Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Karadzic Sent to Hague for Trial Despite Violent Protest by Loyalists - NYTimes.com, July 30, 2007

BELGRADE, Serbia — Long one of the most-wanted fugitives in the world, Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader blamed for inciting his followers to join him in a brutal ethnic war, was en route to The Hague early Wednesday, according to the Serbian war crimes prosecutor.

Radovan Karadzic arrived in Rotterdam on Wednesday before being transferred to a prison in the Netherlands.

About 15,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade on Tuesday night to support the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is facing war crimes charges.

A motorcade carrying Mr. Karadzic to the airport left hours after stone-hurling nationalists clashed with the police in central Belgrade at a rally to protest his arrest last week on war crimes charges, and his likely extradition to stand trial before an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Mr. Karadzic was escorted by masked Serbian security officers and taken from the Belgrade war crimes court at roughly 3:45 a.m., according to the prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic. Soon after, his plane was in flight, and it landed in Rotterdam, not far from The Hague, about two hours later.

He is the highest-level politician from the former Yugoslavia to be transferred to the court since Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, who was arrested in 2001 and died in his cell there in 2006 while awaiting a verdict.

The indictment of Mr. Karadzic charges that as president of the Bosnian Serb republic in the early 1990s, he helped orchestrate a 43-month siege of the city of Sarajevo, devised a systematic campaign to kill or drive out tens of thousands of non-Serbs from Serbian towns and villages, set up concentration camps and was an engineer of the massacre of nearly 8,000 unarmed men and boys captured at the United Nations-protected enclave of Srebrenica, in Europe’s worst mass execution since World War II.

While Serbia waited to hear whether Mr. Karadzic had filed an appeal against his arrest, and supporters celebrated him as a hero, officials were preparing to transport him to The Hague. About 15,000 supporters, some bused in from across Serbia and Bosnia by the far-right Radical Party, gathered on Tuesday to protest the new government that arrested him on July 21.

Loyalists wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Mr. Karadzic’s image waved Serbian flags and chanted “Long Live Radovan!” and “Uprising! Uprising!” About 100 ultranationalists wearing masks, who had separated from the group, burned flares, attacked traffic lights with clubs and hurled stones at storefront windows. The police responded with tear gas, and the Serbian news media said more than 45 people suffered minor injuries.

“Karadzic is a hero because he defended Serb lives during the terrible wars of the 1990s,” said Elena Pavovski, 24, a supporter of the Radical Party, whose members sang patriotic songs next to a banner on Republic Square that threatened Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic. “Everyone knows that the war crimes tribunal in The Hague was designed to try Serbs while the war criminals who killed Serbs are set free.”

Tension Mounting in Serbia on Eve of Nationalist Rally - NYTimes.com, July 29, 2008

BELGRADE, Serbia — Tension was mounting here Monday on the eve of a rally called by an ultranationalist party that some feared could turn violent over the likely extradition of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader arrested last week on war crimes charges.

The fears have been fanned in recent days by death threats against Serbia’s pro-Western president, Boris Tadic, and attacks on journalists by far-right nationalists.

The rally on Tuesday is being organized by the Radical Party, which has glorified Mr. Karadzic as a hero and opposes extraditing him to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague, where he has been indicted in connection with the three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, in 1992-1995.

He is accused of authorizing the killing of civilians there and of masterminding the massacre of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, in 1995. He evaded arrest for more than a dozen years, living at least part of that time in Belgrade as a bushy-bearded practitioner of alternative medicine.

Aleksandar Hemon, How Radovan Karadzic Made Bosnia Suffer, NYTimes.com, July 27, 2008

ON Oct. 14, 1991, Radovan Karadzic spoke at a session of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Parliament, which had been debating a referendum on independence from the rump Yugoslavia. Mr. Karadzic was there to warn the Parliament members against following the Slovenes and Croats, who had broken away earlier that year, down “the highway of hell and suffering.”

He thundered, “Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.” Throughout his tirade, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his audience, but then let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word “annihilation.” The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, a Muslim, was visibly distressed.

It was a spectacular, if blood-curdling, performance. Mr. Karadzic, who was arrested last week after 13 years in hiding, was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which already controlled the parts of Bosnia that had a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the Parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. His very presence rendered the Parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the Parliament represented.

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.

Victor Peskin, Serbia’s tipping-point arrest, open Democracy, July 22, 2008

Each year since the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, the anniversary underscores the failure to apprehend its two alleged architects, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Days after the thirteenth commemoration of the murder of around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries, there was a break in this particular cloud: namely, the arrest late on 21 July 2008 of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb president, found to have been living in Belgrade.

The news of Karadzic’s detention is stunning enough (see Dejan Djokic, “Radovan Karadzic’s capture: a moment for history”, 22 July 2008). What makes it even more timely and important is that it reinforces the signal sent a week earlier, on 14 July, by an application for an arrest-warrant against Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on the charge of war-crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur (see “The Omar al-Bashir indictment, the ICC and Darfur”, 15 July 2008). The respective bodies seeking the opportunity to try al-Bashir and Karadzic may be different - the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) respectively - but taken together, these initiatives highlight the centrality of transnational justice institutions and processes to conflict- and post-conflict situations in different parts of the world.

The wrong climate

Radovan Karadzic is being held at the special court building in Belgrade, where he awaits transfer to the ICTY in The Hague to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes: a series of atrocities that one tribunal judge famously said were “truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history”. Since the death of Slobodan Milosevic in custody in The Hague in March 2006, the importance of Karadzic and Mladic (the former Bosnian Serb military commander) to the tribunal’s mission has grown; the other outstanding suspect, Goran Hadzic, is regarded as a less important if also heinous figure. Now, the upcoming trial of Karadzic will give the ICTY a chance to redeem itself after the missteps of Milosevic’s unsatisfactory and in the end truncated four-year trial.

KOSOVO Pecinci, Srem District
NATO KFOR soldiers patrol a deserted Serbian village. The residents, fearing their Albanian neighbours, have fled from the settlement and many have left their possessions, such as this wedding photograph, behind.

Photographer Martin Roemers

Date 2000

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