How he slipped into hiding

[CroRadio.net]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/yugo/article/0,,2220679,00.html

How he slipped into hiding


Ed Vulliamy
Sunday December 2, 2007
The Guardian

Radovan Karadzic was born in the village of Petnjica, over the
Montenegrin border from Foca, where he shares a surname with most
gravestones in the little churchyard, but where his father was
ostracised after raping and killing a cousin, and a grandfather
murdered a neighbour in an argument over cattle. Now, however,
Karadzic's relatives and neighbours worship him and are planning a
biennial literary festival where they can read Karadzic's poetry. It
is strange verse, such as this, entitled 'Sarajevo': 'I hear
misfortune's threads/ Turned into a beetle as if an old singer /Had
been crushed by the silence and become a voice./The town burns like
incense/In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.'

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But it was not poetry that took the diligent young Karadzic from this
Vukojebina to Sarajevo. The country boy trained as a psychiatrist in
the Bosnian capital and worked for the local football team but was
never really accepted by the city's cosmopolitan circles. The big
chance for a man desperate to be admired came with the sudden advent
of Milosevic's murderous quest to break up Yugoslavia and unite the
Serbs into an ethnically 'pure' community across the borders of
Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and the region in southern Serbia called
Kosovo. With his spurious sophistication and hallmark quiff of hair,
Karadzic ordered and spearheaded the carnage to follow, in tandem with
Mladic.

But for three years, although the atrocities he detonated were
reported across the world, Karadzic's hand was eagerly clasped by the
world's diplomatic leaders. The governments of Britain and France
especially - as well as the United Nations leadership - saw in
Karadzic not the war criminal they call him today, but a fellow
politician with whom to do business. Britain and the UN led the
prevalent international policy of calculated refusal to stop Karadzic,
thereby advancing his aims, and Karadzic dealt in particular -
directly or indirectly - with Lord Carrington, Malcolm Rifkind, David
Owen, Cyrus Vance and Douglas Hurd as an equal deserving full
diplomatic protocol. A recent book by the lawyer Carole Hodge finds
Karadzic, in return, praising Britain's 'refined diplomacy'. To the
private hilarity of the Serbs, western diplomats accepted their
endless, empty guarantees, their posturing and fleeting 'ceasefires'.
They agreed to turn back aid to the desperate 'safe areas' declared by
the UN (including Srebrenica) but, betrayed, they connived in maps and
'peace plans' that gave Karadzic everything he had won by violence and
tolerated the murderous siege of Sarajevo. Mladic was similarly feted
by the western military, who regarded the butcher as a peer in
uniform: America's General Wesley Clark proffered gifts, Britain's
General Sir Michael Rose and General Bernard Janvier of France sat at
table with Mladic. The latter shared suckling lamb and parleyed with
him shortly before Mladic ordered the Srebrenica massacre, Janvier
having turned back the air strikes which could have prevented it.
After the massacre and Mladic's indictment, Janvier told me he saw in
Mladic 'a military professional doing his best to defend his people'.

Karadzic's collateral also continued past the date of his indictment
in 1995 by the war crimes tribunal. As the war drew to a close with
Srebrenica, the doctrine of appeasement of the Serbs advocated by
Britain and the UN had become demonstrably grotesque and America took
the reins in a final effort fronted by the envoy Richard Holbrooke.
Holbrooke's first action was to stop the Bosnian army in its tracks as
it was finally turning the tide, then knock the heads of the leaders
of all sides together to produce the Dayton peace agreement of
December 1995, partitioning Bosnia into the Republika Srpska Karadzic
wanted and a Muslim-Croat Federation. Rarely in European history has
mass murder been so bountifully rewarded at the negotiating table.

Word now abounds - and we shall return to this later - that Holbrooke
struck a deal with Karadzic, whereby Karadzic would be protected from
delivery to The Hague on condition that he leave office and political
life. Holbrooke has vehemently denied any such agreement, but it was
in this ambivalent atmosphere - with whispers of impunity for
Karadzic, after years of appeasement - that the hunt for Karadzic
began.

During the postwar years, while 60,000 foreign troops patrolled
Bosnia, Karadzic lived openly in Pale and moved across the country,
waved through Nato roadblocks. I once saw his immediately recognisable
car, marked 001, parked overnight outside a hotel in Banja Luka in
1996; the local Nato base showed no interest. After 1999, the effort
got more serious, with raids on his family and financial sanctions on
their businesses, and Karadzic disappeared from view. There were
sightings: on the balcony in Foca, at a restaurant in Belgrade,
sheltered in the Ostrog monastery of the Serbian Orthodox church to
which Karadzic was so generous during his presidency. One sighting, in
2002, was in the village of Zaovine, astride an unmarked border
between Bosnia and Serbia just north of Visegrad, on the Drina river,
and hidden in a maze of rocky, winding tracks through thick forest. By
this time, the so-called Preventiva - the network of guards and
contacts protecting Karadzic - was stitched not only into the official
structures of Republika Srpska, but its contacts in the criminal
underworld, centred on one man from Visegrad. Here lies a parable of
the violence unleashed by Karadzic, the way he is protected and the
fiasco of the international search.

The road north of Foca skirts the Drina's left bank and enters the
town of Gorazde, which during the war was the second most renowned
place in Bosnia after Sarajevo, until Srebrenica became a household
name. Surrounded and starved, battered and bombarded by Serbian guns,
the enclave became a legend of resilience, death and suffering. There
is graffiti carefully painted on the gable end of a house: 'Teci
Drino, Teci i pricaj' ('Flow, Drina, flow, and tell your story'). It
sends shivers down the spine. For not only does Gorazde itself sit
astride the Drina, but into the town poured the survivors of a
terrible flight from the next community downriver, Visegrad.

Visegrad nestles in the Drina valley at a particularly beautiful place
in its flow, where precipitous rocks part, giving way to a verdant
valley. Spanning the river is a glorious bridge, iconic of Bosnia: an
Ottoman structure of pumice stone, hewn in 1571 and inspiration for a
novel by Ivo Andric, Bridge Over the Drina, whose author won the Nobel
prize for literature. In the book, the bridge bears silent witness to
Bosnia's history. But Andric died in 1975, 17 years before the bridge
was bloodily defiled, turned into a slaughterhouse.

Night after night, truckloads of Bosnian Muslim civilians were taken
down to the bridge and riverbank by Bosnian Serb paramilitaries,
unloaded, sometimes slashed with knives, sometimes shot, and thrown
into the river, dead or in various states of half-death, turning
Drina's turquoise current red with blood. As well as the slaughter on
the bridge, hundreds of Muslims including women and children were
packed into houses across Visegrad and incinerated alive. Hasena M,
whom I interviewed shortly after the war, escaped the bridge
executions; she had crouched near the bridge and 'watched them put my
mother and sister astride the parapet, like on a horse. I heard both
women screaming, until they were shot in the stomach. They fell in the
water - the men laughing as they watched. The water went red'.

At the same time I spoke to Zehra T, her face and hands deformed by
fire. She recalled her escape from a house at Bikavac, into which
about 70 people had been locked and burned to death: 'The Serbs took a
garage door from another house and put it up against the balcony, so
we couldn't get out. We weren't screaming or banging on the doors,
just crying because we knew what was going to happen. Then they set
the house on fire and everyone inside was screaming, but nobody could
get out. I saw the window in the garage door and I pulled myself
through it.

'I was the only one who got out. I pulled off my burning clothes.
Outside the Chetniks [Serbian soldiers] were standing around watching
the house burning. They were drunk and playing music very, very loud,
so no one could hear the sound of the burning people screaming
inside.'

As elsewhere, the pogrom was carried out on orders from Karadzic and
Mladic. But anyone who survived the ravages of Visegrad will testify
that the atrocities invariably bore the mark of one man above all:
Milan Lukic, arrested in 2005 in Argentina and now awaiting trial in
The Hague. The indictment of Lukic for these house-burnings is most
shocking for the poignancy of the list of victims at the end, which
runs for pages. 'Family name: Kurspahic,' reads one entry on the long
list. 'First name: unknown. Age: about two days.'

For years, neither Bosnian Serb nor Serbian authorities showed any
inclination to hand Lukic over. He was repeatedly charged with
racketeering, arrested three times - but each time released. Looking
more seriously for Lukic, however, was the Sarajevo-based Balkan
Investigative Reporting Network (Birn). In April 2004, Birn published
an account, based on Bosnian state intelligence reports, of Lukic's
links to the fugitive Karadzic in two ways: one, he was part of a
lucrative drug-smuggling ring connected to Karadzic's business
network. The profits funded a second connection: the heavily armed
Preventiva network. And Lukic was also protected: his cousin and
patron Sreten Lukic was deputy interior minister of the Serbian state,
in effect chief of police. But around January 2003, Lukic and Karadzic
quarrelled over Lukic's personal share of the spoils - there were
reports of a shootout with Karadzic's guards. The fallout meant that
Lukic was at risk on Bosnian Serb soil, even in Visegrad. Then, in
March, came a second blow: cousin Sreten was indicted by The Hague,
removed from his Serbian ministerial post and deported to face trial.
And then a third: in April, police from Republika Srpska stormed
Lukic's family home in Visegrad and shot dead his innocent brother,
Novica. Was it a mistake? Was the police unit working for Karadzic and
got the wrong brother? Or was the murder not a mistake, but a message
to Lukic?

Lukic, no longer safe, made overtures to The Hague, with a view to
surrender and safety in return for co-operation over finding and
convicting Karadzic. But he twice failed to turn up at attempted
rendezvous with the tribunal's tracking team. By the time of Birn's
report in April 2004, Lukic had vanished, but resurfaced in an
impenitent email, routed from a server in Brazil, saying: 'Mladic has
always been and will remain the true hero and idol, and Karadzic the
leader of my people.'

That Karadzic was spotted at Zaovine near Visegrad in April 2004,
after Lukic had been neutralised, is logical - he was rid of the
mutineer and could enjoy the most porous stretch of the Bosnia-Serbia
border, near a ferociously loyal Bosnian town. But what worries Senad
Avdic, editor of Free Bosnia magazine, which has assiduously followed
the hunt for Karadzic, is why these sightings and 'raids' never amount
to anything. 'We learned,' he said, 'that a call from the village of
Zaovine saying Karadzic was there was confirmed in numerous reports by
The Hague tracking team. Many questions remain unanswered: why was
there then no raid on the village? So far as we know, requests were
made immediately by The Hague to Nato in Brussels and on to Sarajevo,
where it was said additional information was needed - crazy stuff,
like "how many windows does the house have?" - and more questions,
until nothing happened and Karadazic disappeared. It makes you wonder
- that this is not just a deal with Holbrooke, but a strategy by the
main capital cities not to catch Karadzic.'