The first picture I found on El Universal. Look what a shave and a haircut did for Karadzic.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic appeared at the U.N.'s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal for the first time Thursday, telling the judge he would defend himself against charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.
What's that old saying? The person who represents himself has a fool for a client, or lawyer? No, the lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, apparently. Either way, Karadzic is a damned fool.
"I have an invisible adviser but I have decided to represent myself," he calmly told presiding judge Alphons Orie.
Rioters clashed with heavily armed police in downtown Belgrade late Tuesday.
Not enough they are celebrating a war criminal (of course, they don't see it that way): As many as 20,000 protesters chanted slogans tarring Serbia's pro-European president, Boris Tadic, as a fascist, as speakers accused the government of treason for agreeing to send Mr. Karadzic to the war-crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Treason? Not every one feels that way.
Liberals and many analysts in Serbia argue that Western observers have consistently gotten the country wrong in predicting a nationalist revival. They note that in every election since 2000, Serbs have chosen democrats over ultranationalists. Opinion surveys invariably show support for joining the EU at about 70%. Tuesday's protest turnout was relatively small compared with previous pro-democracy and pro-Kosovo demonstrations.
Rather amazing details are emerging on Karadzic. He was hiding in plain sight. He disguised himself to live and work in Belgrade as practitioner of alternative medicine, “freely walking in the city,” Serbian authorities said Tuesday.Mr. Karadzic had lived under the alias Dragon Dabic and had adopted a “very convincing” false identity, Mr. Ljajic said.
[Rasim Ljajic is responsible for Serbia’s relations with the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.]
Mr. Karadzic had lived under the alias Dragon Dabic and had adopted a “very convincing” false identity, Mr. Ljajic said.“How convincing his false identity was, we can tell you that he has been freely walking in the city, being very public about his appearance,” Mr. Vukcevic said. “Even the people he rented a flat from were unaware of who he was.”
The officials gave no details of the continuing hunt for Mr. Karadzic’s wartime ally, Gen. Ratko Mladic, who is also being sought for trial in The Hague on genocide charges. Some analysts saw the arrest of Mr. Karadzic as an indication that Mr. Mladic would soon be seized.Natasha Kandic, director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, said: “Now the door is open for the arrest of Mladic. After this, he probably won’t get any more official protection. This government has changed its policy. It’s an historical event.”
While the European Union generally welcomed Mr. Karadzic’s arrest, some officials struck a cautious note. “Things will be easier, but let’s not prejudge anything,” Reuters quoted French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner as saying. “Karadzic has been arrested but Mladic has not.”
Prosecutors in The Hague and officials of the European Union have long suspected that he was, in fact, hiding in Serbia, and in recent years have pressed officials in Belgrade to hand him over. “This is a historic event,” said Richard Holbrooke, who brokered the agreements in Dayton, Ohio, to end the war in Bosnia in 1995. “Of the three most evil men of the Balkans, Milosevic, Karadzic and Mladic, I thought Karadzic was the worst. The reason was that Karadzic was a real racist believer. Karadzic really enjoyed ordering the killing of Muslims, whereas Milosevic was an opportunist.”
Russia, a traditional ally of Serbia, called the arrest an “internal matter.”
In the gallery of asshole war criminals, the score in Serbia is now 2 down, 1 to go: Milosevic is dead, Karazdic has been captured, and only Mledic remains hiding in some rat's hole. In due time, he too will face one form of justice, or another: a war-crimes tribunal, or death.
Hooray! One for the good guys. This barbarian was the civilian leader of the Bosnian Serbs who massacred Bosnian Muslims. A psychiatrist, to boot.
Mr. Karadzic, who was the leader of ethnic Serbs during the war that erupted with Bosnia's secession from Yugoslavia, is accused of masterminding massacres that the U.N. war crimes tribunal described as "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history."
Never again became a joke: Europeans stood by and watched, and the US finally did a little something, President Clinton ordering aerial bombing.
Mr. Karadzic's reported hide-outs included Serbian Orthodox monasteries and refurbished mountain caves in remote eastern Bosnia. Some newspaper reports said he had at times disguised himself as a priest by shaving off his trademark silver mane and donning a brown cassock.
As leader of Bosnia's Serbs, Mr. Karadzic hobnobbed with international negotiators and his interviews were top news items during the 3 1/2-year Bosnian war, set off when a government dominated by Slavic Muslims and Croats declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992.
But his life changed by the time the war ended in late 1995 with an estimated 250,000 people dead and another 1.8 million driven from their homes. He was indicted twice by the U.N. tribunal on genocide charges stemming from his alleged crimes against Bosnia's Muslims and Croats.
Two items of recent vintage well point out the nature of W's administration.
Al Jazeera has this story: Bush waives law to help Pakistan - George Bush, US president, has exempted Pakistan from a law that restricts funding countries where the legitimate head of state was deposed by a military coup, as in Pakistan.
In an article entitled The Troubled Birth of Kosovo Charles Simic has some interesting observations to make about Kosovo, Serbia and the US.
At some point in 1998, or perhaps earlier, the State Department decided to take the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army—whose members were being armed from Albania, where the US already had a military and CIA presence—off the US list of terrorist groups, and to describe its forces instead as an insurgency. The change most likely had more to do with the aim of maintaining a US military presence in that part of the world than with outrages committed by Serbs in what they saw as revenge for the gunning down of their policemen and civilians. The moment Kosovo was liberated by NATO forces in 1999, after weeks of US bombing of not only Kosovo but also Belgrade and other parts of Serbia, the US started building Camp Bondsteel on 955 acres of farmland near the Kosovar town of Urosevac, on what was then still Serbian territory. The US strategists clearly expected that this area would never again be part of Serbia.
Insurgency and not terrorists: Kosovo and Iraq parallels? As Chalmers Johnson described in his book Nemesis, bases around the world are a primary US strategic objective, part of a many-tentacled empire.
Still Serbian territory: a violation of the territorial integrity of another nation. Simic addressed that in the first sentence of his article.
The decision of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and a number of other countries to break with international law, which regards the territorial integrity and sovereignty of states as sacrosanct, and to permit Albanian separatists in Kosovo to declare independence from Serbia was an act so extraordinary in international relations that it had to take place outside the United Nations, where its illegality would have been hard to justify.
Amazingly, Condi Rice justified this action.
After congratulating the Kosovars on their independence, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice explained that this was to be "a special case," the sole exception ever to the rule of territorial integrity of nations under international law, and that separatists elsewhere ought not to look upon this act as a precedent.
Maybe the way to get snipers off the center of discussion is to attack the Reverend. Spin, Senator, spin.
Roger Cohen: Imaginary snipers, real challenges International Herald Tribune -3 hours ago By Roger Cohen Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured Bill Clinton's circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by ... Video: Video Belies Clinton's Bosnia StatementsAssociatedPress
Roger Cohen has some tough words for the Clintons. Both are in for raps on the knuckles and upbraiding for their temerity and obfuscation.
Here's some news for Hillary Clinton: The Bosnian war was over in 1996. Those of us, like myself, who first went to Bosnia at the start of the war in 1992 and then, in 1994 and 1995, endured Bill Clinton's circumlocutions as we sat in an encircled Sarajevo watching pregnant women getting blown away by shelling from Serbian gunners, know that. Only after the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, three years after the initial Serbian genocide of 1992 against that population (and one year after a genocide on his watch in Rwanda), did the gelatinous Clinton develop some backbone. NATO bombed, Richard Holbrooke did his brilliant work at Dayton in November 1995, and the guns fell silent in Bosnia.
First, the facts from someone who was on the ground where the snipers Senator Clinton misspoke about having to dodge. Then opinions about things, including gelatinous Bubba's circumlocutions, and her wife's, the Senator's misstatements about the war.
It was over, although she recently recalled "landing under sniper fire." It was over when "we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." Oh, please. This is, as Mr. Cohen states, a significant issue: Hillary Clinton's transference is intriguing: Suffering Sarajevans ran from snipers during the war her husband let fester. Invented danger, supposed to showcase bravery, may instead betray guilt. But I'm not going to psychoanalyze the Clintons. I don't have the space to plumb such unquenchable ambition. Few do. Anyway, she now says she "misspoke" about Tuzla. End of story, you might say. But I'd say it's the beginning of another, more important one.
I agree; I say the Senator is lying. Mr. Cohen's entire article is magnificent, insightful, informative. Clinton made up Bosnian sniper fire in an attempt to show that she's tougher than Barack Obama; that she's a hardened, seasoned, putative commander-in-chief ready to respond to crisis when the "red phone" of her fear-mongering ad rings. John McCain's own recent "misspeaking" about Iran, placing (Sunni) Al Qaeda in (Shiite) Iran, also smacked of muscle-flexing: He wanted to signal toughness to the mullahs in Tehran, where Obama has suggested he'd seek dialogue. But what the United States, and those that look to it, need now is not more braggadocio from the White House. We've had a seven-year dose. That's enough. What's needed, rather, is some new, creative thinking about a changed world in which authoritarianism is enjoying a renaissance and America and its allies need to work together to spread peace, prosperity, freedom, equity, security and, yes, democracy. U.S. hard power has not worked. The Iraq invasion was bungled. European soft power is insufficient.
He quotes Constanze Stelzenmüller of the German Marshall Fund in an important recent essay called "Trans-Atlantic Power Failures," a "European Union with 27 member states and a total of 1.8 million men and women under arms" is incapable of pacifying little Kosovo ("one quarter the size of Switzerland") on its own.
NATO, quoting Ms. Stelzenmüller, Mr. Cohen states has to find "the right mix of idealism and realism," and a new cohesion, if one-pipeline Russia and one-party, Tibet-tormenting China are not to prosper with authoritarianism-for-export.
Foreign policy debate in this election campaign has been paltry. I'd like to hear something about GWOT - the "Global War on Terror" - the heart of U.S. national security strategy. It amounts to war without end because "terror" is a tactic and tactics don't surrender. GWOT should be abandoned: It's externally divisive and internally treacherous. Al Qaeda can be beaten sans GWOT.
Obama, in his speech on race, did important things. He confronted reality, thought big, probed division, sketched convergence. He took Americans and many people beyond U.S. shores to a different mental place. Imagine that capacity applied to GWOT, Iran, Russia, China and Israel-Palestine.
If you don't like the sound of that, there's always seasoned swagger of the kind that runs from imaginary snipers.
The first picture I found on El Universal.
Look what a shave and a haircut did for Karadzic.
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