More on Karadzic's Arrest

The Serbian team for the cooperation with the Hague Tribunal held a news conference today in which they showed the picture of what Karadzic looks like today. He was arrested in Novi Beograd, a suburb of the Serbian capital where he had been practicing alternative medicine under an assumed name, Dragan Dabic. He even went to conferences and public events to talk about his supposed expertise in bioenergy, and published articles in a local alternative health journal. It is certain that ordinary people had no way to identify him as Karadzic, but it is equally certain that the previous government under the nationalist Vojislav Kostunica, protected him.

It is ironic that the new government of Serbia, which arrested him, is a coalition of the ardently pro-Europe Boris Tadic and the Socialist Party of late Slobodan Milosevic. Let's remember that Karadzic is basically a Milosevic creation: without Milosevic he would have been a nobody in Bosnia. It was Milosevic who provided the Bosnian Serbs with the intelligence services and the military infrastructure in building them into a para-state, funding their war effort, and giving them political legitimacy. In 1993 in the wake of the Vance-Owen plan, which Milosevic supported and tried to impose on the Bosnian Serbs in passing himself off as a peacemaker, Karadzic rejected the plan and earned the ire of Milosevic who later cut off all aid to the Bosnian Serbs. Milosevic's animosity to Karadzic and the rest of the Bosnian Serb leadership reflected the larger animosity to the Bosnian Serb leader on the part of the Serbian political elite who had always considered him uncouth, rude, and pretty crazy as well as unreliable. Karadzic was exactly that: unreliable and increasingly out of control.

It was Karadzic who stood in front of the Bosnian parliament in Sarajevo on the eve of the war, warning the Bosnian Muslim president Izetbegovic that if Bosnia was to choose the road of independence: "don't think you will not take Bosnia-Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into extinction!" I think these words will be repeated over and over again in Karadzic's Hague trial.

Karadzic was an extremely unhappy and frustrated man. He comes from a small village in Montenegro and moved to Sarajevo as a psychiatrist. Apparently, he did not fit well in his new city. He worked at the famous Kosevo hospital and failed to be promoted. Later, his former superiors would tell the media that he was a mediocre psychiatrist. If he was a mediocre psychiatrist, he was a terrible poet who liked to pass himself off as a Bohemian and a world-renown intellectual. He even went to Columbia where he studied psychiatry but also took classes in American poetry. This did not help him penetrate the ranks of the Bosnian-Yugoslav intelligentsia.

Misha Glenny, among other scholars, has argued that it was Karadzic's alienation from his urban space that caused him to hate Sarajevo. And Karadzic himself was open in his contempt for the city constantly referring to the Ottoman period when "Turks" lived in cities and Serbian peasants lived in villages. Hence, Karadzic held Sarajevo in a siege which lasted more than three years and which crippled the city. Civilians were murdered by his snipers on a daily basis and his military general Mladic ordered his troops over an open military transmitter to pound Sarajevo and drive people insane. During the genocide in Srebrenica, Mladic infamously said that "this was the time when we exact revenge on the Turks." And Karadzic fumed about the injustices the Turks had committed upon the Serbs several centuries earlier.

Well, the hand of international justice, no matter how frail and slow, did finally clinch this horrible man. His trial will be fascinating and will reveal new details about the war. Although I think it won't be as nearly as long as Milosevic's (I hope), since the international community wants a verdict before he dies or kills himself.

Here is what Sarajevo's main street looked like just minutes after the news of Karadzic's arrest broke.....