No Ordinary Man: The Case of Dražen Erdemović at The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

This article explores the case of Dražen Erdemović, one of the perpetrators of the Branjevo farm massacre in which he and seven other members of a special unit of the Bosnian Serb Army (VRS) murdered somewhere between 800 and 1200 Muslim men and boys, as a part of the Srebrenica genocide that took place in July 1995. Dražen Erdemović was a Croat who, after serving on all three sides of the war, committed the crime in the name of Serb nationalism. Using Erdemović's initial testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the article examines his efforts to portray himself as a victimized perpetrator. It then deconstructs this self-presentation by examining it in the context of other Srebrenica-related trials, including the one against his co-perpetrators, held in Sarajevo decades after his original testimony. The central argument of the article is that rather than being a victim, Erdemović was an ideologically unmoored, pragmatic man who grabbed at every opportunity that came his way. While this indifference to nationalism allowed him to serve on all three sides during the war, it was what eventually entangled him into becoming a genocide perpetrator.