Karadzic ends boycott of trial seen as key to Balkans closure

Izeta Bajramovic, a Sar­a­jevo shopowner who knew Karadzic as a boy in the 1960s, told the Los Angeles Times in a wartime interview that Karadzic used to beg her for free pieces of baklava: "He was skinny, hairy and shy, very, very shy…. I used to feel sorry for him. He was provincial, a typical peasant lost in the big city."

Karadzic married a city girl, got a degree in psychiatry, and bounced around the margins of literary circles; he lived in New York City for a year. He was a police informer and later charged with embezzlement in Sarajevo, but never served the sentence.

Powerful Serbian nationalist elixir

Yet a two-year stint working a Belgrade health clinic in 1986 likely allowed Karadzic to drink deeply from a powerful new Serbian nationalist elixir. The "Memorandum" from the Serbian Academy of Sciences in 1987, written by intellectual-patriot Dobrica Cosic, became a blueprint for breaking up Yugoslavia. In multiethnic Yugoslavia, socialist and egalitarian, the "Memorandum" was a bombshell ­ calling for Serbs to unite. Mr. Cosic had been an older friend to the young Karadzic when the former's views were anathema. By the late 1980s, Serb nationalism was back; many Serbs were tired of and irritated by put-downs in Tito's Yugoslavia.

Armed with new articulations of Serb anger, Karadzic was able to rise in the heady days after the Berlin Wall fell ­ popularly called "the end of history."

With Milosevic pulling the strings, he would soon reintroduce Europe to a past all too ugly and recent. The war he helped facilitate, with 200,000 killed, was at its core a rejection of European postwar values: reversing the "never again" judgments of Nuremburg against Nazi fascism, reintrodu­cing Guernica-like horror and fear, and insisting that ethnic identity and national honor were more powerful impulses than democratic rights and dignity. Milosevic died during his trial in The Hague in 2006.

The 39-page charge outlined at the Yugoslav tribunal in late October by prosecutor Alan Tieger, accuses Karadzic of participating "in an overarching joint criminal enterprise to permanently remove Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat inhabitants from the territories of Bosnia Herzegovina claimed as Bosnian Serb territory."

The tribunal opened in 1994, in the midst of the war, amid great doubt. But it has proved a watershed for international justice.

"The Yugoslavian war was a defining moment for justice," says Hans Corell, chief legal adviser to former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "After the wall fell and the cold war ended, a greater awareness began to force itself into the world public. The war-crimes tribunals were part of a view that you can't conduct mass murder and get away with it by hiding behind the sovereignty of the state."

South African judge Richard Goldstone, who, as the tribunal's first prosecutor, indicted Karadzic in 1995, defended the court, telling CNN recently that the "movement forward has been very impressive…. Fifteen years ago, there was no international justice at all. It is becoming a force."

Today, says Tim Judah, author of several works on Serbian politics, apart from a hard-core set of nationalists, most Serbs have grown tired of ideology, and simply want to put the war, and Karadzic, behind them.

The poet-warrior, for his part, published verse in hiding, including "The sun is wounding me." It included lines like "Judges torture me for insignificant acts."

Why Karadzic trial may be most important remaining case tried by the special tribunal.

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