exemplify
“the heroic ideal derived from centuries of an oft-violent Croatian history” (p. 1718). Scholars
interpret such outcomes as failures of the judicial system, on the one hand, or symptoms of the
persistent nationalism of home states on the other. This article proposes to analyze the public life of
war criminals within the framework of cultural criminology research, noting that the junction of
mass media and consumerism have created “celebrity culture” as the pervasive media logic of Late
Modernity (Marshall, 2006; Penfold-Mounce, 2009). Understanding the public portrayal of war
criminals through the paradigm of “criminal celebrity” as developed in cultural criminology, pro-
vides an insight into the junction between criminals and the mass media, and the conditions under
which criminals might become celebrities. Furthermore, it enables the formulation of more precise
distinctions between the treatment of different war criminals, thereby qualifying the general assump-
tion that all war criminals are heroes of their societies.
The three war criminals selected for this study fall in the category of criminal celebrity which
Penfold-Mounce (2009) has dubbed the underworld exhibitionist, those who attempt “to enter the
celebrity realm through selling their life stories and experiences to the public” (p. 118). All three war
criminals have written ego-documents1 (memoirs, diaries, biographies) in an attempt to reframe their
public image of war criminal. They were found guilty by the ICTY on different counts, from
murders to forcible population transfers and mistreatment of prisoners of war, as crimes against
humanity and war crimes. Biljana Plavšić,2 a politician and prominent member of the Serbian
Democratic Party in Republika Srpska (RS) during and after the war, wrote a two-volume memoir
which followed her life from the outbreak of violence in the 1990s till the end of her political career
in 1998. Yugoslav Army Officer Veselin Šljivančanin3 published his first book in the form of a diary
written in the Scheveningen detention unit, starting on the first day of his detention and continuing
until his release. Finally, Milan Lukić,4 paramilitary leader of the “White Eagles” in Bosnia,
employed a ghostwriter, Rajko Đurđević, to help prepare his memoir. With the exception of Plav-
šić’s memoirs, these documents did not receive any scholarly attention. Subotić (2012) sees Plav-
šić’s memoirs as a “remarkable and disappointing tale of the false promise of apology, remorse, and
confession by a high-ranking convicted war criminal” (p. 57). In other words, Plavšić uses her
Ristic´
393
memoir to (re)assert an essentialist, nationalistic world view, and Subotić shows the inconsistency of
Plavšić’s narration when contrasted with the historical knowledge and ICTY judgments.
The aim of this article is somewhat different. Instead of exposing their fallacies, I have read these
texts as an attempt to retrieve power (Gready, 1993) and to reconstruct the public self by reframing
the past and criminal responsibility. The aim of the analysis of memoirs, then, is to show the
discursive strategies employed by convicts for the reframing of their individual criminal responsi-
bility and creation of a morally acceptable public persona. Nevertheless, the memoirs alone cannot
change the public status of a war criminal. This status is further negotiated in the media and created
in the ways the mass media and other public figures treat the ICTY judgments, convicts and their
memoirs, as well as in the resonance provoked by this mediation.5 Hence, after analyzing memoirs, I
turn to media discourses, asking whether the mediation of war criminals and their memoirs has
resulted in the establishment of a celebrity status for any of the convicts, and if so, what kind of
media attention, narrative about the past and public resonance enables the celebrity status of war
criminals. The conclusion argues that although all three war criminals present themselves in the
memoirs as “defenders of the people,” pleading for public recognition as national heroes, only one
of them becomes a celebrity, if not a hero. Unlike a heroic criminal like Robin Hood, whose crimes
are directed against an unjust authority, the “ICTY celebrity” emerges from and is partly created by
the imprisonment itself—he is known for no heroic deeds and has no achievements to his name; his
main function is to represent a flattering and consoling narrative about the past.
Before the analysis of the memoirs, exploring the individual reframings of crimes and respon-
sibility, and of the media, with the mediation of memoirs and war criminals in the public sphere, the
following section will introduce “Criminal Celebrities” as a theoretical frame for the analysis. It will
be followed by a short note on the method of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Stuart Hall’s
concept of encoding and decoding, used for the analysis of media.Theoretical Frame: Criminal
Celebrities
Criminal celebrity, like any other celebrity, operates at the junction between public personality,
intensive media attention, and high resonance with an audience. Boorstin (2006) famously defined
celebrities as “those who are well known for being well known” (p. 79), thereby distinguishing
between “heroes” known for their deeds and celebrities known for being known. Instead, it is
intensive media attention, the rupture between the public and vernacular selves, and the constant
attempt to grasp the person behind the public image, which drive the construction of celebrity.
Celebrities are no accidental outcome of mass media but emerge in specific historical circumstances:
democratic (or at least popular) regimes, in ambiguous relationship with the consumerism of late
capitalism and widespread mass...
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