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Karadzic: From Dissident Poet to Most Wanted

Radovan Karadzic

22 July 2008  When Karadzic was selected as Bosnian Serb leader in 1989, no one then imagined he would end up presiding over sieges, concentration camps and the worst crime to occur in Europe since World War II.

By Gordana Katana in Banja Luka

No one who knew Radovan Karadzic before 1989 could ever have guessed that the Sarajevo psychiatrist and "reckless poet" would turn, in the space of just seven years, from a candidate for sainthood into the most wanted fugitive on the planet after the Saudi terrorist, Osama Bin Laden.

Radovan (Vuksan) Karadzic was born in the village of Pisce, in the Savnik municipality, in Montenegro. He received a medical degree and then underwent specialist training in psychiatry in Sarajevo. He is married and the father of two.

Karadzic started his political career in 1989 when the Serbian Democratic Party, SDS, was formed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and at that point he was given the role of a greyhound hare. This meant that in the first few months of the Serbs' political organizing in pre-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, his role was to force the pace and then cede the post of party leader to some more prominent and politically more experienced Serb figure.

Many Yugoslav political analysts claim Dobrica Cosic and Jovan Raskovic, the late Croatian Serb leader, personally suggested to Karadzic that he take on this role.

In his first public appearances in 1989, Karadzic himself claimed that he was "at the helm of SDS only temporarily and that he would soon be replaced". Names mentioned off the record included Nenad Kecmanovic and Dragan Kalinic.

However, only a few months later, it turned out that the assessments that Karadzic was only a short-track runner were wrong. He had turned into the supreme Bosnian Serb leader.

Explaining the beginning of his political career, Karadzic said in interview in 1993: "When the Party of Democratic Action was founded, based on Muslim fundamentalist ideas, and when the Croatian extremists made their guest appearance, promising borders on the Drina, that was a sign alerting the Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina".

He went on to assert that "some twenty or so of us who were in the opposition for almost 30 years, dissidents, exiles who had accepted the fact that we would be second-class citizens, began looking at one another and thinking that the Serb people must be saved".

Today, many pre-war Sarajevo residents wonder how and why the "Muslim secret service" managed to tap and organize the surveillance of a man who had published a few collections of poetry, had the reputation of a prominent doctor, and was a member of the Sarajevo Football team management.

Karadzic's stance and attitude towards Bosniaks in Bosnia-Herzegovina changed at the same speed at which the events in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place at the beginning of the Nineties.
In the summer of 1990, on the bridge in Foca, Karadzic and the then SDA leader, Alija Izetbegovic, jointly paid tribute to the Muslim and Serbian victims of World War II and swore that blood would never again flow in the Drina.

That same year, the press and TV stations' archives stored election campaign footage and reports in which Karadzic, Izetbegovic and the then Bosnian Croat leader, Stjepan Kljujic, sent out a message to the people, saying that: "The communists have set you against one another; we will reconcile you again".

Soon after the elections, however, Karadzic replaced the idea of coexistence with the claim that "We simply cannot get along with Alija and the Muslims", not forgetting to add also that "In the event of any clashes, the Serbs will always be stronger by one bullet". In July 1991, Karadzic emphasised that "if the Serbs are attacked, that would mean that Yugoslavia has also been attacked and all Serbs will volunteer, join the JNA (former Yugoslav People's Army) and defend the country together with the JNA".

In October 1991, when everyone stopped keeping count of the number of victims who had been killed in Vukovar, eastern Croatia, and when only the naïve still believed that that the war would not spread from Croatia to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Karadzic told the non-Serb deputies attending a session of the Bosnia-Herzegovina parliament: "If you decide in favour of the war, you will disappear off the face of the earth".

Encouraged by the famous Memorandum written by the members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, based in Belgrade, and backed by the then Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, under the slogan "All Serbs in one state", and by the Chetnik movement's 1941 platform of a Serbian state whose borders spread to Karlovac and Karlobag, Karadzic took the helm of a warpath that left thousands of dead and crippled in Bosnia-Herzegovina and made half of the country's pre-war population flee their homes.

In response to the referendum for Bosnia-Herzegovina's independence held on March 1, 1992, the Serbian deputies quit the Bosnia-Herzegovina Assembly and formed the Republika Srpska of Bosnia-Herzegovina. On May 13, they elected Karadzic as their first president.

Based on their proclaimed constitution, Karadzic became the Republika Srpska's Supreme Army Commander. In the years that followed, concentration camps were opened for the first time since the Second World War in more than half of Bosnia-Herzegovina's territory, which the JNA, before it withdrew to rump Yugoslavia, placed under control of the Bosnian Serbs. Almost all buildings of the Islamic community were wiped out, as well as many Catholic churches, while the non-Serb population was systematically persecuted and killed.

All this time Karadzic was still able to deceive people and publicly tell lies, posing as an honest man with great ease. Asked to comment on the Trnopolje prison camp in which Bosniaks from the Prijedor region were being imprisoned, tortured and killed in 1992, he answered that Penny Marshal, the British ITN reporter who was there, broadcast "a false story about Trnopolje as a concentration camp. Trnopolje was a camp formed by Muslim refugees. They wanted to assemble in one place where our people could protect them. They could come and go as they wished. Our men protected them, gave them their food."

He was no less capable of replying, within days, to the same question – "Why is your army bombing Sarajevo?" – with answers ranging from: "We are not doing it, but the Muslims", to "We are not attacking Sarajevo but protecting our homes around Sarajevo; when you are catching a poisonous snake, you don't catch it by the head, but by the tail, because it could bite."

Still, the spring of 1993 was remembered mainly for Karadzic's refusal to sign the so-called Vance –Owen plan and so end the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Milosevic returned publicly humiliated to Belgrade from the Bosnian Serb Assembly in Pale, which said a categorical "no"
to the peace plan. Following this, Milosevic's wife, Mira Markovic, stripped Karadzic of the right "to speak on behalf of the 12 million Serbs" who were, as he claimed, ready to go to war with the whole world in order to protect the interests of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The letter that was sent to the Bosnian Serb Assembly in connection with this, which started with a warning that "now is not the time to compete in patriotism", marked the first public conflict between Karadzic and Milosevic.

Karadzic's lucky war star, helped by the international community's inertia, followed him until the summer of 1995. Right after the operation Oluja (Storm) in which the Croatian Army took control of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serb Krajina, which had been under the control of Croatian Serbs, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY, issued an indictment against Karadzic on July 25.

The Tribunal charged the Bosnian Serb leader with genocide, crimes against humanity, persecution of political leaders, intellectuals and professionals, shelling of places in which civilians were assembled, appropriation and plunder of property, deportation, destruction of property, destruction of places of worship, and unlawful confinement of civilians.

Karadzic is the only one who knows the answer to the question why he did not stop even after this, and why the Srebrenica massacre had to happen in the summer of 1995, which will forever be remembered as the gravest crime to take place in Europe since the end of the Second World War.

Speaking about the massacre in his book, Karadzic says: "Srebrenica was never a protected zone. And if you don't believe me, ask Boutros Ghali, the former UN Secretary General. He admitted it several times, and told me that Srebrenica was a Muslim military stronghold".
According to Karadzic, "Izetbegovic surrendered Srebrenica so to transfer troops to Sarajevo and trigger international intervention".

Karadzic further claimed that when the Serbs entered the city, "There wasn't a single Muslim soldier there. We only found the civilian population and Dutch soldiers comprising the UN units. The Serb military and civilian authorities did not commit a single offence in the Muslim enclave".

As for how much anyone believed him, this is best illustrated by the fact that the Hague indictment against him was expanded to include the charge of genocide against the Srebrenica population.

The signing of the Dayton Peace Accord in November 1995 marked the end of Karadzic's official political engagements. The OSCE temporary election commission, in charge of organising the first post-war election in Bosnia-Herzegovina, banned political activities by all persons sought by The Hague Tribunal.

Karadzic withdrew from the post of RS president in June 1996 and let the then vice-president, Biljana Plavsic, take over. Still, he held the real power in the RS in his hands for another 12 months, if only backstage. The SDS convincingly won the September 1996 elections, though it was none other than Plavsic who then put a stop to his supreme, unlimited power in July of the next year. In a showdown inside the SDS, she named Karadzic one of the main culprits who had forced the RS into impoverishment, crime and international isolation.

Since 1997, the Hague Tribunal has repeatedly requested that Karadzic be brought to justice. Debates on who is responsible for his arrest went on, and while speaking about his "captivity in the RS", Karadzic sent out messages saying: "I move around my country as I do around my home".

Karadzic was repeatedly urged to voluntarily surrender but that gave no results. "They would be better off killing me than letting me go to The Hague, because they would have far more problems with me at The Hague," he said.

Gordana Katana is Balkan Insight contributor. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.