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Radovan Karadžič
- Architect of the Bosnian Genocide
- Robert J. Donia
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- 05 October 2014
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- 22 September 2014
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Radovan Karadžić, leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalists during the Bosnian War (1992–5), stands accused of genocide and other crimes of war before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. This book traces the origins of the extreme violence of the war to the utopian national aspirations of the Serb Democratic Party and Karadžić's personal transformation from an unremarkable family man to the powerful leader of the Bosnian Serb nationalists. Based on previously unused documents from the tribunal's archives and many hours of Karadžić's cross-examination at his trial, the author shows why and how the Bosnian Serb leader planned and directed the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War. This book provocatively argues that postcommunist democracy was a primary enabler of mass atrocities because it provided the means to mobilize large numbers of Bosnian Serbs for the campaign to eliminate non-Serbs from conquered land.
Acknowledgments
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Radovan Karadžič
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- 22 September 2014, pp xv-xvi
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List of Acronyms and Terms
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Radovan Karadžič
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- 22 September 2014, pp 319-322
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6 - Visionary Planner
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Radovan Karadžič
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- 22 September 2014, pp 120-134
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Summary
“Every Serb has a pistol and a map.”
Momčilo KrajišnikFebruary 28, 1992Karadžić’s period of rage came to an abrupt end following the conclusion of the Bosnian Parliament’s Eighth Session. With no apparent hesitation or introspection, he introduced a new strategy only hours after the session closed. In one of the most dramatic transformations of his life, Karadžić the enraged firebrand became Karadžić the visionary architect and systematic planner. His new path led him, with still more twists and turns, to the war and mass atrocities that would make him infamous.
A New Course
Karadžić implemented a new strategy for the Bosnian Serb nationalists consisting of two tracks: publicly creating the infrastructure of a separate Bosnian Serb state, and privately implementing a municipal strategy for a Serb nationalist armed takeover. Each component depended on the success of the other. The new institutions of state were to authorize, oversee, and legitimize the municipal strategy, while municipal-level authorities were to seize control of territories to be governed by the new institutions. Until mid-December 1991, the two tracks were intertwined. Then, on December 19, Karadžić issued a set of detailed instructions to municipal SDS leaders to seize power locally and thereby pursue separately the municipal strategy and public activities of statemaking.
2 - Sacrificial Founder
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Radovan Karadžič
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- 22 September 2014, pp 42-68
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Summary
“For us Serbs, he was and remains a messenger of Serb freedom. He appeared as a complete surprise in a moment when the Serb people were thirsty for a new life, a new heaven and a new earth that will unite us rather than divide us.”
Kosta ČavoškiIn 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.
Chronology of Events
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 311-318
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3 - Naïve Nationalist
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 69-84
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Summary
Radovan Karadžić won an impressive number of votes and received widespread acclaim in the November 1990 election, but he had no practical experience in wielding the power he had suddenly acquired. At first he followed the lead of Slobodan Milošević, the cunning and resourceful president of the Republic of Serbia, who sought variously to influence, goad, and restrain him. Karadžić gained competence and confidence with each decision he made and each crisis he weathered. Although he remained generally subservient to Serb leaders in Belgrade, Karadžić developed his own perspective and began to pursue his own policies, driven by his own convictions and his often volatile reaction to initiatives of other political actors in Bosnia. He soon turned against the Bosniak and Croat nationalist leaders and in a matter of months he was treating them as enemies. In fits and starts during 1991, Karadžić came into his own as the chief political leader of the Bosnian Serbs.
The Nationalization of Politics in Yugoslavia’s Republics
Nationalism surged everywhere in Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the 1990 elections. Voters had elected nationalists in most places, and nationalist impulses were manifest in the policies of newly-elected office-holders. Elections in Serbia and Montenegro confirmed Milošević and his follower President Momir Bulatović to the offices they had achieved by intra-party machinations a few years before. In Croatia and Slovenia, democratically selected leaders organized plebiscites on independence and crafted declarations of sovereignty. Their parliaments declared independence simultaneously on June 25, 1991.
11 - Callous Perpetrator
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Radovan Karadžič
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- 22 September 2014, pp 187-207
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Summary
“The birth of a state and the creation of borders do not occur without war.”
Radovan KaradžićApril 6, the anniversary of the Partisans’ liberation of Sarajevo in 1945 from German and Ustasha occupiers, had been a special holiday in Bosnia ever since then. But in 1992, that date acquired an additional and different association as the beginning of the longest, bloodiest war in Europe since the Second World War. In the first weeks after April 6, SDS local officials and their allies implemented the municipal strategy largely as they had planned by launching temporally and geographically staggered attacks and carrying out mass atrocities against non-Serbs. Karadžić fled Sarajevo in the first days of fighting; by the end of May he was directing the campaign from Pale, seventeen kilometers east of the city center. This chapter describes his harrowing flight and examines his transformation from a planner and political leader to the head of an armed takeover, and it discusses how he established state territories purged of non-Serb inhabitants.
Flight
For the first six days of April, Karadžić remained in Sarajevo. Although large-scale conflict had yet to begin, there was nothing tranquil about the city in those days. SDS leaders were forming a separate Serb police force in each jurisdiction, touching off struggles with non-Serb officers for control of police stations and neighborhoods. Residents formed committees by block, street, or neighborhood to secure their homes against uncertain threats, turning parts of the city into warrens of checkpoints and barbed wire barriers. Criminal gangs, many of them Bosniak in leadership and composition, controlled whole sections of the city while also defending those areas against Serb paramilitary and police units.
Preface
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp xi-xiv
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Summary
Looking gaunt and downcast, Radovan Karadžić stood for the first time in the dock of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on July 31, 2008, to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes of war. Millions of residents of the former Yugoslavia had longed for that moment to come; he himself had fervently hoped it never would. His initial appearance at the Tribunal came more than a dozen years after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) and thirteen years after he was first indicted by the ICTY. He had spent the intervening years as one of the world’s most successful fugitives, making dramatic escapes, devising elaborate disguises, and taunting his accusers. A week before his first appearance in court, he had been arrested in Belgrade by police of the Republic of Serbia and flown to the Scheveningen Prison in The Hague, Netherlands.
To many outside the former Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić is better known by his deeds and appearance than by name. Few outside his native land can pronounce, let alone remember, his name, with its two diacriticals and unfamiliar combination of two consonants (Karadžić – CAR-ahd-jich, to a speaker of English). With his craggy facial features, roughly dimpled chin, and wavy, drooping hair, he epitomizes in physical appearance the image of the archetypal Balkan atavist: coarse, volatile, and weathered by life’s vicissitudes. To his circle of family, friends, and some fellow Serbs, he is a hero of mythical proportions, a valiant but persecuted champion of the Serb people against many adversaries. But to most of the global public, he is the “Butcher of Bosnia,” the architect and perpetrator of genocide and other atrocities that have been the worst and most destructive in Europe since the Second World War.
9 - Triumphant Conspirator
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Radovan Karadžič
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- 22 September 2014, pp 161-174
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Summary
Brimming with confidence from subduing the Krajina separatists, Karadžić went to Belgrade on March 1, the second of two days of voting in the referendum for Bosnia’s independence. That evening and the next day, March 2, he orchestrated from afar an SDS paramilitary campaign to erect barricades in Sarajevo. While SDS operatives in Sarajevo were carrying out his instructions, he also advanced the Bosnian Serb cause politically in the Yugoslav Expanded Presidency, a body made up of eight presidency members and specially invited guests. Even though Karadžić seemed arrogant and ineffective at that session, he walked away with assurances of Belgrade’s military and diplomatic support for the Bosnian Serb nationalist cause. Significant victories both in a Belgrade conference room and on the streets of Sarajevo reassured Karadžić that he could challenge Bosnia’s imminent independence with Serb arms and men.
Disputed Barricades
As Karadžić was berating the ARK separatists in Banja Luka throughout the day on February 29, Bosnian citizens were casting their ballots on the first day of voting in the Bosnian independence referendum. In that balloting, voters of all three nations largely complied with the instructions of their nationalist leaders. Bosniaks and Croats turned out in overwhelming numbers on February 29 and March 1 to vote “Yes” on independence, while most Serbs boycotted the vote as the SDS had requested. The balloting proceeded without organized interference from any nationalist party, and European monitors subsequently affirmed the basic fairness of the procedures and vote count. The voting returns provided further evidence that most of the Serb population was firmly under the sway of the SDS and supported Karadžić’s campaign.
15 - Falling Star
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Radovan Karadžič
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- 22 September 2014, pp 274-283
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Summary
Karadžić fell from power gradually, in stages, unlike many populist leaders who cling to power until death or ouster by angry mobs. In August 1995 he lost his authority to negotiate; in July 1996 he resigned his offices under pressure; in 2000 he was driven from public view; and in 2008 he lost his personal freedom upon his arrest in Belgrade. Karadžić ascribed his fall to a series of betrayals by Western diplomats, but he had also alienated some of his closest supporters and turned once-staunch allies into enemies. The primary source of his undoing was Karadžić himself. The rational Karadžić, a man of immense intellectual resourcefulness and versatility who charmed and bullied his way to power, was pushed aside by his angry, arrogant doppelgänger. Belligerent, tactless, and vain, Karadžić incited former allies and supporters to unite against him, weaken his authority, and force him from office. This chapter describes his protracted descent from power and high office.
The Road to Hell is Paved
In a long-delayed move, the ICTY prosecutor indicted Karadžić and Mladić on July 24, 1995, for dozens of wartime mass atrocities. The sixteen-count indictment charged them with genocide, unlawful confinement of civilians, shelling of civilian gatherings, destruction of sacred sites, appropriation and plunder of property, using hostages as human shields, and other grave crimes. Although it was filed one week after the killings at Srebrenica, the indictment did not mention those events. Not until November 1995 did the ICTY prosecutors amend their indictment to include charges of genocide at Srebrenica. Even so, the initial indictment transformed Karadžić and Mladić into international pariahs and fugitives from the law. Their lives and fortunes changed forever. But at first, each took the indictment in stride, believing there was no realistic prospect of being arrested while remaining in office.
16 - Resourceful Fugitive
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 284-301
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Summary
With his indictment by the ICTY on July 24, 1995, Karadžić became an accused international criminal and Europe’s most wanted man. But he regarded the indictment with contempt. He refused to turn himself in and took extraordinary measures to avoid capture over the next thirteen years. He audaciously and creatively masterminded his evasion of the law and lived a surprisingly full if unorthodox life on the lam. He owed his success in part to the considerable popularity and influence he retained among Bosnian Serb nationalists, but his ability to adapt and transform his entire persona proved to be his greatest asset. As in his political career, however, the audacity and arrogance that contributed to his success ultimately led to his downfall. Unable to repress his craving for public acclaim, he took inordinate risks as he again entered public life, this time under an alias. This chapter tells of his life, passions, evasions, and deceptions in those years.
From Open Defiance to Monastic Evasion
The Dayton Peace Agreement not only ended the war, it also imposed an entirely new and untested political structure on the country. A Peace Implementation Council, made up of representatives of 55 countries and headed by a Steering Board, became the supreme decision-making body for the civilian administration. The council supervised the Office of the High Representative (OHR), an appointed senior European diplomat or politician with powers nearly as great as most heads of state. The Dayton agreement provided for an international peacekeeping force led by NATO. That force, consisting at first of about 65,000 troops, including 22,000 Americans, was called the Implementation Force (IFOR) from December 1995 to December 1996, Stabilization Force (SFOR) until December 2004, and EUFOR (European Union Force, also known as Althea), since then. Over time the force was reduced from 65,000 troops in early 1996 to fewer than 100 in EUFOR. In 1995, many UNPROFOR troops and much equipment were transferred to IFOR, but the new NATO-led force had a broader mandate, more weapons, and many more troops than UNPROFOR. With UNPROFOR’s dissolution and the end of fighting, the UN was reduced to a limited role as supervisor of the International Police Task Force and certain advisory functions.
Introduction
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 1-22
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Summary
I first met Radovan Karadžić in a war crimes courtroom at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He was there to defend himself against a litany of accusations. I had been called by the prosecution to testify as an expert historical witness to provide background and context to wartime events, having assumed that role in a dozen previous cases before the ICTY. In most other trials, I testified for a few hours under questioning by a prosecutor and was then cross-examined for a few more hours by defense attorneys.
This case was different. In choosing to serve as his own defense attorney, Karadžić gained the opportunity to confront personally each witness, in the presence of three judges who would decide his case. Standing at the defense lectern, he cross-examined me with a barrage of barbed and loaded questions. For a total of twenty-four hours, from June 1 to 10, 2010, he and I engaged in a strange kind of dialogue – testy, impassioned, or sometimes surprisingly cordial – about his rise to power and whether he had led Serb nationalists to commit mass atrocities in Bosnia during the war of 1992–95. Despite the contentiousness of our encounters, with each passing day of the trial I gained new insights about him and the movement that he had led in the 1990s.
Contents
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp vii-viii
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13 - Host in Solitude
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 232-247
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Summary
With the Vance-Owen Peace Plan relegated to the dustbin of history, Bosnian Serb leaders revived their nationalist project in the summer and autumn of 1993. Karadžić was heartened by international concessions in further negotiations following Serb rejection of the VOPP. He remained personally popular among Serbs and firmly in charge of the RS government, but he began to encounter challenges from other Serbs who found him personally abrasive or found his policy decisions ill-considered. For the first time, his personal standing began to diverge from the movement he had created and led. His relationship with Milošević deteriorated further, he quarreled with Mladić over control of the army, and he watched the assembly become increasingly independent. Unlike his measured responses to earlier challenges¸ he turned arrogant, self-obsessed, and increasingly isolated in the face of criticism and opposition. In late 1993 he began to become his own worst enemy, just as the Bosnian Serb nationalist movement experienced significant successes in achieving its goals. This chapter examines the slowly developing crisis that beset his diplomatic quest for permanent acceptance of Bosnian Serb territorial gains.
Union of Three Republics: The Plan Even a Serb Could Love
Although international diplomats had threatened Karadžić with grave consequences if the Bosnian Serbs rejected the VOPP, the rejection triggered not retaliation but additional concessions to the Serb side. Only days after the assembly’s final rejection, international negotiators revisited their proposals in hopes of tailoring them to win Bosnian Serb approval. On August 21, 1993, they unveiled a proposal called the “Union of Three Republics” (also known as the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan, crediting Vance’s replacement, Thorwald Stoltenberg), that gave the Bosnian Serb nationalists most of what they sought. The new proposal “gave the Serbs their own contiguous area for a republic within a Union of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Owen wrote, acknowledging that negotiators had reoriented their efforts to bring the Bosnian Serbs on board. The Union of Three Republics was a peace plan that even a Serb could love.
12 - Duplicitous Diplomat
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 208-231
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Summary
“The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and expedite its occurrence.”
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand“We are a sad orphan without a friend....
“We are just a mouse in the claws of a few cats at play.”
Radovan Karadžić, 17th Bosnian Serb Assembly Session, July 1992
After the Serb takeover of much of Bosnia in spring 1992, Karadžić increasingly became engaged in diplomatic activities. This chapter deals with his successes and failures as a negotiator from war’s beginning until the final Serb rejection of the Vance-Owen Peace Plan (VOPP) in May 1993. He relished his role as chief negotiator for the Bosnian Serbs and proved adept both at winning key concessions and at denying international negotiators grounds for taking military action. But as the war dragged on, he became more transparently duplicitous and alienated many of his interlocutors. Plain-spoken and often blunt, he practiced few diplomatic niceties. He expressed blustery confidence in himself and his cause, and he contemptuously rejected the criticism of others. But along with bravado, he evidenced vulnerability and paranoia on occasion during the negotiations. Toward the end of the war he became marginalized personally, even as international leaders reluctantly acquiesced to many demands of the Bosnian Serb nationalists.
Karadžić and the Peacemakers: “Acquiesce and Ignore”
During the forty-four months of armed conflict, a rotating cast of international facilitators stepped up to sponsor talks and propose peace plans to the Bosnian belligerents. At one time or another, the UN, the EC, the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, the Contact Group (the United States, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain), and the United States itself assumed the lead; each held, for a time, primary responsibility for facilitating negotiations with the three adversaries. With the support of the UN, the United States, and leading European states, each facilitator sought to maintain harmony among the other international actors. In contrast to the international actors, the three Bosnian nationalist contenders were in the position of supplicants. They were constantly pressured to accept draft peace plans and were relegated to reacting to proposals presented to them. Their own initiatives were ignored or spurned by the internationals, and they rarely negotiated directly among themselves outside the framework of internationally-supervised talks.
5 - The Autumn of Radovan’s Rage
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 99-119
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Summary
“We have entered a phase of inebriation with the nation. That’s why we are far removed from civilization, reason, and prosperity.”
Mustafa Šehović, Social Democrat delegate in the Bosnian Parliament, October 14, 1991Sometime before September 1991, Karadžić underwent a personal and political metamorphosis. Evidence of this transformation emerged in his speech, imaginings, and actions during September as he became enraged by confrontations with rivals. As he grew increasingly frustrated by his inability to dictate the course of events, he adopted distorted interpretations of events and became deeply cynical of his rivals’ intentions. He indulged in fantasies of Bosniaks disappearing en masse, revealing a callous indifference toward the lives of non-Serbs. His dark, cynical imaginings would have profound implications for Bosnia’s future, particularly for the Bosniaks.
Sarajevo Enigma
Sarajevo, Karadžić’s adopted home, is a city of seasonal rhythms. In a ritual that seems as ancient as the hills around the city, many of Sarajevo’s residents return each September from languorous Adriatic Coast vacations to restore the city’s throbbing energy. As adults resume their workaday routines and children return to school, cool continental breezes drive the oppressive Mediterranean summer heat from the valley. Autumnal rains transform Sarajevo’s Miljacka River from a placid trickle into a roaring brown torrent, carrying mud and debris from thousands of upland peasant plots. Sarajevans, among the world’s most vocal hypochondriacs even in the best of times, turn from lamenting summer heat to complaining of “changes in pressure” and “unstable weather.” They move their conversations indoors to cramped, smoke-filled cafés and reminisce about their idyllic days of leisure in the summer sun. When one of the few clear, sun-filled autumn days falls on a weekend, they trek by the tens of thousands through the surrounding hills, pausing at outdoor cafes to enjoy a cup of coffee or a robust shot of plum brandy.
Frontmatter
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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Conclusion: Radovan Karadžić and the Bosnian War
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp 302-310
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Summary
“Nothing is easier than denouncing the evildoer, nothing more difficult than understanding him.”
– Fyodor DostoevskyRadovan Karadžić exercised a profound influence on the world around him in the course of his relatively brief political career. He destroyed his adopted home republic of Bosnia by leading the Bosnian Serbs to war and committing mass atrocities against non-Serbs. The path that led him there is neither simple nor linear; it is instructive, however, and its end is particularly disturbing. Because his influence led to such deplorable consequences, it is important to determine how and why he and his Bosnian Serb followers adopted the values and made the decisions that ended in mass atrocities against non-Serbs. This chapter considers those questions and proposes some answers based on Karadžić’s life and deeds.
The Man
For forty-five years, Radovan Karadžić lived an unremarkable life. Born in Montenegro in the final days of the Second World War, he experienced hardship and deprivation as he grew up, but he benefited from a dedicated, nurturing mother and a hard-working if more distant father. At age 15 he left home and moved to Sarajevo, the capital of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There he earned a medical degree, married and started a family, and became a successful psychiatrist at the university clinic. Although he demonstrated many personal qualities that would later make him a successful political leader, he remained distant from politics (except for a brief address at a student demonstration in 1968) and had no public profile as a dissident or nationalist of any kind. He wrote and published poetry that was unconventional in style and stark in tone but devoid of political content. As the 1980s approached their end, he was pursuing his search for a grand intellectual synthesis by bringing together his knowledge of group psychology and the idiom of folklore.
Dedication
- Robert J. Donia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- 22 September 2014, pp v-vi
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