Karadzic and the Banality of Evil

WASHINGTON DC. -  I had long despaired that Radovan Karadzic (pronounced Kara-jich) would ever face justice. This week, though, I was extremely happy to see Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader responsible for organizing some of the worst abuses of the Bosnian war, finally in custody.

Charged with genocide and crimes against humanity, he had been on the run for 13 years, evading police, NATO soldiers and bounty hunters. Bizarrely, he was found living under a false name in the Serbian capital, Belgrade, pretending to be a hippie alternative healer with an enormous beard and long hair.

It has been difficult for me to grasp the absurdity of his new persona. For me, Karadzic had represented a kind of vicious, villainous monster. I have been struck by what philosopher Hannah Arendt, in observing Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichman, called the ‘Banality of Evil.’ 

It reminds me of the reaction I saw in my Kurdish colleagues when Saddam Hussein was captured while I was working in Iraq. For years Saddam had been their arch enemy, a powerful threat to their lives and livelihood. To see him scruffy, cowed and an ordinary human being was both cathartic and almost unbelievable.

While living in Bosnia, I had been constantly surrounded and haunted by the reminders of the crimes of Karadzic and his henchmen. Bullet holes in the side of an apartment building, where civilians had been executed. The remains of a mosque, exploded to deny people a sense of history and belonging. The rows and rows of graves covering parks and empty spaces all over Bosnia's capital, Sarajevo.

As part of my PhD I have tried to understand the network that protected Karadzic from capture. A friend of mine had a personal obsession with trying to track him down. It seems so incongruous to us that he was living out in the open in Belgrade, even writing articles for a health magazine, attending conferences and setting up a web site.

The new pro-European government in Serbia, which faces nationalist resistance following Kosovo’s declaration of independence, was very brave to make this leap towards ending impunity. While Serbia's pro-democracy movement has had an uphill struggle, even after deposing the authoritarian leader Slobadan Milosevic, they have won a small but important victory for peace and justice in the former Yugoslavia.

That said, there are still major war crimes fugitives who have evaded justice for too long. Most critically, Karadzic’s general Ratko Mladic is still on the run and has had links to Serbia’s security apparatus who have probably protected him in the past.

 We can only hope that the Serbian government takes advantage of its momentum to bring in Mladic and eventually have a public accounting for the abuses of the past couple decades. The international community should do all it can to help track Mladic down, and support the movements for justice, human rights and democracy in the former Yugoslavia.