Radovan Karadzic: The sealing war criminals

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Three years ago the judges at the Hague war crimes Tribunal convicts Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, to 40 years in prison. Now the decision, whether this judgment falls. A Portrait.

He is a man of many facets: a psychiatrist, a Poet, and in the 1990s, a powerful politician. For many in Bosnia-Herzegovina, he is simply a war criminal – even a case for the psychiatry. Radovan Karadžić is made for the worst war crimes committed during the nearly four-year war in Bosnia – Herzegovina (1992-96). Karadžić, now 73 years old, according to the indictment, as the former political leader of Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the responsibility for the genocide of about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the ostbosnischen town of Srebrenica. In addition, he is accused of crimes against humanity. Specifically, the displacement, murder and torture. It is also a violation of the law of war in the case of the siege of Sarajevo.

In a Montenegrin village in 1945-born Radovan Karadžić lived since he was 15. The age of the then multi-cultural Yugoslav city of Sarajevo in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, came from a family, the Chetniks had in their ranks. Chetniks are nationalist Serbian extremists who advocate a greater Serbia, and the power squared in the Second world war, some with German military forces collaborated, and the Communist partisans of Tito were defeated.

“Fighting spirit of the Serbs“

After he had moved with his family from the Montenegrin mountains in the vibrant city of Sarajevo and the school had ended, he studied medicine. He even spent a year for the purpose of continuing education at Columbia University in New York and eventually founded his own private psychotherapy practice in Pale, a small town near Sarajevo, mostly of Serbs inhabited it.

Karadzic (right) and the commander-in-chief of the Bosnian Serb army Ratko Mladic in August 1993

A name he had previously been as a Poet. “How is this personality that had so many facets, then a politician, was a highly nationalist direction, is already a phenomenon”, the Balkans expert Franz-Lothar Altmann. His nationalist inclinations you have can already be seen in his poems, because he spoke from the “fighting spirit of the Serbs”. “And then he met Dobrica Ćosić, who was a nationalist novelist, and being influenced by it. This has pushed him, obviously even more in this nationalist twist.“

But not only the Serbian Poet and writer Dobrica Ćosić, exerted influence on Karadzic’s view of the world. He also got to know Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian President, which is also in front of the Hague Tribunal, the process was made. However, Milošević in 2006, passed away before a judgment could be made. In the 1980s, Karadžić Momčilo Krajišnik met, a later policy friend, who had been sentenced in The Hague to 20 years in prison for war crimes. Both came with the justice in conflict, because they should have embezzled money. Karadžić was, however, acquitted because his party, the Serbian democratic party (SDS) according to democracy the turn of 1990 in Yugoslavia was one of those who came in the former Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And Karadzic was its President.

The Muslim as the “enemy”

He, however, was not the only one who could live out his nationalist embossing. It was a time in the former Yugoslavia, which was marked by omnipräsentem nationalism. Slovenes, Croats and other peoples were oppressed by Belgrade and wanted to get out of the common Yugoslavia. So also in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Well Karadzic disguised as “Dr. Dragan Dabic”

The Serbian politicians do not want to allow however. Their Motto: “Where a Serb lives in Serbia.” Karadžić developed at the time, as politicians towards Muslims, increasingly, an “enemy image”. “Obviously, it was a Transfer from the former enemy to the Ottomans,” explains Franz-Lothar Altmann. “The Muslims, the Muslim Bosniaks, are for him a kind of descendants of the Ottomans, against the Yes Serbia, the Serbian people, for a long time resisted, and fought.”

The Bosniaks and Croats voted on 1. March 1992 in a Referendum for an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serbs boycotted the vote. A month later the war broke out. In the Serb majority populated areas had already been declared before the Serb Republic, later renamed Republika Srpska and its first President Radovan Karadžić. In the years that followed, about 100,000 people were murdered, it came to the mass and systematic rapes, hundreds of thousands were displaced on all sides. And it came to the genocide in Srebrenica, where around eight thousand Muslim boys and men were murdered.

Mug shot from 2002 in Sarajevo

For the execution of the massacre was made in The Hague, the commander-in-chief of the Serbian armed forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina, General Ratko Mladić, the process. For him, the UN had released in July 1995, of Srebrenica, which was at the time a UN-protected zone and a place of refuge for thousands of Bosniak refugees and IDPs, without a fight.

In Serbia, hidden,

Both Mladić and Karadžić, after the war, unnoticed for years in Serbia to keep hidden. Karadžić was not only a different identity – he appeared as Dr. Dragan Dabić , he had changed from the Beard and long hair Appearance significantly. He had “quite obviously, a large number of helpers and supporters who had helped him and again and again, if an action has been launched to arrest him, in time to have warned,” says Altmann. However, after considerable pressure on Serbia from the EU, Radovan Karadžić was arrested after twelve years in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. Almost three years later, Ratko was arrested Mladić.

24. March 2016 the Hague war crimes Tribunal verdict against Karadžić: 40 years in prison. Among other things, for crimes against humanity, genocide and the siege of Sarajevo.