Is it possible for a novel to be biased and one sided? If it is, should one still read that novel to understand what happened during a horrific historical event? This is one issue surrounding S.: A Novel about the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulic. The novel centers around one women, S. , and her time in an “exchange” camp during the Bosnian-Serbian crisis of the early 1990s. S. is a Muslim who suddenly forced from her home village and into an “exchange” camp, where she is subsequently made into a sex slave for the soldiers and guards. S.’s story is tragic and heart-wrenching, but the novel itself does little to fully explain the crisis in which the novel takes place. S. could very well have occurred during the Holocaust or other genocides. Because of its transferability, S. should not necessarily be used for the study of the ethnic cleansing of Serbia, but should be used in an effort to dissect victim-perpetrator relationships.

At the very beginning of the novel it is hard to discern why S. was taken from her village. All one knows is that she was a school teacher who was forced onto a bus that would take her to the exchange camp. It is not until page 27 where the basic conflict is explained. S. discusses how her mother was a Serb and her father was a Muslim.[i] From this, the crisis between the Serbians and the Muslims is revealed, but without any prior knowledge of the situation it would be hard to understand what side S. must have been on. It is not until later when the Captain explains to S. that several Muslim women will be handed over to the refugee camp in exchange for some Serbian soldiers that the reader understands S. is a Muslim and her captors are Serbians.

The entire story is told as though the Muslims were only victims, as though they were put into these camps much like the Jews of Europe were during the Holocaust. One scene that very much connects the Bosnian crisis to themes of the Holocaust is when the ‘woman’s room’ that S. had come to call her home at the camp fills with a bitter burning smell. The smoke and smell do not leave the room almost two days. N., the keeper of the girls so to speak, explains that it was just the trash being burned. But when one of the girls returns to the room, H., she explains how she was forced to watch the burning of inmates who had been killed.[ii] However horrific the experience of the exchange camps, S. never once discusses that the war going on outside the camp walls involves Muslims executing Serbians as well.

In her article about Bosnia, Florence Hartmann attempts to make real the violence that occurred on both sides of this war. Serbia and Croatia did not agree with the Yugoslav belief in an ethnically heterogeneous state. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was not timid in using the phrase “ethnic cleansing” in discussing his plans for the Balkans. While the propaganda did cause violence to erupt, it was not just the Serbians who inflicted the violence. As Hartmann puts it, the enemies of the Sarajevo government created polices against the Muslims, but the Muslims also practiced executions against the Serbs in Sarajevo.[iii] S. only describes the pain and suffering of one side – the side that was made into the victims.

There are always two sides to every war. People tend to view one side as good, the other side as evil. Which side gets which label tends to depend on which side a person lands. There are also two sides to genocide with clear cut alignment: the victims are the good and the perpetrators are the evil. But is this always the case? Are there situations where there are victims and perpetrators of genocide on both sides of war? If one looks closely at the case in Bosnia, it is true that the Serbs were trying to ethnically cleanse their country of all the Muslims. But, the Muslims did not just sit back and watch as the Serbs did so. As Florence Hartman stated, the Muslims also committed acts against international humanitarian law during the crisis.[iv] Because the Muslims had the most casualties, the more traumatic and tragically documented casualties, does that make them the bigger victim? While S. does show the atrocities against Muslim men and women in the “exchange” camps, it neglects to show both sides had been guilty. The novel portrays S.’s experience in the camp much like those of Holocaust survivors. And while no one should degrade or negate the experience of S. and the real persons who lived to give Drakulic her novel, one should sit back and wonder the unfortunate question: What differentiates genocide from prisoner of war casualties?

[i] Drakulic, Slavenka. S.: A Novel about the Blakans (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). 27.

[ii] Drakulic, S., 87-89.

[iii] Florence Hartmann, Bosnia in Defining the Horrific: Readings on Genocide and Holocaust in the Twentieth Century, ed. William L. Hewitt (New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004), 300.

[iv] Hartmann, Bosnia, 300.