Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2008, pages 38, 41

Special Report

Radovan Karadzic Captured After Serbs Vote Out Hard-Line Nationalist Government

By Peter Lippman

	Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, arrested July 21 in Belgrade, is shown on the phone in Banja Luka in 1995 (l), and pictured recently in Belgrade (AFP photo/files).

“FOR US, Radovan Karadzic is a saintly man.” A local Bosnian Serb official spoke these words to me in 1997, when I was monitoring an election in the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, not long after the end of the 1992-1995 war.

After 13 years on the lam, Karadzic was arrested July 21 in Belgrade. He had been moving freely about the city, presenting himself as a “New Age” therapist, giving public presentations on meditation and alternative medicine and writing for a health magazine. Indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity, Karadzic’s appearance before the war crimes tribunal in The Hague on the last day of July was long overdue.

Karadzic, wartime president of the separatist portion of Bosnia controlled by Serb extremists, supervised the massive ethnic cleansing of the 70 percent of the country taken over by Serb forces early in the war. That conquest involved the establishment of concentration camps, the systematic rape and torture of non-Serbs, the long siege of Sarajevo, the murder of at least 100,000 Bosnians, and, toward the end of the war, the infamous massacre of some 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) at Srebrenica. 

For the vast number of Bosnians whose lives were ruined by Karadzic’s policies, of course, he is anything but a saint.

On the night of Karadzic’s arrest, hundreds of people waved flags in the streets of Sarajevo and celebrated. They were surprised at the news. After all, international officials had been announcing since 1996, as regularly as the passing of the seasons, the imminent arrest of Karadzic and his army commander, Ratko Mladic. People stopped paying attention to those announcements years ago.

The true obstacle to Karadzic’s arrest was not learning his location, as this event has demonstrated, but the lack of sincere political will to make it happen. In the first few years after the war, U.N. soldiers could easily have apprehended Karadzic, but turned their back on the task. Instead, they expected the leaders of Bosnia’s Serb-controlled entity (the Republika Srpska, or RS), legalized by the Dayton peace agreement, to arrest him. But this would have been tantamount to arresting themselves, since Karadzic was the ideological predecessor of the post-war RS rulers.

Thus, in the absence of political will to arrest Karadzic, nothing happened—until there was a change in the government of Serbia, in late June. At that time, a hard-line nationalist government was overturned in special elections, and Boris Tadic’s Democratic Party, more cooperative with the West, received enough support from Serbia’s citizens—in part because of its promise to lead Serbia toward membership in the European Union—to form a new coalition.

Not surprisingly, one of the primary conditions for Serbia’s advancement toward EU accession is cooperation with the Hague tribunal. So the new government went looking for Ratko Mladic—and instead found Karadzic.

International officials from the EU, NATO, the U.N., and the United States unanimously cheered this development, saying that Serbia has taken a significant step on the way to EU membership. Meanwhile, as Bosniaks celebrated in Sarajevo, some Serb extremists rioted in Belgrade, smashing shop windows, fighting with the police, and denouncing their new government as treasonous. Certainly, other Serbian citizens are tired of the whole affair, and of their home country continuously being branded as a destabilizing factor in the region.

Human rights activists in Serbia repeatedly have called for a “de-Nazification” of the country, a process of acknowledging Serbia’s role in the destruction of Yugoslavia. The arrest of Karadzic is not really the beginning of such a process, however, and it remains to be seen whether, and when, such an honest reckoning may take place. Along with the political “normalization” that currently shows signs of developing in Serbia, such a self-examination will be a prerequisite to the establishment of true democracy and stability in the country. Then, foreign investment will be more likely to arrive, bringing increased employment, and people will have something to occupy their time other than creating disturbances in the streets and glorifying war criminals.

For the thousands of widows and hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the Bosnian war, Karadzic’s arrest is bittersweet, because justice delayed truly is justice denied. But Ratko Mladic must be arrested as well, and he and Karadzic must be tried in The Hague, in order for the complete record of their war crimes to be exposed to the world.

In Bosnia, acknowledgment of the truth and reconciliation of the opposing sides’ historical narratives is at least as far away as it is in Serbia. While there are many rational Serbs living under difficult conditions in the RS, their leaders are carrying on, in all but name, Karadzic’s wartime separatist project. Mladic’s photograph still hangs on coffeehouse walls in out-of-the-way places, and posters and tee-shirts still appear with photos of Mladic and Karadzic.

Bosnia is currently entering a nationwide municipal election campaign, and elections in the post-war period are historically a time for heightened rhetoric. Politicians such as President Haris Silajdzic on the Bosniak side, and RS Prime Minister Milorad Dodik lob bellicose charges against each other, raising the tension to the point where what little glue holding the country together seems to be failing. Despite the fact that one of the few factors on which most Bosnians agree is that they, too, want to “go to Europe,” in a pre-election period all semblance of stability seems to fade away. And now the added factor of Karadzic’s arrest has provided ammunition to both sides in their war of rhetoric.

With Bosnia governed by politicians whose careers are aided by appearing to be at loggerheads, and with weak supervision under an international semi-protectorate, recovery and “normalization”—let alone self-examination—indeed seem to be a distant hope.

Peter Lippman is an independent human rights activist based in Seattle.