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Journalism of Courage
With his arrest on Monday after about 12 years on the run, Radovan Karadzic seems certain to face trial in the Hague for his role in masterminding massacres that prosecutors have described as 8220;scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of history8221;. But in his own mind, at least until he vanished from view in 1996, Karadzic saw himself as a sophisticated intellectual, a psychiatrist and poet with an intuitive understanding of his people, the Bosnian Serbs, and of the challenge to their survival.
It was in his intellectual guise that he presented himself to visitors at the height of his power, when he ruled as president of the self-styled Srpska Republic and supreme commander of its armed forces.
In those first two years of the war that lasted from 1992 to 1995, was the worst atrocity of all, the one that came to define the madness that seized Karadzic and his partner in the Bosnian slaughter, the army commander Gen Ratko Mladic, who still remains uncaptured 8212; the genocidal massacre in 1995 of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
Born to a poor family in Montenegro on June 19, 1945, he carried in his bones much of the tortured history of the region during World War II. His father, Vuk, a member of the Chetniks, Serbian nationalist guerrillas, fought the Nazi occupiers of Yugoslavia and communist partisans of Tito. When the Chetniks lost to Tito, his father was jailed, and he was left under the care of his mother, Jovanka. In 1960, he graduated in medicine, specialising in psychiatry.
He began as a liberal in politics, but as strains on Yugoslavia8217;s survival grew after Tito8217;s death in 1980, he moved to the right, helping to found, in 1990, Serbian Democratic Party that became the vehicle for hardline Serbian nationalism, and a handmaiden in the cause of a Greater Serbia that found its principal champion in Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian leader in Belgrade.
In 1992, after the Muslim leader in Bosnia, Alija Izetbegovic, declared the republic8217;s independence, Karadzic, declaiming against what he described as a plan to implant an 8220;Islamic republic8221; in Bosnia, declared foundation of separate Serbian republic. The death toll from the 43 months of war has been estimated at between 1.5 to 2 lakh, accompanied by about 20,000 rapes.
Fearing arrest in 1995, Karadzic and General Mladic went into hiding. Both men have remained at large until the announcement on Monday. In Montenegro and in Serbian nationalist strongholds in Bosnia, Karadzic continued to be feted, as a hero. In 2004, he even managed to get a novel published.
In an article in The New York Times in 2003, Carla Del Ponte, then the chief prosecutor at The Hague, wrote: 8220;Only when fugitives like Karadzic and Mladic are transformed from symbols of a lack of backbone into symbols of the international community8217;s resolve, will Bosnia and Herzegovina and the other traumatised states of the region stand a chance of establishing rule of law. The time has come to summon the will and bring Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to justice. It8217;s what their victims, and the rest of the world, deserve.8221;
