Serbs Grow Weary of a Longtime Hero

This small town with its pocket-sized Orthodox Church and tatty cafes is Karadzic country: a place where indicted war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic has long been viewed as a savior, a saint.

But even here, where the Bosnian Serb leader lived at the height of his power during this country’s brutal war, there is a weariness when people talk about Karadzic--as if they love him but are almost too tired to defend him.

That matters, because Pale is a place where people generally see the 1992-95 war through an exclusively Serbian lens, one in which the Serbs are the biggest victims, and not the perpetrators of “ethnic cleansing” against Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Muslims. But increasingly, even here, other factors dominate people’s daily lives.

Hard economic times are casting a long shadow over people’s views in Pale, long a Bosnian Serb stronghold. Also sapping the energy for defending Karadzic are political changes elsewhere in the former Yugoslav federation that make the Serb-controlled half of Bosnia less willing to be the sole holdout with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague.

Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic, remain at large, but many observers say these changes in the mood and politics of the area increase the likelihood that the pair could be arrested in a matter of months.

On a good day in Pale, Mira Jugovic makes $4 at her stall in the open-air market where she sells cheap clocks, watches and plastic toys. But there are many days when she doesn’t earn a penny. The hardship has dimmed her thoughts of defending Karadzic and Mladic.

“Life is very bad now,” she said. “People have lost too much.”

Like those of many women in the market, her husband is out of work. She says she wouldn’t object now if Karadzic and Mladic were tried on war crimes charges; she just wants to be sure that the justice is evenhanded and touches all ethnic groups, including the Muslims and Croats who control the other half of Bosnia.

“If Karadzic and Mladic should be arrested for what they did, then Croat and Muslim leaders should be arrested for what they did,” Jugovic said, referring to the fact that leaders from all the ethnic groups in Bosnia are alleged to have committed war crimes.

Karadzic and Mladic were indicted by the Hague tribunal in July 1995 in what has been called the worst war crime in Europe since World War II: a massacre in Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia, like Pale, and a place that has become synonymous with the brutality of the Bosnian war.

Karadzic and Mladic are charged with genocide, accused of ordering the slaughter of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys from Srebrenica who were summarily executed and thrown into mass graves. It is just one of the serious war crimes of which they stand accused.

Six years after their indictments, the men are believed to still be hiding here in Republika Srpska, as the Serb-dominated part of Bosnia is known.

These days, nowhere in the Balkans looks quite as poor as Republika Srpska. And that has made economic politics almost equal to the still pervasive politics of ethnic hatred.

“Bosnia is like the U.S. during the 1992 campaign--it’s the economy, stupid,” said Thomas J. Miller, the American ambassador to Bosnia, referring to Bill Clinton’s chief focus when he ran for president during the U.S. recession of the early 1990s.

The economic status of Bosnia hovers near the bottom of the poor states of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But the Bosnian Serb area is indisputably poorer and has had higher inflation than the rest of the Balkans, according to a 2000 report by the International Monetary Fund. Unemployment is estimated at 40% to 50%, and gross domestic product in 1999 was slightly more than $4.4 billion, lower than anywhere in the Balkans except Albania.

Even so, it is widely believed that Karadzic still pulls some strings in Republika Srpska through the political party he led until 1996, when he went into hiding to escape arrest.

His Serbian Democratic Party remains the largest vote-getter here. Western officials in Bosnia believe that only when Karadzic is gone will his party loosen its grip on virtually all aspects of the economy.

“As long as Karadzic is out there, he represents the old nationalist, statist, separatist politics where the parties fed off these state companies and didn’t distribute the benefits to the people,” Miller said.

The bad economic times may contribute to people’s willingness to come forward with tips about Karadzic’s whereabouts. They also may prompt the cooperation of Republika Srpska’s government, because it is strapped for foreign investment and Western aid.

Jacques Klein, the top U.N. official in Bosnia and a former deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. Air Force, says that for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops to capture Karadzic and Mladic, they will need good intelligence. Someone in Karadzic’s or Mladic’s entourages may have to be persuaded--with cash or other enticements--to reveal their movements to make an arrest possible.

The United States is offering up to $5 million for information leading to the men’s arrest.

Karadzic and Mladic are believed to be hiding--almost certainly not together--in the region that rises south and east of Pale, and in that rugged terrain it won’t be easy to find or arrest them.

That’s why the prospect of a reward and the promise of more Western reconstruction aid might make a difference. Large parts of Republika Srpska appear in a state of virtual economic collapse. Many factories stand neglected, their windows broken and their structures rusting.

In the small towns along the region’s dirt roads, the only signs of commerce are a few meager vegetable stands, storefront groceries with half-full shelves, and the ubiquitous cafes, where apparently unemployed men nurse a bottle of beer or a cup of black coffee for hours.

“There is no enthusiasm for defending Karadzic,” said Igor Gajic, editor in chief of Reporter, a Serbian weekly newsmagazine in Banja Luka, the administrative center of Republika Srpska. “The economy has made people very depressed.

“For ordinary people, it’s not important to have a big salary, but to have any salary. They must choose between Karadzic and bread. What would you choose in that case--bread for your children or to defend Karadzic?”

Even in the political arena in Republika Srpska, the climate is changing. This month, the Bosnian Serb parliament gave preliminary approval to a law that opens the way for cooperation with the Hague tribunal.

Although the law is actually not necessary--cooperation with The Hague is required both through Bosnia’s membership in the United Nations and the 1995 Dayton, Ohio, peace accords that ended the war--it suggests that even the political leadership is looking to show a different face to the world.

The move by parliament came after Yugoslavia’s decision to transfer former President Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague this summer. In fact, some international observers say Milosevic’s transfer put more public pressure than anything else had on Bosnian Serbs to begin complying with the tribunal.

“Before, the Republika Srpska could say, ‘Belgrade is not cooperating, Croatia is only doing it halfheartedly--why should we do it?’ ” said Alex Stigelmayer, spokeswoman for the chief Western official in Bosnia who oversees the implementation of the peace accords. “Now it’s harder for them to say that.”

If Karadzic and Mladic are captured and sent to The Hague, it will be a significant step toward enforcing the rule of law in Bosnia, but for the families of victims of these crimes, it will bring little comfort.

Although Karadzic and Mladic may have been the architects of the atrocities, the actual killings at places such as Srebrenica were committed by an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 members of the local police, military reservists and other sympathizers, according to U.N. officials. Those people are still walking free and are often powerful figures in the very towns they “cleansed” of every Bosnian Muslim family.

“It is known that Karadzic and Mladic are war criminals--they issued the orders. But the executioners are still wandering around all over,” said Munira Subasic, who runs an organization of women who lost family members in the Srebrenica killings. Subasic lost 22 relatives during the war, including one of her two sons.

“When I go back to [visit] my town,” she said, “I recognize the man who took my son away, and I would be more happy if they arrest him than if they arrest Karadzic or Mladic.”

But that man is not on The Hague’s list. Prosecutors say it’s all they can do to handle a few hundred cases. For Subasic, that means that her beloved Srebrenica will not be her home again.

“If the world wants us to go back to our towns, they must cleanse them of war criminals,” she said.