A measure of justice for Serbia — at last

When Radovan Karadzic’s dark era began in the late 1980s and early ’90s — when this Bosnian Serb psychiatrist with the wild hair and the strange eyes began sending forth his ravaging Serb militias to massacre tens of thousands of Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars — most analysts had ready answers for the process that was unfolding so desperately.

“Ancient hatreds” of the overlapping ethnic groups in the Southern Balkans were bubbling up, like poisoned springs in an otherwise healthy lake! Memories that were never really stifled from the Yugoslav conflicts of World War II rose again, specters of the Chetnik vs. Communist/Titoist past! The renewed chaos was simply inevitable!

But these answers were not true, and in this last week it has become easier to see why.

After 13 years of searching for Karadzic by Europe’s security forces and Interpol, this mass murderer was finally discovered, hiding in full sight in Belgrade, disguised by a bushy white beard and a white ponytail and camouflaged as a practitioner of alternative medicine. He even lectured on videotape at local community centers in Belgrade.

By the time this monster had finally been captured, the real reasons behind the horrors of the Yugoslav 1990s were also emerging. Those “Serb wars” did not bubble up from anywhere at all. Instead, they were quite deliberately planned by men and women in power, who calculatedly rekindled old hatreds for the exceedingly exact modern purposes of gaining personal power and for the destruction of their long-despised neighbors.

This is the new version of the old story of Serbia. Were we more aware of the world, we would understand how this story can be used by cruel and cynical men everywhere.

Descent into hell

It was not really so difficult, if one had listened to what people were saying, to see it coming. When I visited Belgrade in November of 1989, after Yugoslavia’s leader, Marshal Tito, had died and the country was beginning its descent into hell, many leaders privately predicted to me what would come — and even how.

“The fights are not between nationalities, you see,” Dr. Vladimir Stambuk, secretary general of the Communist League of Serbia, told me in a private conversation, “but between political leaderships. When you are going downhill, you try to grab from others as much as you can. The Serbian leadership is split, so the idea of ‘Greater Serbia’ is put forward as an attempt to stop the changes.” The American ambassador, Warren Zimmermann, made the same prediction to me.

The real analysts (as always) also saw the conflict as more “anthropological” than communist-ideological. Milos Vasic, the courageous editor of Vreme, Belgrade’s equivalent to Time magazine, analyzed for me why the “wild mountain men” of Yugoslavia’s Dinaric Alps would soon emerge as the primitive Serbian force to destroy the urbane cities of Sarajevo and Mostar — “because these cities are a different civilization to guys frustrated by not being able to settle in them.”

In the years between 1992, when the Serbs and their Bosnian Serb sidekicks such as Karadzic started the wars, and 1995, when the American-sponsored Dayton Accords ended most of them, it was troubled psychiatrist and erstwhile poet Karadzic who personally oversaw the horrors, toasting himself and his minions with Yugoslav “slivovitz” or murderously strong plum brandy.

Sitting in a shabby converted ski hotel, The Panorama, in the hit-or-miss village of Pale in the cup of mountains surrounding the gorgeous Bosnian city of Sarajevo, it was he who would send his barely literate paramilitary yokels out to bombard one Bosnian city after another. In fact, when I drove up there in 1997, you could easily see that the infamous Serb artillery posts which had so decimated the city could have been easily destroyed by Western helicopter gunships — but the mistaken idea that the “people were rising up” kept the Europeans from acting.

So, Karadzic filled the soccer fields with bodies and burials, until he disappeared after 1995 into still further grotesque caricatures of Balkan life. But not now.

Pro-Western government

With his capture last week, new events of note emerge into view. One, the new, more pro-Western Serb government has obviously decided to go the “European way” — in effect, to move toward joining the European Union. Two, the E.U. has taken steps, in particular a move in April, that offered Serbia a path to future membership. Three, this use of “soft power” on the part of the new Europe has now been shown to be effective in bringing outlaws to justice.

But above all, the Karadzic arrest should alert us to something of immense importance, whether it takes place in Armenia/Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Soviet Georgia, Rwanda, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, or elsewhere.

This is the grave danger of allowing men like Karadzic to write the script of their demented intentions, instead of ourselves analyzing what they actually are and thus preventing the rise of their destructive crusades.

Universal Press Syndicate