The Book of My Lives

LET THERE BE WHAT CANNOT BE

On October 14, 1991, Radovan Karadžić spoke at a session of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Parliament, which had been debating a referendum on independence from the Yugoslavia crippled by the secession of Slovenia and Croatia earlier that year. Karadžić was there to warn the parliament against following the Slovenes and Croats down “the highway of hell and suffering.”

I was in Jahorina at that time, placating myself with reading and writing. I turned on the nightly news to watch him thunder at the frazzled members of the parliament: “Do not think you will not lead Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Muslim people into possible annihilation, as the Muslim people cannot defend themselves in case of war here.” Throughout his tirade, in a manner familiar to me from the press conferences I had attended, he clutched the lectern edges, as though about to hurl it at his feeble audience. But then he let go of it to stab the air with his forefinger at the word annihilation. The Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, a Muslim, was visibly distressed.

You can easily find a grainy YouTube clip of Karadžić’s ranting. The Internet and television can convert just about anything into benign banality, but his performance is still bloodcurdling. Karadžić was then president of the hard-line nationalist Serbian Democratic Party, which had already acquired control of the parts of Bosnia with a Serbian majority, but he was not a member of the parliament, nor did he hold any elective office. He was there simply because he could. His very presence rendered the parliament weak and unimportant; backed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army, he spoke from the position of unimpeachable power over the life and death of the people the parliament represented. And he knew it and liked it.

Tranquilized by the weeks of therapeutic reading (Kafka, Mann), I could not initially comprehend what Karadžić meant by “annihilation.” I groped for a milder, less terrifying interpretation — perhaps he meant “historical irrelevance”? I could settle for historical irrelevance, whatever it meant. What he was saying was well outside the scope of my humanist imagination, prone to reveries and fears; his words extended far beyond the habits of normalcy I desperately clung to as war loomed over what Sarajevans called “common life.”

The parliament eventually decided a referendum was the way to go. It took place in February 1992; the Serbs boycotted it while the majority of Bosnians voted for independence. Throughout March, there were barricades on the streets of Sarajevo, much shooting in the mountains around it. In April, Karadžić’s snipers aimed at a peaceful antiwar demonstration in front of the parliament building, and two women were killed. On May 2, Sarajevo was cut off from the rest of the world and the longest siege in modern history began. By the end of the summer, nearly every front page in the universe had published a picture from a Serbian death camp. By that time, I understood that Karadžić had wagged the stick of genocide at the Bosnian Muslims in his address to the hapless Bosnian Parliament, while the unappetizing carrot was their bare survival. “Don’t make me do it,” he was essentially saying. “For I will be perfectly at home in the hell I create for you.”

Now I have little doubt that, regardless of the outcome of the parliamentary session, Karadžić would have gladly sped in his motorcade down the hell-and-suffering highway. What I didn’t see then is clear to me now: the possibility of war not happening was already completely foreclosed. The annihilation machine was happily revving, everything was in place for the genocide operations, the purpose of which was not only the destruction and displacement of Bosnian Muslims but also the unification of the ethnically pure lands into a Greater Serbia. Why had he staged that performance before the parliament, since peace was never an option? Why did he bother?

I have spent time trying to comprehend how everything I had known and loved came violently apart; I have been busy obsessively parsing the details of the catastrophe to understand how it could have taken place. After Karadžić’s arrest, I watched the YouTube clip, trying to figure out why he had bothered. Now I know: the point of that performance was the performance itself. It was not meant for the beleaguered Bosnian Parliament but for the patriotic Serbs watching the broadcast, for those ready to embark upon an epic project that would take sacrifice, murder, and ethnic cleansing to be completed. Karadžić was showing his people that he was as tough and determined a leader as need be, yet neither unwise nor unreasonable. He was indicating that war would not be a rash decision on his part, while capable of recognizing that genocide might be inescapable. If there was a difficult job to be done, he was going to do it unflinchingly and ruthlessly. He was the leader who was going to lead his people through the hell of murder to the land where honor and salvation awaited them.

The model for Karadžić’s role was provided by Petar Petrović Njegoš’s epic poem The Mountain Wreath (Gorski vijenac). Just like everyone else, I was forced to study it in school as it was part of the socialist cannon, easy to interpret within the framework of “freedom,” widely available in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Set at the end of the seventeenth century and published in 1847, it is deeply embedded in the tradition of Serbian epic poetry; a foundational text of Serbian cultural nationalism, it always bored me to tears. Its central character is Vladika Danilo, the bishop and sovereign of Montenegro, the only Serbian territory unconquered at the time by the powerful and all-encroaching Ottoman Empire. Vladika Danilo thinks he has a major problem: some Montenegrin Serbs have converted to Islam. For him, they are the fifth column of the Turks, a people who could never be trusted, a permanent threat to the freedom and sovereignty of the Serbian people.

Wise leader that he is, Vladika Danilo summons a council to help him find the solution. He listens to the advice of various bloodthirsty warriors: “Without suffering no song is sung,” one of them says, decasyllabically. “Without suffering no saber is forged.” He receives a delegation of Muslims pleading for peace and coexistence and all that; they are offered a chance to keep their heads on their shoulders by converting back to “the faith of their forefathers.” He speaks of freedom and the difficult decisions required to protect it: “The wolf is entitled to a sheep / Much like a tyrant to a feeble man. / But to stomp the neck of tyranny / To lead it to the righteous knowledge / That is man’s most sacred duty.”

In lines familiar to nearly every Serbian child and adult, Vladika Danilo eventually recognizes that the total, ruthless extermination of the Muslims is the only way: “Let there be endless struggle,” he says. “Let there be what cannot be.” He will lead his people through the hell of murder and onward to honor and salvation: “On the grave flowers will grow / For a distant future generation.”

Karadžić, who grew up in the part of Bosnia where mail is delivered by wolves (as we used to say in Sarajevo), was intimately familiar with Serbian epic poetry. A skillful player of the gusle, a single-string fiddle (for which no real skill is required) used to accompany the oral performance of epic poems, he understood his role in the blazing light cast by Vladika Danilo. He recognized himself in the martyrdom of leadership; he believed that he was the one to finish the job that Vladika Danilo started. He was to be the hero in an epic poem that would be sung by a distant future generation.

Indeed, while hiding in plain sight in Belgrade, undercover as a New Age mountebank, Karadžić frequented a bar called Mad House—Luda kuća. Mad House offered weekly gusle-accompanied performances of Serbian epic poetry; wartime pictures of him and General Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serbs’ military leader (now on trial in The Hague), proudly hung on the walls. A local newspaper claimed that, on at least one occasion, Karadžić performed an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, undertaking feats of extermination. Consider the horrible postmodernism of the situation: an undercover war criminal narrating his own crimes in decasyllabic verse, erasing his personality so that he could assert it more forcefully and heroically.

The tragic, heartbreaking irony of it all is that Karadžić played out his historical, pseudoheroic role in less than ten years. In the flash of his infernal pan hundreds of thousands died, millions (including my family) were displaced, untold numbers of people paid in pain for his induction into the pantheon of Serbian epic poetry. After his arrest in the grotesque guise of a spiritual quack, one can imagine him singing of himself as a wise sage for his prison mates in The Hague.

If you’re a writer, it is hard not to see a kind of Shakespeare-for-Idiots lesson in the story of Radovan Karadžić: his true and only home was the hell he created for others. Before he became the leader of the Bosnian Serbs and after he was forced out by the Serbian president Slobodan Milošević (who was Karadžić’s supporter until he exhausted his usefulness), Karadžić was a prosaic nobody. A mediocre psychiatrist, a minor poet, and a petty embezzler before the war, at the time of his arrest he was a full-fledged charlatan with a clump of hair tied on his forehead to attract cosmic energy. It was only during the war, performing on a blood-soaked stage, that he could fully develop his inhuman potential. He was what he was because what could not happen did in the end happen.