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Karadzic, A Serbian Creation, Threatens to Bring Down his Patrons By Donald Forbes
While his army pillaged its way across 70 per cent of the country, slaughtering thousands of civilians with long distance artillery, Karadzic was the voice that assured the West it was deceived by its own eyes and ears.
In the Bosnian Serb president's version of the war, there was no siege of Sarajevo, no Srebrenica, no mass murder, no ethnic cleansing.
Serbs, threatened by genocide, simply defended their homes and families; Muslims bent on a fundamentalist state were the real enemies of the peace Karadzic craved for his people. He told the story a thousand times as he wooed incredulous peacemakers -- some of them far from being anti-Serb -- like Britain's Lord Owen to America's Jimmy Carter.
It sounded surreal and no one said so more brutally than Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic when he turned against the war, publicly accusing Karadzic and his allies of squandering lives in Bosnia for their personal profit. Milosevic, who created Karadzic as the agent of his dream of a Greater Serbia, is now destroying him.
A word from Belgrade this week, ordering Bosnian Serb compliance with the Bosnian peace agreement, brought Karadzic to the brink of forced resignation and possible extradition to face a U.N. war crimes trial in The Hague. Outmanoeuvered and expendable, deserted even by the hardline nationalists who used him as a figurehead, Karadzic seems destined to became the war's first major scapegoat.
Like many others on both sides who became prominent during the conflict, Karadzic is not a Bosnian. The family is from Montenegro but moved to Sarajevo when he was a boy. A burly man with an unruly mane of hair that became an international trademark, he was well-known as a psychiatrist, whose clients included the Sarajevo football club, and as a friend of Muslim lawyer Alija Izetbegovic, who was to be president of Bosnia.
Karadzic appeared to have long harboured ambivalent feelings about Sarajevo, possibly connected with his feelings as a Montenegrin outsider. As a young man, he wrote a poem -- sinisterly prophetic as it turns out -- about his desire to burn the Bosnian capital.
His poetry is a thread that runs through his career. A film exists of Karadzic showing a Russian poet his siege guns above Sarajevo and allowing the man to fire into the city with whoops of delight.
Before he made the mistake of alienating them at a crucial stage of the war, the Russians gave Karadzic a poetry prize. Karadzic's ascent to political prominence was almost accidental. The nationalist Serbs in Sarajevo who cooked up the war with Milosevic, intended him to be only a stopgap president of their Serb Democratic Party.
He proved an adept politician and took root in the job. His English was useful in dealing with, and bewildering, mediators who grappled with his erratic style of negotiation. He was also useful for taking flak. His army commander, General Ratko Mladic is the only other Serb leader to be indicted for war crimes. The rest seem exempt.
Karadzic relished the trips to peace conferences in Geneva, Athens and New York where his task was no more onerous than to say no to any plan that deviated from Bosnian Serb war aims.
They also enabled him to indulge his love of gambling. Reporters in Geneva gaped when Karadzic aides trailed in his
wake with carrier bags stuffed with wads of German marks. The suits got smarter and the limos got longer. The Bosnian Serb government, which started out as a one horse affair in the village of Pale outside Sarajevo, assumed the trappings of a state and treated Karadzic in consequence.
Last year, while the Bosnian Serb Army fell apart under Muslim and Croat attack, Karadzic was rolling up to official visits in the biggest Mercedes money could buy and being welcomed by brass bands.
The good times now seem to be over, even if he avoids the U.N. court.
The final judgment of his leadership is likely to be harsh. Although the Serbs are blamed for starting the war, one of the truths that got lost was that they had legitimate rights as a constituent Bosnian people. If the outside world lost sight of that, the fault lay in the fact that they were led by men like Radovan Karadzic. |
BELGRADE, June 26 (Reuters) - During 3½ years of war in Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic was the smiling face that tried to mask the horror of Serb brutality from the outside world.
Berserkistan, June 26 · Karadzic is Still a Hero to Many Serbs
Berserkistan, June 26 · G7 Could Impose New Serb Sanctions Against Serbia
Berserkistan, June 26 · Klickovic Tries to Cut a Deal for Karadzic’s Departure
Berserkistan, June 26 · Bosnian Serbs in Crisis Over Serb Decree on Karadzic
Berserkistan, June 26 · Karadzic, Mladic Dispatch a Lawyer to the Tribunal
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