Thought for Food

"A leader turned ghost"

John F. Burns in the IHT profiles accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who “saw himself as a sophisticated intellectual, a psychiatrist and poet with an intuitive understanding of his people, the Bosnian Serbs.”

What is interesting is that Karadzic is not a textbook psychopath (an “intraspecies predator,” according to Dr. Robert Hare, creator of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, who “uses charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs”).  He may have believed that he was actually doing good; in any case, he wanted others to think so:

One night in the late spring of 1992, brandishing a Cuban cigar and downing successive glasses of French Cognac, Karadzic admonished a reporter from The New York Times for a dispatch from eastern Bosnia in which the reporter described terrified groups of Muslim women and children fleeing across the mountains from towns overrun by Serbian paramilitaries, who had gone house to house rounding up Muslim men, and killing them. This, the reporter had written, was the reality of “ethnic cleansing.”

“No, no, no,” Karadzic said, leaning forward intently at his desk. As though correcting an errant pupil, he said the reporter had failed to understand ethnic cleansing, presenting it as an abomination to those taking to the mountains, whereas it was, in reality, quite the reverse. Far from being forced from their homes, he said, the fleeing Muslims were being given an opportunity for which they should be grateful — the chance to “return” to the only place they could ever truly be at home, in towns and villages elsewhere where they could live with other Muslims, away from Serbs.