Radovan Karadžić

After a manhunt lasting more than a decade, Radovan Karadžić was captured in July 2008, on a bus in Vračar, a suburb of Belgrade. One of the world’s most wanted war criminals, wanted for inciting the Bosnian Serbs to commit genocide, by then Karadžić had re-invented himself as a medicine man complete with long grey hair and large unkempt beard — but an oddly forbidding-looking one. Going by the alias of ‘Dragan Dabić’, practitioner of alternative medicine, he had managed to remain under the radar for more than thirteen years, but soon after his arrest in 2008 he was handed over to the ICTY, where he first appeared on 31 July 2008 before Judge Alphons Orie. Robert Donia was called an expert witness for the prosecution, providing the historical background and context of the wartime events in Bosnia. Donia had often given evidence against former Yugoslav leaders, but the case against Karadžićwas different, as Robert Donia describes in this comprehensive biography.

Donia appeared as historical expert witness in fifteen war crimes trials at the International Court Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, including those of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević and, precisely, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić. In his biography of Karadžić, Donia describes the flamboyant former psychiatrist as a bully with a brilliant mind, a sharp tongue and impressive powers of persuasion. He seeks to understand how Karadžić was able to make the leap from politically indifferent professional man to nationalist of passionate conviction. To understand so remarkable a transformation Donia presents the results of research that has continued for almost two decades. He has used an impressive quantity of source material made available by prosecutors in The Hague, such as audio tapes and transcripts of telephone conversations between the wartime leaders. Not only that, but Donia was present in the courtroom with Karadžić for almost two weeks.

Donia’s account starts out in rural Montenegro, where Karadžić was born in 1945. After leaving middle school at sixteen, Karadžić moved to Sarajevo to attend medical college. Young Radovan held his family as dear as his native Montenegro, so during the holidays he often went to Nikšićto visit his family. Although his life and studies as a student at Sarajevo’s Medical Faculty did not directly prepare him for a political career, nevertheless during the student uprisings in 1968 Karadžić was the only student from the Medical Faculty to take a leading role in the one-day protest at the University of Sarajevo. That protest was one of a wave of similar protests in Yugoslavia’s universities and part of the worldwide ‘1968’ movement and was directed against Yugoslav state bureaucracy and the Vietnam War. According to Donia, the student protests were Karadžić’s first contact with intellectuals in the humanities, and he embraced their critique of Yugoslav socialism. While that critique started out with grievances against the bureaucracy, it later separated intellectuals along ethnic lines.

It was in 1968 around the time of the student protests that Karadžićfirst began to write poetry, and the Serb writer and a dissident Gojko Djogo became one of his closest friends. One of the editors of the literary programme at the Youth Centre in Belgrade, Djogo introduced Karadžić to Belgrade’s young intellectual community and gradually their grievances against bureaucratic authority turned into a Serb nationalist critique of socialist governance in Yugoslavia, and in Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular. One of the leaders of the change of thinking was the writer Dobrica Čosić, who authored the infamous memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1986.

The economic and political situation in the 1980s fostered the rise of nationalist agitation. Donia describes how Karadžićwas intrigued by the opportunities but did not know how to exploit them. He and the Sarajevo-based group around him met in early 1990 to discuss forming a political party, and in July of the same year the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia (Srpska Demokratska Stranka, SDS) was founded and Karadžić elected its leader. By the end of 1990, Karadžić succeeded in rallying many Bosnian Serbs behind the new party, and he first spoke of the ‘disappearance’ of the Bosnian Muslims in 1991, and then when war broke out in April 1992 an orgy of violence was let loose. Karadžić was sidelined by Slobodan Milošević during the negotiations in Dayton in 1995, and Donia describes in detail how Karadžić descended into a welter of his own megalomania.

The bizarre tale of Karadžić’s life ends in court in The Hague, where after more than a decade on the run he chose to represent himself at his ICTY trial. Visibly enjoying himself in his role as his own advocate, over the hundreds of hours he was given to try to justify his deeds as leader of the Bosnian Serbs Karadžić presented a self-serving narrative of what he claimed was a need to help the long-suffering Serbian people. Donia describes Karadžić’s appearance in court as bold and arrogant, just as it had been when he entered politics. Karadžić cross-examined Donia in June 2010, and Donia concluded that Karadžićsaw himself as a saviour, and was utterly sincere in identifying his personal fate with that of the Bosnian Serbs.

As Donia’s biography was published, the trial was still going on, but on 24 March 2016 Karadžić was convicted and sentenced to forty years in prison, quite a contrast to the fate a few days later of Vojislav Šešelj, leader of the Serbian Radical Party, who was acquitted. For the 70-year-old Karadžićhis sentence means he can expect to end his life in prison — but Karadžić would not be Karadžić if he were not to appeal against the court’s verdict.

Donia’s biography gives highly detailed insights into his subject’s attitude.

He shows how Karadžić managed to assume power by means of his intellect and his charisma, and how that in turn became veritable megalomania. However, Donia maintains that it would be too easy to catego rise Karadžić as simply a madman, the evil mastermind of genocide. He shows how Karadžić considered various political circumstances tactically and strategically, how he met his counterparts both national and international, and how he argued with his opponents. Karadžić came to power, and then managed to create the conditions in which genocide became an option. Donia shows in this thoroughly readable page-turner of a biography that Karadžić, although not there in person when it occurred, was nevertheless the true architect of the Bosnian genocide at Srebrenica.