Globe and Mail reporter Paul Koring.The Globe and Mail
In the Bosnian alpine town of Pale – perched high above the besieged and blood-soaked city of Sarajevo, where the rain of death from Serb mortars and machine guns would eventually kill tens of thousands – Radovan Karadzic, the psychiatrist turned politician and the supposedly acceptable civilian face of Bosnian Serb nationalism, held court.
So we – Sue Lloyd-Roberts of the BBC World Service and I – went to see President Karadzic, the first elected leader of the Serb Republic.
Expansive and relaxed, with an unruly white mane, he was happy to talk: about the West's abject failure to understand the existential threat posed by Islamic hordes threatening Christendom; about German duplicity in backing the Croat "fascists" as they sought to refight the Second World War; about the deeply misunderstood Serbs who had been saving Europe since at least 1389, when they defeated the Ottoman invaders; and how a new triumphant nation of Serb patriots, armed with a bundle of maps, would emerge from the rubble of war-torn Yugoslavia.
Long, passionate, nationalist diatribes were stock-in-trade for political leaders in all of the warring factions, but we dutifully took notes. But what we had really come for was to ask the President's permission to enter the encircled supposedly "safe haven" of Srebrenica, crammed with refugees from the vicious ethnic-cleansing sweep by Serbs that spring in 1993. Horrific rumours of starvation, of bodies rotting in the streets and children eating grass were seeping out of Srebrenica. We needed permission to cross the Serb lines into the no-man's land ringing the town, where silver had been mined in Roman days.
Mr. Karadzic, who had been back and forth three times to the United Nations in New York and was still years away from being a fugitive accused of genocide, magnanimously agreed to give us a laissez-passer; he signed it with a flourish and had it stamped by a functionary. He was, after all, the duly elected President of Republika Srpska, constitutionally charged with running the nascent state and appointing senior military officers, including General Ratko Mladic, the much-feared head of the Bosnian Serb military.
Whether Mr. Karadzic really was the supreme power or just the front man, the smiling face on an evil military regime, was only one of the grim enigmas of the bloody breakup of the Balkans, endlessly debated by Bosnians and outsiders alike.
On Thursday in The Hague, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, after more than a decade as a fugitive, another eight years in prison and a long trial, Mr. Karadzic was convicted by a three-judge panel of genocide and other war crimes in connection with the deliberate, methodical massacre of more than 6,000 men and boys after Srebrenica fell in 1995, and the 44-month siege of Sarajevo during which at least 10,000, mostly civilians, died.
The 70-year-old psychiatrist and sometime poet was at the "apex of power," presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon concluded.
"There is nothing heroic about raping persons, about sexual abuse in camps," said Serge Brammertz, the court's chief prosecutor. "There is nothing heroic about executing 7,000 prisoners which have been detained in impossible circumstances. There is nothing heroic to kill with snipers children who are playing."
Back in 1993, when then-president Karadzic signed our laissez-passer, the murder, rapes and ethnic cleansing that drove hundreds of thousands from their homes were in full swing and would continue for years.
But even then, Mr. Karadzic's power was a murky, uncertain thing. At least one Bosnian Serb regarded him as a minion.
Not far from Srebrenica, we happened to cross paths with Gen. Mladic. In an improbable encounter, the beefy Serb commander insisted we join him for dinner in what turned out to be a long, slivovitz-fuelled evening that ended with us, rather tentatively, asking the general whether his troops dug in around Srebrenica would honour our laissez-passer – not just as we headed into the hellhole but, more importantly, when we tried to walk out some time later.
Gen. Mladic laughed mirthlessly. And he looked at our flimsy bit of paper signed by his President. And he tore it up. "It's worthless," he said, adding that if we wanted to get into and out of Srebrenica alive, we needed his word. And he wrote out another pass. At least that day, Gen. Mladic, who still faces war-crimes trials for genocide, knew who was boss.