Karadzic Losing Cachet Among Serbs

In mountains scattered with sawmills and war bones, Zoran Mikevic paints murals of martyrs and saints in the cool half-light of a church. He is reticent about the bloodshed that ruined this land a decade ago. But when pressed, he hops off his scaffolding and deifies Bosnia’s most notorious war crimes fugitive.

“Radovan Karadzic led his people through a difficult time,” said Mikevic, his voice softly echoing through the Serbian Orthodox church here. “All the saints I’m painting on these walls are martyrs. Karadzic is a martyr too. He’s a Serb. He’s one of my own, and there’s something in me that loves the underdog.”

Accused by international authorities of orchestrating the 1995 massacre of about 7,500 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, Karadzic has been eluding thousands of NATO troops and jeopardizing the credibility of the international community. He is believed to be traveling with bodyguards, slipping through backwater villages and pine forests, and bankrolled by a secret network of supporters.

Karadzic’s wartime leadership remains revered in this rugged terrain, but passion for the bushy-haired poet turned charismatic nationalist has become muted over the years as many Bosnian Serbs blame him for their economic and political turmoil. Time and poverty have diminished Serbian dreams of ethnic purity. And Karadzic -- much like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic -- is viewed by many as an unwanted relic from a painful era.

“I have no time for Radovan Karadzic. I have my own problems,” said Sofija Mirkovic, more scant in her praise than Mikevic as she sat in the shadow of the church. “My husband died of lung cancer. I live on a [$45]-a-month pension. I’m 65 years old and have to cut my own wood for winter.”

A man who gave his name only as Bozidar offered blunt advice: “If I were Karadzic, I’d turn myself in to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague just to stop the suffering of my people. Serbs would respect him even more if he did that. People don’t condemn Karadzic, but they don’t like him so much anymore.”

Such sentiments would have rarely been whispered -- if held at all -- just a few years ago. The change in mood, Western officials say, increases the possibility that Karadzic’s protective cloak may splinter. The international administrator of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Paddy Ashdown, intensified pressure on the Serbian leadership last week by removing 59 government and police officials he accused of helping Karadzic hide in a “climate of secrecy and impunity.”

It was a provocative move that threatened to radicalize Serbian nationalists and further complicate fully fusing the Serbian enclave, known as the Republika Srpska, with the Muslim-Croatian sector of the loose Bosnian federation.

Zoran Zuza, one of the officials suspended by Ashdown, denied any culpability in protecting Karadzic. Zuza, a journalist during the aftermath of the 1992-95 Bosnian war, said he had reported on the Srebrenica atrocity and supported the arrest of war criminals.

“I was shocked to be included on Ashdown’s list,” he said. “You receive a fax saying you’re suspended, and that wipes you out as a human being. These firings were unjust and counterproductive.

“Karadzic and the other war crimes suspects can sleep well for the coming time,” he added. “No one will turn them in now. They don’t want to arrest Radovan anyway. The West wants to use him as an excuse to eliminate Srpska.”

In a recent interview, Ashdown acknowledged the risks of the suspensions but said that “if there’s a crisis, it’s a crisis this country will have to go through.”

He added that there was a “sullen understanding” among Serbs that the “curse of Karadzic in the hills” was preventing the enclave from prospering through aid and foreign investment. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, for example, last month denied Bosnia an invitation to join its Partnership for Peace program largely because suspected war criminals remained free.

The specter of Karadzic looming beyond the grasp of NATO soldiers has damaged the international community’s standing in the region. In the late 1990s, when Karadzic’s support among Bosnian Serbs was at its highest, he often traveled near NATO patrols but was not arrested for fear of reigniting hostilities. War crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte made a number of statements in recent years suggesting that his seizure was weeks, if not days, away. NATO raids were hatched -- the most recent last week around old communist bunkers in the woods near Han Pijesak -- but Karadzic remained a phantom.

The freedom of Karadzic, a former sports psychologist, has inspired conspiracy theories in the Balkans. NATO’s intervention in Bosnia in 1995 was launched primarily to protect Muslims from well-armed Serbian forces and paramilitary “ethnic cleansing” units. But U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have convinced many Bosnian Muslims that the West is a threat to Islam and is creating a double standard for human rights.

“The genocide Karadzic committed is incomprehensible,” said Zumra Sahomerovic, a member of an association for Srebrenica mothers and victims. “But the international authorities are not interested in arresting him. If Karadzic had not killed Muslims but Americans or other Christians, he’d have been dealt with more harshly.”

This is a rugged country, marked by cliffs, crevices and secrets. War crimes investigators dust soil from mass graves, and dirt roads shimmy through mountains and across fields of wildflowers. River trout jump, and sometimes a NATO helicopter skitters across the horizon.

Sawmills whine, but that is the only sound of work as restless men sip espresso and whiskey in cafes and women get dressed up to endure another day of sameness. About 60% of the people in this region are poor. Karadzic’s military commander and fellow war crimes fugitive, Ratko Mladic, used to play soccer on the field below the Han Pijesak church. These days, the field is tangled in high grass, the goal nets have vanished, and the heroic myths of the past have turned to bitterness.

“This is our reality,” Stanko Reljic, owner of a grocery, said as he thumbed through a ledger listing scores of families who buy on credit. “Some of these people will never pay me.”

He added: “Nobody knows where Karadzic is. We feel about him like you Americans feel about the presidents who got you into Vietnam. They were not put on trial.”

Up the hill, past the towering bronze memorial to Serbian partisans of World War II, Zoran Mikevic mixes and dabs his acrylics and paints saints on the church wall.

He was studying icons the other day when NATO troops whisked through town on another search for Karadzic. Like many in the Balkans, Mikevic has a selective view of history, innocence and guilt. He acknowledges that atrocities were carried out, but insists that one side is just as much to blame as the other and that no wartime leader should be held accountable for more crimes than another.

“Why should he be arrested?” Mikevic said. “He’s guilty of nothing.”