More than 8.000 citizens of Srebrenica were killed 15 years ago. I’ve read the book “They Would Never Hurt a Fly” by the Croation author Slavenka Drakulic during my vacations in Croatia. Drakulic offers the portrait of nine war criminals of the Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian civil war on trial in The Hague. The thirteenths chapter “Why We Need Monsters” is the most important one (excerpt):

“… The more you know them, the more you wonder how they could have commited such crimes – these waiters and taxi drivers, teachers and peasants in front of you. And the more you realise that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become. Of course, this is because the consequences are more serious than if they were monsters. If ordinary people commited war crimes, it means that any of us could commit them. Now you understand why it is so easy and comfortable to accept that war criminals are monsters, rather than to agree with Erwin Staub that ‘evils that arises out of ordinary thinking and is commited by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception’…”