Jean Hatzfeld

Jean Hatzfeld is a writer and journalist whose reporting on the wars in the Former Yugoslavia gives the book a crucial counterweight to romanticized accounts of combat. His work records the exhilaration and brutality of militia culture without allowing fascination with war to erase the suffering of its victims; just as importantly, it shows a reporter willing to revisit his own assumptions when the evidence unsettles them.

Identity and Reporting

The narrator identifies Hatzfeld as the author of L’Air de la guerre and says that his account overlaps with Campagnes, the book by Jean Rolin. Both writers followed the wars on the ground, and the narrator, who knows Hatzfeld a little, treats the two as especially trustworthy witnesses. Their value lies not in claiming a view from nowhere but in recording what they encountered while resisting the temptation to suppress facts that complicate their judgments. Hatzfeld’s reporting makes that discipline concrete: he was first inclined to believe that Serbian snipers had ambushed him, but after a year in hospital he returned to Sarajevo to investigate. He concluded that the shots that cost him a leg had, by chance, been fired by Bosnian militiamen. The reversal does not lead him to declare all sides equivalent. Instead, it demonstrates how reporting can correct a strongly felt first impression while still attending to the unequal positions of the besieged and those besieging them.

The Tigers and the Aftermath at Vukovar

Hatzfeld’s account turns from the general culture of the militias to the Serbian Tigers, led by Željko Ražnatović, known as Arkan. After the surrender at Vukovar, Croatian prisoners were gathered in a warehouse, having been driven from their cellars during the final attacks. In principle the People’s Army was responsible for protecting them. Instead, it stepped aside and left their fate to Arkan’s men. The arrangement exposes the gap between formal military authority and the power exercised on the ground by a militia.

The prisoners’ vulnerability was sharpened by how recently their lives had been intertwined with those of their captors. Victors and vanquished had lived in the same villages and neighborhoods; until the war, they had worked and drunk together without those identities deciding who belonged. Now rifle butts drove the captives onto military trucks bound for unknown destinations. Hatzfeld’s scene shows violence not as an encounter between strangers at some remote front, but as a reversal within familiar communities, where proximity offered no protection once the balance of power changed.

Hatzfeld also follows the violence beyond the warehouse. The day after the roundup, he picked up a young, athletic Tiger hitchhiking home on leave to visit his mother. The soldier cheerfully described an initiation in which recruits slowly slit the throat of a kneeling Croatian prisoner; those who were too nervous had to begin again, while those unwilling to take part left the patrol. He described the killing as something that became easier and was followed by celebration. The ordinary setting of the encounter—a man on his way to see his mother—sits beside his account of organized murder, making militia brutality appear not as an exceptional rupture in these men’s lives but as a practice absorbed into them.

Witness, Partiality, and the Choice of Side

The narrator trusts Jean Hatzfeld and Jean Rolin over writers who visited Belgrade briefly and spoke mainly from behind Serbian lines. Their authority rests on extended reporting from the ground and a willingness to put inconvenient evidence in view. They do not pretend that war is only horror: they acknowledge its excitement, its adrenaline, and the appeal of the people encountered along the front. At the same time, they remain attentive to victims on every side and try to understand what drives torturers. For the narrator, that combination of attraction, compassion, and scrutiny is more credible than either moral simplification or the performance of detachment.

Hatzfeld’s return to Sarajevo makes this method costly and personal. His first instinct was to think Serbian snipers had targeted him as a journalist. After spending a year in hospital, he went back to investigate and concluded that the shots that cost him a leg had in fact been fired by Bosnian militiamen. The finding overturned his initial account of who had wounded him, but it did not persuade him that the two sides were interchangeable. Correcting a mistaken belief, the narrator argues, need not become an excuse to erase the difference between besiegers and besieged.

That distinction becomes decisive in the account of the Siege of Sarajevo. In its first days, a person could still drive from one side to the other, though doing so meant risking a frightening journey. The deeper choice was where to watch from: inside the besieged city, where shells fell, or from the positions from which they were fired. Hatzfeld and Rolin, despite their reluctance to cast themselves as heroes or rallying figures, gravitated toward the weaker side. Their sympathy did not require believing that everyone there was innocent or that everyone opposing them was evil. It required recognizing an imbalance of power and placing the observer where its consequences were being endured.

The narrator also preserves the awkwardness that follows from such a commitment. Rolin could feel satisfaction when, for once, the Serbs were the ones being hit. But that feeling did not last; the balance shifted again, and the work of attending to victims continued. The same scrutiny extended to international justice: the narrator notes the charge that the International Tribunal in The Hague pursued Serbian war criminals while Croatian and Bosnian counterparts were left to the leniency of their own courts. He also points to the terrible conditions of defeated Serbs in Kosovo. In this account, the roles of torturer and victim can reverse, but reversal does not make every situation equivalent. The reporter must keep adapting, the narrator suggests, to avoid remaining on the side of the powerful simply because that side once suffered.

Narrative Function and Contrast

The placement of Hatzfeld’s reporting before Limonov’s account of meeting Arkan establishes a deliberate test of perspective. Hatzfeld describes prisoners handed over to the Tigers after Vukovar and a recruit’s matter-of-fact account of killing; Limonov, by contrast, recalls Arkan as astute and circumspect, remembers their shared drinks and political accord, and later looks with radiant nostalgia at a photograph of them beside the group’s tiger mascot. The contrast does not erase Limonov’s experience or claim to settle every uncertainty about it. It prevents his sense of comradeship from standing alone as the reader’s picture of the war. Hatzfeld’s testimony supplies the violence that Limonov’s recollection leaves outside its frame, while the narrator’s attention to Hatzfeld’s later correction about who shot him shows that reliable witnessing depends on scrutiny, not on a claim to perfect initial judgment.