On the hunt for Dr. Karadzic
Posted: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 8:59 AM
Filed Under:
London, England
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
LONDON – Just typing his name brings back an old, deeply buried dread. Thirteen years since the end of the war in Bosnia,
Radovan Karadzic – along with Gen. Ratko Mladic – remains, for many of us who covered them, one of that war's "faces of evil," even if the austere, white-bearded version of Karadzic seen today looks nothing like the slick poet-psychiatrist of those days, with his rock-star mane of gray hair and European suits.
Karadzic was the perfect front man for the horrors that were allegedly carried out against thousands by his paramilitary henchmen. He was a kind of mafia warlord who was cleverly articulate – even if crazed – when it came to explaining the history of Serbs victimized over the centuries at the hands of the West.
According to investigators, he used "ethnic cleansing" to justify beatings, rapes, mass murder, starvation and unspeakable torture of non-Serbs.
And, for years, Karadzic managed to evade U.N. forces, Serb police and a hoard of international media – including NBC News – only to be arrested, in the end, on a city bus near Belgrade.
‘The Hunt for Dr. K’
In the summer of 1997, two years after Karadzic was indicted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, NBC News launched an ambitious, and costly, series of stories on "The Hunt for Dr. K." We sprayed Bosnia with producers, reporters and crews, hoping to track down the former Bosnian Serb leader, who had gone into hiding.
Unbelievably, we soon learned that he was still spending much of his time at his own home in Pale, the capital of the self-proclaimed "Serbian Republic," a breakaway enclave. How could that be? Italian and French U.N. peacekeepers routinely patrolled the same neighborhood.
We asked the Italians manning a checkpoint about 100 yards from Karadzic's home. "It's not our problem," an Italian soldier told me in broken French. "If we see him, we'll stop him. But we never see him."
My producer, Justin Balding, and I were determined to see him. So we rigged a small hidden camera in an over-the-shoulder tote-bag and looking like a pair of naive tourists approached his bodyguards outside his house. Our ruse was an introductory letter for his daughter, Sonja, his unofficial press secretary.
One of the guards excused himself for a few minutes and during that time we saw over a dozen guards with guns and dogs slip out of the garden to check us out. I tried not to think about what kind of carnage the guards had committed or what might happen to us if they discovered the slit for the camera lens in the tote-bag Justin was carrying.
By the time the first guard returned, it was sheer joy to learn that neither Dr. Karadzic nor his daughter were at home. We thanked him and quickly left.
Later, back in our vehicle, we screened our covert tape, as well as tape from our cameraman, Kyle Eppler, who was rolling, from a distance, inside our parked vehicle. It ended up that Kyle did get the most useful images from afar of the house and guards – but not the man himself. And we barely got that. "Police," who were likely Dr. K’s paramilitary men, detained Kyle and checked his tape, eventually letting him – and the tape – go.
Why didn't the U.N. forces raid the house? No official would say on the record, but it was clear that no Western country was willing to risk the loss of perhaps dozens of men to capture one alleged war criminal.
We did speak to some of his old friends, to his family, to some of his alleged victims, and to a Bosnian journalist on a mission to document each and every one of his alleged atrocities. We even arranged with a man who called himself Karadzic's chief lawyer to have an exclusive interview with Dr. K as he ''turned himself in'' to Bosnian authorities. But Dr. K suddenly changed his mind, we were told. And we never got any closer to our goal.
Another page turned
Over time pressure mounted and Karadzic had to go permanently underground. But there were still regular reports of visits to his wife and daughter back in Pale, as well as his mother in his native Montenegro. There were raids, some U.S.-led, but Dr. K always managed to make his escape.
There were also rumors that pro-Serb elements within the French peacekeeping force were tipping off Karadzic when his enemies got too close. And, through it all, many Bosnian Serb government officials – and citizens – saw him as a hero to the Serb cause; even years after the Dayton Accords ended the war in Bosnia.
If Serbia’s old nationalist government had protected him, then logic suggests that the new, moderate, pro-Western government that was just formed on July 7 and is keen to shed Serbia’s pariah image, might have sacrificed him to gain legitimacy. But why his capture and arrest occurred now is still unclear.
Still, it must be seen as a victory for those seeking some truth and justice for the former- Yugoslavia, a nation once so intimidating that even the Soviet Union didn’t interfere too much. Those of us who covered the trauma of its decade-long implosion – from Croatia's 1991 war to the 1999 conflict in Kosovo - the capture of Radovan Karadzic, like the arrest of the late Slobodan Milosevic, turns yet another page in that brutal history. And each reporter who was there likely has a mental gallery of images that sum up Radovan Karadzic.
Here are just three of mine:
The young, bright face of my Yugoslav cameraman, Tuna Tunukovic, at our last meal together in Zagreb – before he was killed by Bosnian Serb gunfire on the mountainous approach to Sarajevo;
The wan, almost ghostly faces of Muslim women and children, having just walked dozens of miles in the summer heat, from Srebrenica to Tuzla, and who cried inconsolably, fearing the worst for their missing male loved ones;
The glazed stare of a stooped Sarajevan in a torn suit carrying a pile of withered branches on his back, hoping to cash them in for a few pennies. The branches stripped of their bark because he and his family had eaten it.
Jim Maceda is an NBC News Correspondent in London who covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia extensively.
