Serbian nationalists portray Karadzic as national hero and ignore or downplay slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica
July 29, 2008 7:39 am Religion, nationalism, and terror in the BalkansTension 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.