Karadzic Told Us What He Planned; We Just Watched

Weeks before snipers sparked war at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn in 1992, I visited a psychiatrist, silver-maned and clearly loony, at his Bosnian Serb party headquarters.

He jabbed a stick at a colorful grade-school map on a wall of the tiny office to show how Serbs would displace Muslims and Croats by force if all else failed.

I rechecked his name -- Radovan Karadzic was not yet in the files -- and then asked how he would get away with that. You watch, he replied.

The interview went across the world on Associated Press wires. Back then looming conflict was still easily preventable. But few took notice of the obscure doctor.

Even after Serb gunners besieged Sarajevo, and courageous reporters found ways in from every direction, people with the power to act simply wrung their hands.

Year after year, Europe and America watched. As announced, Serb militias "cleansed" centuries-old Muslim and Croat settlements with help from Belgrade.

That name, Radovan Karadzic, climbed the scale of synonyms for human depravity. Along with Ratko Mladic and others most of us fail to remember, he transcended cruelty.

Reporters filled notebooks with details of gunned down families, mass graves, systemic gang rape, burned villages, starvation camps, and torture just for the sadism of it.

We all saw that beefy, pockmarked face smirking as atrocities forced victims to fight back so fiercely that outsiders could dismiss it all as "a civil war."

After the concentrated horror of Srebrenica pricked enough consciences, the Dayton Accords in 1995 stopped most of it. Karadzic moved up the hill to Pale where he mocked efforts to bring him to justice.

NATO politicians claimed he was too hard to find. But this was no Osama bin Laden in trackless mountains. NATO commanders, and reporters, knew where he was.

And then Karadzic was allowed to slip away, along with Mladic and others, their crimes unpunished, to inspire ethnic genocide elsewhere.

The government of Serbia took credit for locating him at long last with detective work, but I would go with a New York Times editorial:

"A more likely explanation is that President Boris Tadic, and his pro-Western government, decided to improve Serbia's chances of joining the European Union and finally ordered investigators to do their job."

Later is better than never. But think of those anguished victims who for years saw no gesture toward justice. More, consider those uncounted thousands of lives that earlier action would have spared.

Stepping back, we might take stock of where we are as a civilized world 16 years after Radovan Karadzic was allowed to exterminate people he found inconvenient.

In the 1990s, most news organizations still wanted substance and were willing to pay for it. Reporters, as watchdogs, sniffed fresh ground for impending calamity.

AP and others signaled Serb intentions. Thanks to a brave and well-funded Sarajevo press corps, no one who cared to notice was ignorant of the chilling reality.

And yet the world still did not respond.

As usual, pundits with secondhand sources outshouted correspondents who saw the story up close. The Balkans was too complex, too fraught with history, and so forth.

Facts were blurred in a flurry of opinion, offering no end of excuses for ignominious inaction.

The reality, as Blaine Harden of the Washington Post once said to me, was about as complicated as armed robbery.

In Vietnam, and again in Iraq, reporters could not stop U.S. policymakers from charging onward. And in Bosnia, they could not inspire simple preventative action.

Today it is harder to spot an incipient Karadzic. Correspondents are dramatically fewer, with scant funds to travel and more editors prone to tell them what they saw.

Though a "mainstream media" often still serves us well, it is taxed with sweeping generalities from critics who fail to separate what is good from what bad.

As a result, people listen to long-distance guesswork and Internet chatter. Google cannot reflect a Karadzic with his crude map until someone finds him in the flesh.

Heraclitus put it simply enough 2,500 years ago. As Willis Barnstone translates: "Eyes are a more precise witness than ears."

But whether good or bad, the media is no more than the messenger. Those who cared enough knew what was happening in Bosnia, and they are likely to know the next time.

Prosecutors will recite a litany of Karadzic's crimes. Yet Srebrenica, however horrific, was just the final flourish of carefully orchestrated ethnic extermination.

Hindsight confirms what was dead clear at the time. NATO shots across the bow of warships off Dubrovnik, or any other such stitches in time, would have done it.

It is heartening that Karadzic must finally face justice. Yet the rest of us might also consider our role as unindicted co-conspirators.

Why didn't we stop him? That is now rhetorical. More to the point, will we stop all those others -- now and in the future -- who murder en masse before our averted eyes?

Mort Rosenblum is editor of the new quarterly, Dispatches, and author of Escaping Plato's Cave: How America's Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival.

Comments

[20thcenturykid]

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/07/29/vonat.belgrade.clashes.more.ap

[20thcenturykid]

CNN doesn't know enough about the news it is reporting on or intentionally broadcasting reports from the riots in Blegrade "augmented" by footage of Hungarians demonstrating against the return of the born-again communists in Budapest:

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/07/29/vonat.belgrade.clashes.more.ap

You can clearly see the Hungarian street signs and tricolor which CNN wants you to believe was shot in Belgrade. Ted Turner, where are you, now that we need you!

[randyjet]

I have a question for Mr. Rosenblum since he was there. I noticed that when Clinton made her famous visit that there was a mention of other camps already existing in Macedonia before the influx of the Kosovars. Who was in those camps? I can only assume it was Serbs and Roma who had been kicked out by the KLA. Is that the case?

I was particularly offended at her reference to the trains that came in as being similar to the cattle cars that transported the Jews to the concentration camps. The Jews would have LOVED such accomodations that the Kosovars had. They could get on and off, had no armed guards, would not be shot, were going away from death, not TO it, etc.. As for the overcrowding, I had similar crowding on some trains in Europe too. I even had to stand for long periods of time with no seat available.

[randyjet]

I see that most posters have NO concern for the 200,000 Serbs and many Roma who were kicked out of Kosovo. Why is displacing Serbs from their historical homeland OK, and only the Albanian concerns looked at? Kosovo became mainly Albanian for many reasons over the years. One of the biggest was that the Albanian SS division killed off and shipped out most of the Serbs, Roma, and Jews to the Jasenovic concentration camp where about 800,000 were murdered. NATO has taken the side of outright Nazis and let the KLA ethnically cleanse all the Serbs and Roma from Kosovo. The KLA was at one point termed a terrorist organization by NATO, but then it became useful in hitting at Milosevic, and they became good guys.

If Karadzic is tried for war crimes, then the US should demand the SAME for the leaders of Kosovo. They are just as guilty of the same crimes as he is.

[bayside]

Disposed of people that stood in his way to get what he wants. Sounds familiar.. Monsters

[Marlyn]

"Why didn't we stop him?"

We did. Karadzic has been in hiding for years. General Wes Clark, Supreme Commander of NATO managed to stop the ethnic cleansing, but it wasn't easy for him. He had to go over the head of his commanding officer who didn't want to take action. And as a result, his military career was over.

[randyjet]

The FACT is that NATO is the one who successfully ethnically cleansed all the Serbs from Kosovo. There were over 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo before NATO started its bombing campaign. There are basically zero now. The FACT is that the KLA had as its program to ethnically cleanse all the Serbs, and NATO facilitated that.

If Karadzic is put on trial, then Clark should be joining him in the dock for killing journalists in Serbia when he bombed the radio/TV building. In WWII journalists were considered non-combatants and were prohibited from carrying arms. Hemingway was court martialed by the Army for violating this policy, but was found not guilty.

[Mort Rosenblum - Huffpost Blogger]

With all respect, you don't sound like you've spend much time in Kosovo, either before all those desperate Kosovars fled to Albania in 1999 or since. Action inevitably provokes reaction. I wrote about Bosnia, but there is much to say about Kosovo on similar lines. If "an international community" or world leaders with the chops to act want to lessen the brewing ferment that feeds the ranks of zealots -- and kills innocent victims in distressing multiples -- we should keep this in mind,

[tcagle]

Serbs should now have to wait as many years to be considered for EU membership as they have spent hiding this monster.

[brainuser]

People so far away and about whom we knew so little. Or cared.

[schatsie]

exactly, so blood is on our hands....