After 13 years on the run and over a year in prison, Radovan Karadzic is finally scheduled to face trial in The Hague on Monday. But the Serbs and many Bosnian Muslims have lost interest in the former Bosnian-Serb leader, they're tired of looking back. Only Bosnian Muslim victims of Serb brutality will carefully watch this trial; for them the war is very much alive.
by Hermione Gee and David-Jan Godfroid
Radovan Karadzic is charged with 11 counts of genocide and war crimes for masterminding Serb atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. In total, more than 100,000 civilians and soldiers are thought to have been killed during the conflict, including the 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys who were murdered during the 1995 Srebenica massacre.
Karadzic "forgotten" by Serbs
The death toll includes around 25,000 Serbians. But the start of the Karadzic trial is unlikely to stir much public interest or outcry in the Serbian Republic in Bosnia nor in Serbia itself.
In the years following the war, Karadzic has almost been forgotten by most of the Serbs in Serbia and the Serbian territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many of the myths surrounding him have faded away.
Few people thought that Karadzic would ever be arrested. It was a big surprise when the news broke on July 22nd 2008 that the former leader was being held in the special court building in Belgrade on charges of genocide and war crimes.
That astonishment grew as details about his life as Dragan David Dabic emerged. For a number of years the former president had lived in broad daylight in a Belgrade suburb as a specialist in alternative medicine, openly visiting patients and conventions.
No hero
Radovan Karadzic is no longer the Serbian hero he once was. In fact, many Serbs regard him as an obstacle to European integration. During the days following his arrest only a few people came to protest at the court where he was held. For them Karadzic will always be a hero, or, as in one popular song, a Srpski Sin, a Serbian son.
No doubt the first days of the trial will be extensively broadcasted in both countries - as when former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic stood trial. However, television stations quickly dropped their live broadcasts after it turned out that hardly anybody was watching. There's no reason to believe that it will be any different with the Karadzic case.
Shadow of war
In Bosnia, however, the story is very different. Over 80 percent of civilians killed during the war were Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks - the victims of Serbian attempts to "ethnically cleanse" territories in the region. And many of those who survived still live in the shadow of the war.
Katheryne Bomberger directs an organisation in Sarajevo, which helps locate and identify the mortal remains of those who have disappeared during armed conflict. So far, Bomberger's team has assisted in the identification of over 6,300 bodies buried in mass graves in Srebenica. It's an essential part of the healing process, Bomberger says:
"Many of them had their entire families wiped out, any evidence of their existence wiped out. They have governments denying the existence of their sons. Being able to use DNA to identify the son of a mother who's been told by a government that this person doesn't exist allows them not only to bury them but to reclaim the identity, an existence - that they had a life, that they had a son, that they had something."
Imprisoned
But for the young generation in Bosnia the war is a thing of the past. And even the middle-aged Bosnian Muslim population will hardly pay attention to the trial in The Hague. They - as well as the Serbs - feel imprisoned by the past, and want to shake it off.
Whoever turns on their TV set on Monday to see Karadzic in the dock, will be disappointed. Radovan Karadzic, who will be representing himself before the court, announced this week that he would not be appearing before the tribunal on the first day.
"[The] defence was not granted sufficient time and resources to prepare," Karadzic wrote in a letter to the court. "This process is not ready to start."
The tribunal, meanwhile, says that the trail will go ahead as scheduled. Whether or not that happens, for the survivors in Srebenica, the process is long overdue.
Photo: ANP
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