In 1990 Radovan Karadžić rose from political obscurity to become one of several improbable novices to attain high office as Yugoslavia collapsed. He did so in the aftermath of far-reaching and fast-moving changes that led to the end of socialist governance. The precipitous rise of political nationalism, particularly in Serbia, fueled propaganda assaults on Bosnia’s communist rulers from without, while scandals and contention threatened the existing order from within Bosnia. The Bosnian communists paved the way for their own departure from power when the Bosnian parliament voted to allow formation of new political parties and to hold free, multiparty elections during 1990. Although reluctant at first to plunge into politics, Karadžić was selected as the first president of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS) at its founding assembly on July 12, 1990. He immediately began to weave a narrative of himself as the sacrificial founder of the SDS who answered the Serb people’s cry for leadership at the expense of his comfortable personal life. This chapter describes the upheavals of the late 1980s that made a Bosnian Serb nationalist party possible, then recounts how Karadžić helped launch the SDS during 1990.

Serbs Before Karadžić I: Milošević and the Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution

Until 1990, no centrally organized Serb national movement existed in post–World War II Bosnia, but in the last three years of the 1980s, conditions rapidly evolved to make the rise of national movements more likely. Nationalism had never completely vanished from socialist Yugoslavia, and after Tito’s death in 1980 it revived with a vengeance in republics outside Bosnia to threaten Yugoslavia’s existence. Competing national movements emerged into open conflict in 1987, exacerbated by the growing economic crisis and increasingly dysfunctional political system. By mid-1989, Bosnia, too, was succumbing to the movements of national revival sweeping the land, and nationalist incidents had become a part of life in provincial towns.