Radovan Karadzic and the Killing of Flies
by Slavenka Drakulic
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That afternoon Dr. Dragan Dabic took his long, gray ponytail and fixed it with a plastic hair clip at the top of his head. Then he put on a Panama hat and threw a side-glance in the mirror in the entrance hall of his rented apartment in New Belgrade. As usually, he was pleased with what he saw and even proud of himself. For years now he was not bothered by the fear that he would be recognized. With his long hair, long beard and a pair of old fashioned glasses, he looked like an aged hippy, a Bohemian figure in any case. This was a perfect image for a doctor of alternative medicine, for the New Age guru that he had become. Yet, there was a price to pay for his new look. Before he looked like a romantic poet with his longish dark hair with strikes of gray, dressed in a dark suit and a butterfly. He had flamboyance that impressed people, especially women. But that was long ago, when his name was still Dr. Radovan Karadzic.
Dr. Dabic headed towards a bus stop nearby. Riding on a bus fitted the lifestyle of a modest, elderly, spiritual guide. He politely greeted one of his neighbors, a lady of his age. She smiled. Tenants from his building in Yuri Gagarin Street were not curious about the strange looking person, which suited him well. He no longer had to hide in Orthodox monasteries or remote villages high up in the mountains of Montenegro. Besides, anonymity was not his cup of tea. Even under his false name, he wanted to be among people. He craved attention.
On the other hand, this other image brought him something extremely precious -- freedom to move around. Like any ordinary citizen of Belgrade, he was free to walk the streets and visit the coffee shops, meet people, deliver lectures, visit other cities. Most important, he was free to practice something remotely similar to his former profession as a psychiatrist. He considered himself to be a healer of both body and soul.
On the bus he was sitting somewhere in the middle when a young man sat down next to him and discreetly showed him his police badge. Secret policemen of today are a different species, he probably thought, remembering his encounters with them in his former life in Yugoslavia, long before he became the president of Rebublika Srpska. In those days, he was accused of fraud and even served an 11 months sentence. Pointing at three other men positioned strategically at exit doors of the bus, the man asked him, ever so politely, to please step down with them. Karadzic, now suddenly back to his own identity, showed no sign of surprise, much less of an intent to resist them. Other passengers saw nothing unusual when a small group with a bearded man in a Panama hat left the bus at the next stop.
When he was arrested on July 21, Karadzic must have been aware that it was not by chance. It did not happen because the Serbian secret service finally had recognized him. He knew that they were following his every move; after all, it was the same secret police that had provided him with false documents and his new identity. His arrest was a matter of political decision. True, he had contemplated surrender, but he wanted to do it on his own conditions. In his opinion, it would have been better if he would do it in 2009 -- then he would have been safe from extradition to the International Criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. No new trials would open after the end of this year, 2008. Besides, to be tried in Serbia was not such a frightening prospect as to face the court in The Hague. But it was not to be, he probably thought, now back in his usual fatalistic mood.
It doesn’t matter much if Karadzic was arrested as media reported it, on the bus no.83 in the afternoon hours of July 21, or if it happened a few days before, under totally different circumstances. When the news hit the media and the photo of Dr. Dabic appeared, the first reaction, besides surprise and then satisfaction that one of the most wanted war criminals is no longer at large, was incredulity. People were amazed at the mere fact that Karadzic lived a normal life, in a city, among them. After all, there was a bounty of five million dollars on his head, which alone could have brought him into trouble. Then an even bigger astonishment and admiration followed, because of what was described as his perfectly crafted disguise. Who in his right mind would ever have believed that one of the two most hunted men in Europe would dare to live a normal life as a New Age doctor, ”specializing” in meditation, healthy life, reiku, haiku, homeopathy, as well as any other kind of prana-mana thing?
How poor and amateurish Saddam Hussein looked when he, not so long ago, appeared from his rat hole, all dirty and frightened. In comparison to him, Karadzic showed some style. At least, his looks were chosen by himself and not created by fear and despair of somebody on the run. He possessed documents, legal documents. He even published a few books in the last twelve years of that other life, not a small achievement. A born leader and charismatic person -- as he liked to think of himself -- Karadzic even behind his false identity was capable of attracting people, even followers who believed his every word. Looking at his audience of a guru, he must have thought at times that if only he could gather as many people as that for his poetry readings…
As guru Dr. Dabic, he held lectures in several towns in Serbia. In the period between October 26, 2007 and May 23, 2008, he attended different public events and festivals in cities like Smederevo, Kikinda, and Novi Sad. In May this year, at the big Festival for Healthy Life at Ada Ciganlija in Belgrade, he delivered a lecture under the title ” How to nourish one’s own energies.” Hundreds of people saw him and listened to him; he even appeared on the local TV program in Kikinda. Yet nobody detected or even doubted his true identity.
Suddenly a million details, presented as facts, popped up about the secret life of Radovan Karadzic, alias Dr. Dabic: his favorite coffee place was ”Crazy House”, where he occasionally played the gusle, a one string folk instrument. He drank red wine appropriately named Bear’s blood, and ate healthy corn bread with yogurt. A sales girl in the nearby supermarket thought that he was sympathetic. He had a mistress named Mila and was often seen in her company, holding hands with her. When he was arrested, he was on his way to summer vacation on the Adriatic coast. Someone remembered that he used to bite his nails, while someone else witnessed that he had dandruff. Needless to say, there is much less written about why he was indicted by the ICTY for crimes against humanity and for genocide. In the local press, he is treated like a real celebrity. On the other hand, anyone in media, regardless of what he or she did to deserve such publicity, is a star -- even if he is held responsible for the death and the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of people.
However, the thing with Radovan Karadzic is that he, although stealing another man’s name, was not at all in disguise. What to others looks like a clever, elaborate mask, is just another side of the same personality. Before he became president, a war criminal and a doctor of alternative medicine, he was a psychiatrist and a poet. It is rarely mentioned that he specialized in treating depression. Later on, for a while, he was the psychiatrist of the Belgrade football team ”Red star,” a position that gave him a certain visibility. It was evident that Karadzic knew how to deal with people, a strike of character crucial in order to become a politician.
Besides the fact that in 1997 he was detained for eleven months, following the trial for building his weekend house with money actually belonging to the hospital where he worked, the most interesting detail reported from his past is that he was an -- ecologist.
Just before launching himself head-on into politics as a founder of the nationalist Serbian Democratic Party in 1990 -- just following the ”spirit” of those days -- he was one of the founders of the Green Party in Bosnia. Moreover, he and his wife Ljiljana, founded the first S.O.S. telephone in Bosnia, helping people with advice for all kind of psychological troubles. Becoming a staunch nationalist only shortly afterwards was just an indication that the ”spirit” of those days had changed.
The ecologist turning nationalist? The lifesaving expert who treated so many traumas, turning into a war criminal? What happened to the good-guy-nice-person that he was? And how come that for six years, between 1990 and 1996, he behaved as a completely different person? What had changed in him? The answer is not so complicated: Even if his change seems to be a dramatic one, it is just the same set of events that changed the life of so many others.
For example, the life of another war criminal colleague, Goran Jelisic. This man, who would otherwise never have hurt a fly, was sentenced by the Tribunal to 40 years for executing thirteen Muslim prisoners in May of 1992, in the Luka camp near Brcko. Jelisic worked as a farm mechanic until one day, when -- by a sudden twist of destiny, as it often happens in times of war -- his situation had changed quite by coincidence. This man of 21 with a baby-face who loved fishing and his neighbors, regardless if they were Muslims or Serbs, was given a gun. During 18 days of that May he acted as an executioner, something he never before had done and never after did. Having the ultimate power over life and death, Jelisic behaved as if he would have been another person.
So did the ambitious and vain Radovan Karadzic. His ambition and vanity, however, turned him first into a president and then into a war criminal who ordered killings. But there is no mystique in these changes, as every human being has the potential for acting in good or bad ways. What really changed were circumstances. In Karadzic’s case, circumstances were such that as the first president of Republika Srpska (although he personally, of course, would never hurt a fly), he ordered the killing of some eight thousand Muslim men in Srebrenica in 1995, because in his eyes they evidently had turned into flies. Certainly a nasty business, but, from his point of view, a necessary one. Such orders, however, were not in contradiction to the character of Karadzic the poet and psychiatrist, the man who loved to help people. Not actually, since he was convinced that both the siege of Sarajevo and the killing of civilians that he allowed (of which 1 500 were children), as well as the mass executions in Srebrenica, the concentration camps and ethnic cleansing of the self-proclaimed territory of Republika Srpska, which resulted in emigration and displacement of millions -- was done for the benefit of the Serbs, his people. They needed their ”Lebensraum.”
Dr. Dabic’s posing as a New Age guru, also, was not in opposition to that of Karadzic the ecologist, the understanding psychiatrist, the helping telephonist. In all his different roles he was in a position of power, helping and ”helping,” but always dominating the stage and holding power over people. Both as the good and the bad Radovan, as real maverick greedy for applause, he proved the best at fooling people. Therefore, his transformation into Dr. Dabic was a perfect one, because it was no change at all. Karadzic turned into Dabic easily, because Dabic was his own other self. And equally easily he changed his image just by letting his own hair and beard grow long. Of course, he continued to ”heal” people, but this time he had changed his method. No more genocide, now its time for alternative medicine! As his alleged lover Mila (more likely a groupie) expressed it: ”His mind could cure any illness … he was like a saint to me.” Indeed, when you think about it, there is a similarity between a guru and a president of a state, even if small like Republika Srpska: this way or the other, people look up to you, which in the end is all that matters for a person like Karadzic.
In spite of the general claim to the opposite, Radovan Karadzic showed no imagination when he chose to disguise himself as Dr. Dabic. He just returned to what he had been when he hadn’t attained such immense and deadly power.
His arrest and extradition to the ICTY was an easy trade off for Serbia. Neither is he a Serbian citizen, nor a Serbian hero. By arresting him, Serbia considerably strengthened her political credit. He lost his mythological status. If anything was shattered by his arrest, it was the myth that he is a hero whose arrest would shake Serbia to the core. Karadzic is more or less on his own, and it must feel bad. Especially because the same fate did not befell his comrade-in-arms Ratko Mladic, the then commander of his army. Karadzic knows all to well that the arrest of Mladic will be a very different story.
When he boards the Het Oranje Hotel, as the Dutch call the Schevenninge detention center, it is almost too easy to predict his behavior. He will, of course, plead not guilty, while at the same time enjoying every moment on the stage of world media. But that will not last long. Waiting for his trial in the detention center, he will seek attention again, albeit under limited circumstances and in front of a rather small public. He will probably form a therapy group to help his fellow inmates of all nationalities. What does it matter that they were at war with each other? He personally has nothing against anyone of them. He understands that all of them were just doing their duty, obeying orders. Karadzic will surely write poems and novels, maybe a couple of books for children and, of course, a book about his life in prison. He will have ideal conditions for that, and all the time in the world.
Slavenka Drakulic is an author and journalist from Croatia, whose books have been published in over twenty languages. Her latest book published in the United States is They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (Penguin).
Copyright © 2008 Slavenka Drakulic -- distributed by Agence Global
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