http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/10/radovan-karadzic-bosnian-war
Don't oversimplify the Bosnian war
Radovan Karadzic should pay the price for any crimes he committed. But
let's not reduce the conflict to goodies v baddies
*
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 10 May 2010 12.23 BST
o
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/10/radovan-karadzic-bosnian-war#history-link-box>
Ivo Petkovski
Watching Radovan Karadzic's appearances at his ongoing war crimes trial
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/13/radovan-karodzic-trial-prosecution-witness>
at The Hague, I'm reminded of an absent-minded professor at an
employment tribunal. At times he cuts a shambling, comedic figure, a bit
like Kingsley Amis's "Lucky" Jim Dixon
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucky_Jim> – a picture starkly at odds
with the litany of atrocities he stands accused of, most notorious among
them the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 and the siege of Sarajevo
between April 1992 and February 1996.
Following the example of his old capo Slobodan Milosevic, Karadzic has
elected to defend himself at the trial. His arguments
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/01/radovankaradzic-bosnia-and-herzegovina>
are pure fantasy, of the sort broadcast on Serbian state TV throughout
the early 1990s – the central themes being Serb victimisation and a
Nato-backed Islamist conspiracy. The grist of the trial, away from
Karadzic's posturing, is establishing firm culpability for individual
events. Karadzic may have had overall command of the Bosnian Serb armed
forces, but he was always primarily a politician, which makes it very
difficult to sift what he personally ordered from what was carried out
under the authority of those further down the ladder.
The way the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s will be remembered by future
historians is still being established, however in the western media an
overall impression is already starting to coagulate from the messy
tangle that made up the reality of the conflict. This simplified
narrative tends to cast Serbia as aggressors, Bosnian Muslims as
victims, Nato as rescuing heroes and Croatia as bemused onlookers.
Perhaps it's always the fate of the loser in a conflict to play the bad
guy in the resulting film – that certainly seems to be the case with the
Bosnian Serbs.
The US state department issued an old-fashioned "wanted" poster
<http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Milosevic-karadzic-mladic-wanted-poster.jpg>,
casting the Serbian leadership in the popular imagination as the outlaws
in a John Wayne film. The 2007 Richard Gere film The Hunting Party
<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0455782/> went one further, portraying the
Karadzic character as an elusive evil genius, a Keyser Soze
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyser_S%C3%B6ze> figure, complete with
slow-motion-walk shots and a menacing audio signature.
As for the media treatment, at one end are News Corporation outlets that
frequently refer to Karadzic as "Razorman" Karadzic
<http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1494091.ece> or "The
Beast of Bosnia". On the other, more subtle, end of the scale we find
more efforts such as Adam LeBor's piece for Cif
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/14/uk-serbia-balkan-history>,
in which he points to the UK government's "Serbophilic" decision to
arrest former Bosnian president Ejup Ganic, a man accused of war crimes.
In LeBor's account, the implication is that being Bosnian automatically
equates to being innocent – this is entirely in keeping with the idea
that the Bosnians were purely victims of the "evil" Serbs. However, in
reality, the Bosnian political leadership made some very bullish moves
which escalated the initial situation dramatically.
In March 1992, a referendum to decide independence from the
Serbia-dominated rump of Yugoslavia was rushed by the Bosnian Muslim
leaders before the debate about secession could unfold, and the cases
for and against could be properly heard. This resulted in the Bosnian
Serbs' disastrous knee-jerk decision to boycott the referendum, leaving
them disenfranchised when the electorate resoundingly returned a vote in
favour of secession.
Later that same month the Lisbon agreement
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Agreement> was signed, setting up a
framework for a multi-ethnic coalition government. The signatories were
Radovan Karadzic for the Serbs (representing 31% of the population
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_population_census_in_Bosnia_and_Herzegovina>),
Mate Boban for the Croats (14%) and Alija Izetbegovic for the Bosniaks
(43%).
However two weeks later, Izetbegovic decided to withdraw his signature
and the coalition government was abandoned, resulting in 45% of the
population being disenfranchised from government, without any clear
explanation as to the reasons why. This event was crucial in escalating
an already tense situation into all-out war.
Another important factor which is often omitted from the growing popular
consensus on what happened in Bosnia is the uncertain,
anything-is-possible atmosphere when Yugoslavia dissolved. It was by no
means clear-cut at the time that Bosnia would (or should) be entirely
governed and dominated by Bosnian Muslims – it had always had an
enormous ethnic Serb/Orthodox Christian presence and influence. When the
region was a federal entity within Yugoslavia, this diversity did not
lead to much friction, nor was there much of an imperative to define
which ethnicity was dominant.
It's absolutely right that Karadzic pays the price for any crimes he is
found guilty of. However in the rush to assign the simplified roles of
aggressor and victim, crucial details are being sidelined – this was not
a war of aggression but a civil war, with atrocities committed on all
sides. Karadzic and Milosevic did not create the situation but harnessed
it, and rode it like a wave. The genesis of the conflict was in the
dissolution of Yugoslavia and the rise of aggressive nationalism in the
vacuum created by the collapse of Tito's Brotherhood and Unity
<http://www.rationalium.com/2010/03/brotherhood-and-unity-reflection-on.html>
ideology.
If these nuances are left out of the popular accounts of the Bosnian
conflict, then the true lessons of it will be lost on the general
public. This is already in evidence with the disproportionate focus on a
few Serb leaders, as if their capture and trial has somehow solved the
problem – it has not. The cautionary tale Bosnia has to teach us is not
about "evil" individuals but about the dangers of aggressive nationalism
and factionalism, a lesson more relevant than ever in the constantly
shrinking world we inhabit.
• Ivo Petkovski posts on Cif under the username OZKT29B
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/users/OZKT29B>
