Ljubiša Beara, commanding officer of the general staff’s security service of the Bosnian-Serb Army, passed away in a prison in Berlin, February 9, 2017. Two years earlier, the Hague Tribune had sentenced him to life in prison for his participation in the genocide of Srebrenica. It was a massacre where more than a third of the inhabitants, 8373 men and boys, of the Bosnian municipality were murdered.

Ivica Djikić, a Bosnian-Croatian journalist and writer, has done an unprecedented work researching interrogations, protocols and document in order to map this crime against humanity. The result is the book “Srebrenica: A story of Evil”; now translated into Swedish. An important testimony and a shocking account about how a high ranking officer in the former Yugoslav People’s Army under Tito could be driven into mass murdering his former compatriots.

Ivica Djikić, who has written a number of novels, biographies and scripts for television, is struggling with the tension between fact and fiction in this documentary novel. But the sentence that introduces one of his other novels, ‘In truth I tell you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar…’ is here abandoned; the depiction of the horrific days in July is factually correct – who committed the murders, where they were committed, how many were killed and where they were buried. Yet, to be able to conceptualize the state of mind of lieutenant colonel Beara under pressure, a recourse to literary writing proves necessary. 

Language: Swedish interpreted from Croatian
Saturday 25 march, 16.45
Uppsala Konstmuseum