Despite everything, this heap of trivial rubbish circulating in the media served Karadžić himself well, it transformed him from a notorious murderer into a clown and placated a potentially hostile crowd. Intrigued by the farce of his disguise, many people forgot that this same Karadžić-Bogdanovich-Dabić is sitting on a pile of anonymous human corpses, and that there is a large, silent, nameless heap of witnesses, including the women of Srebrenica, for whom this whole media circus that surrounds Karadžić is like salt on an open wound.
The truth will out. .
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Serbian Epics—the best and fullest portrait of Karadžić to date — was made as long ago as 1992. Everything in the film is so clear and explicit that this documentary on its own could serve as an indictment against Radovan Karadžić.
In the intervening years, Karadžić’s criminal file has become notoriously public, and the new details which have flooded the media since his arrest have merely confirmed what we all knew: that Karadžić is a murderer, sitting calmly on a pile of the corpses of people whom he himself killed, and the only thought buzzing in his head is — how to survive. An enormous human mechanism has been keeping Karadžić alive, the same mechanism that preserved Milošević for years: servants, like-thinkers, admirers, assistants, petty and large-scale criminals, the police, the state apparatus, politicians, murderers, fighters, patients, women, friends, priests, the church, believers, dealers, people — both sick and quite ordinary.
At this moment, many Serbs are lighting candles and praying for their man in prison in The Hague. Ordinary citizens, aging rockers (Bora Đorđević), members of the ultra-right group “Honor” (Obraz), Serbian radicals, supporters of ešelj, Nikolić, Karadžić, with children at their head — a boy and a girl — they are all marching at this moment through Belgrade, shouting slogans of support for Karadžić, threatening the Serbian government, The Hague Tribunal, the world. Many Serbs — who otherwise have no idea what to do in the face of a sudden “blow” in their household, when, for example, there’s a faulty tap in the bathroom, or if their wife ends up in hospital — suddenly display supreme organizational skills and political agility:
Karadžić has been arrested — a heavy “blow” has been struck against their “Serbdom.” Every blow against Serbdom has the effect of an adrenaline injection.
Following the false news of Karadžić’s arrest in 2001, “defensive” meetings were instantly organized in Karadžić’s native village and some other places in Montenegro.
Supporters from Montenegro and Serbia gathered, Chetnik songs rang out, priests waved censers around. Karadžić was proclaimed a “haiduk,” “poet,” “fighter,” “saint” and “symbol of Serbdom.” People fell into poetic raptures (“We will not hand Karadžić over!” “Wake up Serbian fire! Radovan is a spark in the rock. Whoever betrays the spark be damned!” “And may all belonging to the traitor be damned a thousand times!”) Those present were given masks of Karadžić’s face. The Montenegrin backwoods sent a message to the world: “We are all Radovan Karadžić”; in other words the people behind the masks brazenly admitted their complicity in genocide, both real and mental. The main slogan of the Chetnik organization “Honor” is: “Every Serb is Radovan!”—and it could be seen in recent days again in the streets of Belgrade. Is Karadžić, Radovan, really an exclusively Serbian monster? Let us not forget the fact that Karadžić easily crossed the borders between such “irreconcilably different” peoples as the Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins; he spent his summer holidays in Croatia (making only a single linguistic error, the experts maintain). In the end, if for no other reason than because of Karadžić’s longevity and his ability to rise up again like a phoenix, one might ask: How many citizens of the former Yugoslavia were Radovan Karadžić!?
Children, grandchildren, mutants
The lack of a symbolic lynching of Karadžić—now that it is possible — demonstrates that the problem is deeper and harder, and that it is not after all confined to “Karadžićes”: swindlers; prophets and profiteers; doctors of the human soul; grudge-bearers who drag their personal affronts out of dusty chests and transform them into ideologies; necrophiliacs; bone-diggers; bullies; exterminators; murderers; drummers-up of collective hysteria; local “butchers” and “vampires” for whom many citizens of the former Yugoslavia have been obediently stretching out their necks for two decades now. The problem is that all these servants of fascism — like Karadžić—do not excel in the quantity of evil they produce, but in an invisible form, in the seed they leave behind them, in their children, and their grandchildren.
And those children, grandchildren, mutants, have sprung up, healthy and handsome, in the course of these last twenty years. These are the children with Chetnik caps on their heads, who demonstrate throughout Serbia against Karadžić’s arrest. Or Marija efarović whose three-fingered sign of the cross spread throughout Europe, although she was unable to explain its purpose (“In the name of mother, father, and you know. .” she tried irritably to explain to a Dutch woman journalist), and who, when she won the Eurovision Song Contest, did so as she put it herself, “for Serbia”. These are the enthusiastic supporters of the “granddads,” of the Serbian radical Tomislav Nikolić (the author of the statement, “God created the world in six days, and it took me two to send it reeling.”); these are the bullies who beat up Gypsies and homosexuals in the streets of Belgrade; the drunken, ecstatic crowd at concerts by Ceca Ražnjatović-Arkan. These young mutants are from Bosnia; they go on the rampage during football championships and wrap themselves in Croatian, Serbian, and Turkish flags as if in a protective placenta. They are secondary-school children from Makarska who recently had themselves photographed for their school almanac with a swastika in the background, “for fun” (“It’s not a swastika but an Indian symbol of love and peace”, a pupil explained meekly) and strutted about wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan Über alles (“We meant that we had matriculated, it was over, we were above all others”, explained another even more meekly). These are the children who appear at concerts by Marko Perković Thompson in Ustasha uniforms and raise their right hands to the level of their noses, while their granddads — Croatian academicians, writers, journalists, doctors, generals, philosophers, and publicists — write open letters of support for Thompson, the illiterate, third-rate turbo-folk singer, defending his right to the expression of uncensored Ustasha ideas in our free Croatian homeland. They are the young members of obscure pro-fascist parties in Serbia; children with tattoos, whose bodies display Pavelić’s face; customers in shops freely selling fascist souvenirs; the “brave” attackers of tourists, foreigners, homosexuals, and Gypsies. These are children who wear crosses round their necks, who regularly attend Catholic and Orthodox churches and Muslim mosques, who hate each other, or some third party, and all join in hating Gypsies, Jews, Blacks, and homosexuals. These are young contributors to chat-sites who, I presume, know of their brothers: the young Hungarian fascists (Magyar garda), who rose up to defend “Magyar values and culture”; the young Bulgarian fascists of Bogdan Rassata, who “defend Bulgarian values and culture” and for ideological reasons beat up Turks and Gypsies; the brutal Russian children, who beat to death anyone whose skin is darker than Putin’s; the eco-fascists of the German radical right. . They are members of “Honor” and similar ultra-rightwing groups who lure children with the cheap glue of love of God and the homeland, Serbian Serbia, gallant armed forces, the crucified fatherland, and the suffering nation (We need new heroes, Obilićes, and new Maids of Kosovo!). These children are young Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bosnians who use both open and closed web forums to sow and graft their hatred and proclaim that the war is not yet over. . And they are not alone (there are their grandparents, their parents, their families, Serbdom, Croatdom), nor are they originaclass="underline" fascism thrives among servants and in serving. The local press, local authorities, and local politicians do not pay attention to the “children,” “cases,” “hooligans,” “troublemakers,” “unpleasant, but understandable incidents” in what is otherwise the successful daily life of transition.