Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Itai Engel, Karadzic’s insane asylum, Haaretz, July 25, 2008

In the end we each had our pictures taken next to the car that, for a month, had sheltered us from Karadzic’s bullets and murderers, and with which we smuggled out and saved civilians from his ethnic cleansing. That car had more luck than brains, certainly more luck than fuel, and somehow it always succeeded in rescuing us at the last moment, against all odds and all laws of mechanics, to the point where we thought that God Himself was watching over us from the skies above Bosnia.

One morning when we went out to the parking lot, we saw that a shell had exploded a meter from the car and scorched it completely. Apparently, despite our feelings to the contrary, there really was no God in Sarajevo. God wasn’t in Bosnia at all in 1992. He was replaced by someone who played God: a Serbian psychiatrist named Radovan Karadzic.

…Without getting into terms and definitions, in Bosnia there was systematic genocide. They called it ethnic cleansing. The idea, as explained to me with cold logic by Serbian citizens whom I met later in the war, is nevertheless somehow connected to us. “We don’t want to be stuck the way you’re stuck, in Israel,” they said. “You occupied territories and got stuck forever with an occupied population inside those territories. For decades you have been dealing, and will deal, with terror that originates on their side and, in addition, with international complaints about violating human rights.”

In order not to get “stuck,” the Serbs carried out ethnic cleansing. Every area that was occupied was entirely cleansed of its Muslim residents. There were two ways of doing this. The first was to load the residents onto trucks and, in a mass transfer, to drive them several hundred kilometers away, and fence them in an abandoned and isolated area. The second way was related to Karadzic’s sick worldview: neither transfer nor expulsion, but immediate extermination of everybody.

And thus it happened that in a city called Srebrenica, all 8,000 Muslim residents were massacred within a 24-hour period. In one of the horrible pictures that came out of there shortly after the ethnic cleansing, Radovan Karadzic is seen embracing and kissing his chief of staff, Ratko Mladic; next to them, Serbian soldiers and militiamen are raising glasses of slivovitz.

A fate similar to that of Srebrenica befell Gorazde, Zepa and innumerable other Muslim villages in Bosnia. But Karadzic’s declared ambition to totally terrorize the country’s Muslims led to a situation where even massacre was not just an act of killing for its own sake. When the Serbian militiamen entered a Muslim house, several would grab the man inside, and one after the other, before his horrified eyes, they would rape his wife. After the rape, the woman would see her husband being decapitated.

The Muslim women who were raped were held by the Serbs in a prison camp for several months, after which they could no longer undergo an abortion if impregnated. To these thousands of villagers, who had led a conservative Balkan lifestyle, the fetus they carried was the seed of Satan. There were women who, right after birth, abandoned the baby and fled. Some killed the newborn with their own hands, and some, despite the horror and disgust, decided to raise the baby. But then, when they returned to their village after captivity, they discovered that the residents, sometimes even their own families, were unwilling to take them back with the satanic Serbian baby in their arms.