Who is Afraid of Dragan Dabic

Who's Afraid of Dragan Dabic?

The trial of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb war criminal accused of genocide, among other crimes, has resumed these days in the International Hague Tribunal.

Determined to fight the whole world alone, that is, refusing the defense lawyers and defending himself. Radovan Karadzic began with a speech of four hours. Speedy, passionate, and barely translateable, his defense speech was very reminiscent of his earlier aggressive speeches, remembered well by those who witnessed and survived his eloquence.

His companion Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general, is still at large, an aging hero whose monument is the mass graves of Muslim ethnics liquidated in Srebrenica in 1995. Karadzic explained to the astonished audience of judges, journalists, and last but not least translators, that his peacemaking policies have always failed to be recognized, both then and now, by an erring world community.

For years on end, exiled within my own disintegrating country, I had to listen to the rambling harangues of Karadzic, Milosevic, Mladic, and Mira Markovic (the wife of Milosevic). Even the strongest-willed had to doubt their sanity in the atmosphere they created. They transformed a secular, multiethnic state into a world battlefield where the Serbs were a historically elect victim people fighting Muslims for the benefit of the entire planet. As Serbs had fought centuries before, against the Turks who conquered and dominated them for 500 years. Yet they certainly weren't defeated by Turks in the 1990s, but by NATO.

Today Radovan Karadzic is in the court, while relatives of his victims demonstrated in front of the tribunal. His victims were not merely shot, but dismembered and distributed all over the territory so that the bodies could not be found or historically identified. One has to wonder at a psychotherapist pursued in this way by the return of the methodically repressed.

Let's remember here the curious figure of Dragan David Dabic, the alter ego of Karadzic, the fake identity under which the war fugitive hid for many years. Hiding in Belgrade, public yet obscure, a guru, a healer, and a good innocent person who would not hurt a fly.

His new friends swore it never occurred to them that the white haired guru was the poet-psychotherapist of Balkan ethnic cleansing. They were happy and contented with his kindness. Was he a Dr Jekyll as opposed to Mr Hyde?

But there was no such literary-romantic split in the Karadzic psyche. Dragan Dabic the guru had forsaken his machine-guns and left the mountains for the city, but he was still very much an ardent Serbian nationalist. While preaching mystic meditation, he did so as a Serbian Orthodox religious suprematist. He commonly frequented a nationalist bar where boozy, sentimental patriots played and sang songs praising the greatness of Serbia and its numerous defeats, not excepting that genocide in Srebrenica. And, of course, Dragan Dabic was a quack, sheltering himself among people with no idea of his true aims. and taking money from sick, miserable and gullible Serbs, imperilling them while promising them health and happiness.

These days I heard him in the Hague Tribunal -- Radovan Karadzic, speaking in my mother language, assuming the historic right to speak in the name of all Serbs and the nation of Serbia. Dragan Dabic and Radovan Karadzic are the same person. They were always lurking pretenders, fringe fanatics, there was no innocence or heroism in either of them.

Radovan Karadzic was always a scheming criminal bent on seizing power through fear and racial politics. He coined the term "ethnic cleansing," which was his own scheme, implemented by his own trustworthy, efficient and slightly dim militia general, Ratko Mladic.

Dragan Dabic was a mere consequence, the farce after the tragedy. This masque, a fake identity, hid a true fake. The authentic Radovan Karadzic was always every bit as fake as Dragan Dabic. They were both arrogant crooks, gurus, poets and visionaries. committing crime and denying that crime within the same moment. That is still the problem with Serbia today: no exorcist can save a nation in denial.

The power of truth can help Serbia and its citizens to move on from the killing fields. Serbia is a wounded polity that much prefers its own quack remedies to the sting of antiseptics. There are not many Serbs eager to pull aside that Dabic mask and frankly probe the scar tissue that has formed beneath it.

But that mask did fall at last. The Serbian nation is not insane, fatally stricken, or even threatened for its life. Today it has become a small and eccentric state in a troubled region. Even its darkest terrors can't hinder the wind from blowing.