Traumatized War Criminal? Documenting the Case of Esad Landžo

• Author: Olivera Simic
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1057567720940786
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Original Article

Traumatized War Criminal?

Documenting the Case

of Esad Landˇ

zo

Olivera Simic

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Abstract

Perpetrators’ voices have been traditionally ignored in the transitional justice field and beyond. Esad

Landˇ

zo was only 19 when he committed the crimes of willful killing, torturing, and causing serious

injury to the detainees of notorious ˇ

Celebic

´i camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2001, Landˇ

zo was

sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former

Yugoslavia for the crimes he committed in 1992. After serving two thirds of his sentence in 2006 and

settling in Finland, Landˇ

zo and the Danish filmmaker, Lars Feldballe Petersen, embarked on the

project of making a documentary movie about Landˇ

zo’s traumatic memories, remorse, and regret.

Landˇ

zo had a strong urge to extend his apology to each victim individually and in 2015 went to

ˇ

Celebic

´i to meet his former detainees. This article will build on a scarce conversation in scholarly,

and legal discourse, as to why psychological trauma is considered to be an experience that belongs to

victims. It will analyze difficult and untold perpetrators’ experiences of criminal acts and explore

whether in these experiences there is potential for inner and group understanding. This article

draws on the author’s interviews with Landˇ

zo, the main protagonist in the movie The Unforgiven: A

War’s Criminal Remorse, a film that documents the extraordinary story of Landˇ

zo: from his denial to

redemption.

Keywords

war criminal, trauma, remorse, Landˇ

zo, ICTY

Introduction: The Voices of Perpetrators

My name is Esad Landzo. I used to be a guard at Celebici prison camp. I wish it never happened. I really

did bad things. Would I be able to forgive somebody like me?

Transitional justice initiatives rarely pick up on perpetrators’ remorse and trauma as potential

drivers of any peacebuilding or reconciliation efforts. As of December 2019, 59 of the 90 war

1

Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Olivera Simic, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Queensland 4111, Australia.

Email: o.simic@griffith.edu.au

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DOI: 10.1177/1057567720940786

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2022, Vol. 32(

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criminals prosecuted and sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugosla-

via (ICTY, 2019) have been released after serving their prison sentence.

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Some of these individuals

have become part of the political elite of their country of origin (mainly high-ranking war crim-

inals),

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while others have tried to slip back into the community without much notice. Some perpe-

trators, for different reasons, stayed to permanently reside in the third countries where they served

their sentence.

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Only 19%of those early released acknowledged their personal responsibility and

expressed remorse for the crimes they committed (Hol´a et al., 2018).

As with ordinary criminals, war criminals too have diverse relationships with their crimes after

the fact: They may regret or embrace them; they may see themselves as having had no choice or they

may see themselves responsible for their crimes. How to engage with those perpetrators who feel

responsible and even remorseful for their crimes and how to perhaps capitalize on the perpetrator’s

pain for the purpose of reconciliation are questions yet to be researched in the field of transitional

justice.

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While we expect victims of crimes to suffer trauma, we rarely imagine and ask whether

perpetrators could experience the crimes they inflicted upon their victims as traumatic too.

This article aims to explore how and whether war criminals experience crimes they inflicted

either directly or indirectly on their victims as traumatic (Mohamed, 2015b) and whether the

perpetrator can be, as Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (2003) argued in her work on Eugene De Kock,

“a wounded self?” It builds on a scarce conversation in scholarly, and legal discourse, as to why

psychological trauma is an experience that belongs only to victims and why there is resistance to

acknowledge and value trauma of perpetrators (Mohamed, 2015b). This article also explores

whether perpetrators’ trauma can serve as catalyst for inner and group understanding. If justice and

reconciliation are both established as ultimate objectives of transitional justice (United Nations

Secretary General, 2004), then perpetrators’ remorse should be given more consideration.

Plenty has been said about victims’ needs to narrate their victimization—be it in the courtroom,

film, truth, and reconciliation commission—as part of the presumption that such narration will set

one free from psychic pain and from trauma of violence (McGarry & Walklate, 2014; Pemberton

et al., 2018, 2019; Walklate, 2016). In the context of “revealing is healing,”

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narrating “the truth” of

one’s experience of victimization or perpetration is und erstood as a pathway to individual and

communal healing (Anders, 2017, p. 45). Felman talks about the courtroom as a theater of justice,

the stage upon which the public can witness dramatic transformation of the private tra umas of

victims and witnesses into public narratives. These narratives, Felman argues, help to symbolize,

exhume, and contain the ghostly traumas of past atrocities (Felman, 2002, p. 1). The protagonists of

the stage are victims and witnesses, not defendants or their crimes (Anders, 2017, p. 44). Transitional

justice mechanisms prioritize victims, especially truth and reconciliation commissions, in which

victims are the “primary subject and intended beneficiaries” of their investigations and recommen-

dations (Laplante & Theidon, 2007, p. 237).

The law has made available certain forms for the representation and adjudication of traumatic

experience (Crawley & van Rijswijk, 2012), while others have been systematically concealed and

ignored. As Megret (2019) argues, “the accused is arguably and paradoxically the great absent figure

of trials before international criminal tribunals” (p. 398).

Still, breaking the silence about crimes may be a necessary route for the recovery of perpetrators

too. Can a perpetrator become the victim of his crimes? Can an articulation of his crimes and an

apology bring inner peace to his victims and to himself? Perpetrators are not uniform. The Unfor-

given: A War’s Criminal Remorse (The Unforgiven) elucidates this point: Landˇ

zo breaks stereotypes

that we hold about perpetrators as “monsters” not capable of humane feelings, as the ones who are

not “‘like us’” (Jensen & Snezjnmann, 2008, p. 1).

The scholarly literature acknowledges “complex perpetrators,” usually child soldiers whom the

criminal system finds difficult to deal with.

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Although Landˇ

zo was not a child soldier, he shares

similar traits: He is sincerely remorseful for his crimes and now psychologically suffers from them.

358 International Criminal Justice Review 32(4)