Jean Rolin

Jean Rolin is a writer and war observer whose account of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia helps Emmanuel Carrère examine what it means to report honestly from a divided battlefield. In Campagnes, Rolin records the seductions and abuses of militia life; in Carrère’s reading, his importance lies in holding that excitement beside the suffering it enables, and in allowing unwelcome evidence to unsettle an initial judgment.

Identity and published work

Carrère describes Rolin as a friend and names Campagnes as one of two accounts of the Yugoslav wars that he considers especially valuable; the other is Jean Hatzfeld’s L’ Air de la guerre. The books overlap, and both writers followed the fighting on the ground. Carrère sets their work against accounts grounded in a brief visit or observation from behind the lines, and says he trusts the witnesses who spent time close to the fronts and encountered more than one side of the conflict. He returns to Rolin and Hatzfeld as the eyewitnesses whose testimony he believes he was right to trust.

The opening of Campagnes establishes Rolin’s attention to the war as a social atmosphere, not only as a contest between armed formations. He begins with a roadblock manned by militiamen whose affiliations are difficult to identify. The war is just starting; losses remain comparatively low, and men are learning what weapons allow them to do. Rolin’s description connects that novelty and pleasure to the terrorizing of civilians, the abuse of women, and the acquisition of goods without the labor peace would require. The scene makes the militia’s attractions part of the account rather than a subject to be hidden behind condemnation.

The paramilitary world that follows is rendered through particular details: camouflage, green berets, Ray-Bans, Kalashnikovs, pump-action shotguns and Uzi submachine guns marked with Smurf stickers. Rolin’s catalogue also includes heavy drinking, unlicensed four-wheel-drive vehicles, tattooed Chetniks returning from the front or a cleansing operation, and violence spilling into ordinary interiors. The inventory refuses to make armed life abstract. It sets youthful swagger and comic-looking decoration beside terror, injury, and a demand for war painted on a wall. Carrère uses this passage to show why Rolin’s reporting can acknowledge the war’s intoxicating surface without mistaking it for innocence.

Reporting the attraction and the cost of war

Carrère admires Rolin’s willingness to say that war can be exciting. He groups him with Hatzfeld as a writer who recognizes the pull of adrenaline and the extraordinary company found on front lines, and who does not pretend that people go to war only from virtue. That candor matters because it does not excuse the consequences. In Carrère’s account, Rolin’s attention remains with victims regardless of their side, while extending enough curiosity to understand what drives torturers. The difficult combination is part of the reporting: attraction is admitted, but is not allowed to cancel suffering or responsibility.

Carrère compares this preference for uncomfortable truth to George Orwell’s example. Rolin and Hatzfeld, as Carrère presents them, favor what the evidence shows over what they would like the evidence to show. They put a fact that challenges their own opinions in the foreground rather than suppressing it. This is not simply a claim that every account is equally trustworthy. It describes a method of reporting in which a witness’s first interpretation can be tested against what later investigation reveals, and in which honesty is measured partly by the willingness to revise.

Choosing a position during the siege

For Carrère, a reporter’s standpoint becomes unavoidable during the siege of Sarajevo. In the first days, crossing from one side to the other could still be attempted at speed, though at considerable risk. After that, the choice was between following events from inside the besieged city or from the positions of those besieging it. Carrère places Rolin and Hatzfeld among observers who naturally went toward the weaker side, where the shells were falling rather than where they were being fired from. This choice does not certify every person on that side as virtuous; it establishes where the observer stands in relation to the force being applied.

That position does not prevent contradictory feelings. Carrère recalls that Rolin could feel satisfaction when, for once, Serbs were the ones being hit. The pleasure is unsettling precisely because it arises within the same moral landscape as his concern for victims. Carrère presents it as temporary: the balance of victim and perpetrator can turn, and an observer who wants to remain attentive must be ready to notice when the people previously seen as victims inflict suffering themselves. Rolin’s value in this account is not an impossible purity of response, but a reporting practice that does not hide the response when it becomes uncomfortable.

Reversal, judgment, and narrative significance

Carrère traces the consequences of that shifting perspective into later disputes about selective justice. He points to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s prosecution of Serbian war criminals and contrasts it with the anticipated leniency of Croatian and Bosnian courts toward their own counterparts. He also invokes reports about the harsh conditions of Serbs in enclaves in Kosovo. These examples give political form to the reversals Rolin’s kind of witness must confront: the formerly powerful can become vulnerable, and victims can become perpetrators. Carrère does not use that reversal to flatten distinctions between sides; he treats the ability to keep shifting attention toward those suffering as a demanding ethical discipline.

Rolin therefore functions as more than a source for the physical details of militia culture. Through his writing, Carrère tests the difference between witnessing complexity and using complexity to evade judgment. An account that acknowledges excitement, mixed motives, and wrongdoing on more than one side can still take a position: it can attend to who is weaker, who is being shelled, and what the observer’s evidence actually supports. Rolin’s significance in the book rests on that combination of ground-level description, self-scrutiny, and resistance to conclusions that make the facts more comfortable than they are.