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BOOKS
The Quest for Radovan Karadzic
Review by Stefan Wagstyl
Published: July 13 2009 06:36 | Last updated: July 13 2009 06:36
The Quest for Radovan Karadzic
By Nick Hawton
Hutchinson £14.99, 240 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59
When Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, was arrested last
year, the biggest surprise was his disguise. Rumoured to have been hiding in
the mountains of his native Montenegro or holed up in a safe house, he had
for years been living openly in Belgrade and working as a bearded faith
healer called Dragan Dabic.
He was sent by the Serbian authorities to the United Nations’ war crimes
tribunal in The Hague, where he faces charges of crimes against humanity for
his role during the 1992-1995 Yugoslav conflict in which more than 100,000
died. After 12 years on the run, the man accused of being one of the main
authors of Europe’s bloodiest war since 1945 is finally in the dock.
Arriving in Bosnia as a BBC correspondent well after the fighting ended,
Nick Hawton became obsessed, as he says himself, with the hunt for Karadzic.
His book is a fluid mix of history, biography and journalistic sleuthing.
Hawton conveys the genuine enthusiasm of a newcomer to the region as he
describes his forays from his base in the battle-scarred Bosnian capital of
Sarajevo. Jeep rides up mountain tracks, clandestine assignations with
spies, and pilgrimages to remote monasteries all enliven Hawton’s personal
pursuit of Karadzic.
Along the way, he develops good relations with Karadzic’s wife Ljiljana and
daughter Sonja. They provide him with a lot of biographical material,
including details of his poor upbringing, career as a psychiatrist, literary
interests and of his detention in prison for fraud.
Hawton also spends time talking to war victims: a man who still has
nightmares after his beatings in the prison camp, a woman who was raped by
her former headmaster after he killed her husband; and the widows of
Srebrenica. These harrowing interviews and the Karadzic biographical
sections are skilfully woven into the pursuit narrative, resulting in a
fluent read.
Yet Hawton devotes too much space to his own adventures, and not enough to
bringing out Karadzic’s larger-than-life personality. His Karadzic remains a
curiously indistinct figure, even though there are reams of material
available. Until his disappearance in 1996, the English-speaking Karadzic
was never shy in giving interviews to justify himself and defend the cause
of the Bosnian Serbs. When he went into hiding, he left behind close
associates with intimate knowledge of his infamous career. Karadzic’s many
rivals and enemies are also absent. Without the range of opinions and
anecdotes that such interviews might have generated, the biographical
elements of the book are somewhat sterile.
Karadzic was a man with many advantages – intelligence, charisma, and a deep
capacity to understand and manipulate others. He was driven by an ambition
to leave his mark on the world. But he lacked moral scruple. Faced with the
disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Karadzic could almost
certainly not have stopped the collapse into war. But he did not even try.
Stefan Wagstyl is the FT’s East European editor
Serbian News Network - SNN
[email protected]
http://www.antic.org/
