Covering Karadzic

When I first met Radovan Karadžić in Sarajevo in 1990, the psychiatrist-turned-politician seemed to prefer reciting his poems to talking politics. I thought his poetry was bad, but maybe Serbian epic style was lost on me as a reporter covering Yugoslavia. His jowly face was topped by a flying shock of salt-and-pepper hair. Karadžić said he wanted Serbs to have equal rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one of six republics in the defunct communist federation which was holding its first multiparty elections.

Then, Karadžić fancied himself an urban intellectual. But he was born and raised in Montenegro, and to Sarajevo's elite he always remained an outsider. Karadžić had already caught the eye of Serbian nationalists who saw in him a charismatic true believer.

Over the next year his nationalist rhetoric escalated sharply as it became apparent that Yugoslavia was hurtling towards disintegration. In an address to Bosnia's parliament, he warned that the republic's Muslims would "disappear" if Bosnia tried to break away from Serb-dominated Yugoslavia. My friends in Sarajevo did not believe that war was inevitable. But doom seemed to hang over the Bosnian capital.

Once in the café of a Belgrade hotel, Karadžić casually drew maps for me on plain white paper showing how he would partition a country whose population of 4.3 million Muslims, Serbs and Croats was so mixed that any division meant war. His maps always left Bosnia's Muslims wedged in a stranglehold between Serbs and Croats in a statelet that had no prospect of survival. Many times over the next few years, I saw similar maps, sometimes done by Croat nationalists, sometimes done by Serbs.

In August 1992, on the eve of a tour around detention camps in Serb-held parts of Bosnia, we ate dinner together in the mountain capital of his self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb state. Karadžić said the tours would convince the world that he had nothing to hide. Stick-thin Muslim men standing shirtless against barbed wire fences too scared to say a word told another story. Tens of thousands of Muslims were held in these wretched camps, and it later would emerge that thousands were summarily murdered.

Over glasses of wine and dinnner, he offered to turn off the electricity in the hospital so that I could have light in my hotel room, and he bragged about how big his country had become. By then, his forces controlled some two-thirds of Bosnia and Herzegovina, displacing a million and more Muslims and Croats.