LET KARADZIC’S TRIAL BE FAIR – BUT ALSO QUICK

By Emir Suljagic: I was not in Bosnia when he was arrested, but I remember the exhilaration I felt when talking to my friends. We were all confident that with his arrest the war was over, in fact. There are many other reasons to do away with Karadzic, such as avoiding any further re-traumatization of individuals and groups already traumatized, but most important is the following: the sooner he is sentenced and sent away to prison, the sooner the war which still rages in peoples’ souls will be over; the sooner the barriers that he erected in peoples’ minds will come down.

I dare say hardly anyone is as familiar with Radovan Karadzic as I am. Over the past few years, I spent countless hours pouring over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pages of orders and instructions that he issued, speeches he made and transcripts of telephone conversations he had with various other members of the Serbian political and military leadership from the early and mid-1990s.

Some left me speechless, most of all Directive No 7, dated March 1995, which outlines the ultimate goal of the attack on Srebrenica as ensuring the impossibility of the survival of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica and Zepa.

I found him bloodthirsty at times, such as when, during a conversation with his friend the poet Gojko Djogo, he enthusiastically referred to Sarajevo as “black cauldron” in which “three hundred thousand people will die”.

A testimony of his conversation with a Bosnian Muslim from western Bosnia has him describing the future Serbian state in Bosnia as one in which “Serbs would make war and Muslims would work”.

At the end of the day, however, I found Karadzic to be first and foremost a dilettante. I had some exclusive insights into the mind of one of the greatest villains of the second half of the 20th century, but there was a problem: I did not want to know.

Then they arrested him. Now I had to find out much more: about his not-so-secret secret life in downtown Belgrade, his alternative lifestyle and the lover he kept, his strained relationship with his wife as a result, until I reached the point when someone whose humanity had been irrevocably lost to me – at some point in the small hours of reading the testimony of prison-camp inmates in Luka in Brcko or Omarska or Batkovic or perhaps long before it – began to resemble a human being again.

With his public appearances limited to status conferences in the ICTY courtroom, Karadzic has crept back into my, into our, lives in the year that has passed since his arrest. Everyone has had to say something about him, or about something he had said or done, so if the first year is anything to go by his trial will be much like that of Slobodan Milosevic: long, grueling and traumatic.

Of course, this is a matter of perspective: mine is the perspective of someone who has been held hostage to what Karadzic did during the war, and to the consequences of what he did after the end of the war, and who in some ways remains hostage to the end result of his lifework. Therefore, I want to see him dealt with fairly, but swiftly and without undue procrastination.

I was not in Bosnia when he was arrested, but I remember the exhilaration I felt when talking to my friends. We were all confident that with his arrest the war was over, in fact. There are many other reasons to do away with Karadzic, such as avoiding any further re-traumatization of individuals and groups already traumatized, but most important is the following: the sooner he is sentenced and sent away to prison, the sooner the war which still rages in peoples’ souls will be over; the sooner the barriers that he erected in peoples’ minds will come down.

This is not to say that there should not be a trial and that victims should not have an opportunity for their voices to be heard; or, for those who can stomach it, to face him in court. He should have the right to cross-examine them within the limits of good taste (the kind of latitude Milosevic had was simply too much), but that is where it ends.

No names of individuals who defend him, no grievances about the so-called immunity deal, no letters to this or that, and please, but please, no information regarding conjugal visits. I am not asking this for myself: I will always find a way to either avoid finding out about it – by not reading the Belgrade-based dailies run by the Security and Intelligence Agency, formerly known as State Security Branch, is a good start; I can shut it out of my life.

But for the sake of so many who either cannot or who don’t know how to do so, please let us exercise some responsibility over what is divulged about Radovan Karadzic. He cannot, at any cost, become a human again. He has lost the privilege.

Emir Suljagic is a journalist, author of the book Postcars from the Grave and Srebrenica survivor. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.