Thursday, Jul. 24, 2008
The Moment
By Massimo Calabresi
7|22|08: Belgrade
In wartime Sarajevo, the wellspring of genocide was easy to spot. Running through the middle of the proudly multicultural city, between apartment buildings and along avenues, were sight lines from the Serb-held side of town. Stepping into them meant death for thousands of innocents at the hands of snipers who had embraced the anti-Muslim ethnic cleansing orchestrated by their leader, Radovan Karadzic.
But how to recognize evil in disguise amid a peaceful, thriving metropolis? On the run for over a decade and living in plain sight for several years in Belgrade until his arrest on July 21, Karadzic could hardly have appeared more benign. Wearing a long white beard and a ponytail, he practiced alternative medicine and lectured occasionally on Orthodox Christian meditation under the name Dr. Dragan Dabic.
Karadzic, a trained psychiatrist, may have been aided in his deception by friends or the Serbian government. But his ability to so completely transform himself--and so completely convince those who lived and worked alongside him--is more difficult to explain. In his study on the psychology of mass murder, The Nazi Doctors, Robert Jay Lifton wrote, "No individual self is inherently evil, murderous or genocidal. Yet under certain conditions virtually any self is capable of becoming all of these." In Karadzic's case, the reverse was true. The warlord charged with ordering the massacre of more than 7,000 people in Srebrenica became a harmless quack described as "friendly" and "open" by his co-workers. Once a proponent of the view that the ills of society could be healed by cleansing itself of an ethnic group, Karadzic the fugitive maintained a fascination with acupuncture and meditation.
That spirituality can coexist with the darkest of impulses is a sad but simple fact of humanity. The best defense, Lifton wrote, is "equally pervasive empathy, fellow feeling, toward all other human beings." To the victims of Karadzic's cruelty, though, that may seem like more than such a man deserves.
A Brief History Of: The Poet Laureate PAGE 23