Bringing Karadzic to Justice

LONDON - The photo accompanying a brief story on page 25 of the Evening Standard nearly had me convinced. Could that saintly Santa with a $100 haircut, grinning merrily above ruddy chin folds and a silk tie, be anything other than the man-of-peace poet he swore that he was?

“Instead of being accused for the events in our civil war I should have been rewarded for all the good things I have done,” Radovan Karadzic told judges last week in The Hague. He called himself a mild, tolerant and understanding man who tried to avert war and then reduced suffering once it began.

But six weeks before Serb zealots opened fire in Sarajevo to start the war, early in 1992, Mr. Karadzic told me with a self-satisfied smirk exactly what he had in mind.

As Croatia fought to free itself from Yugoslavia, I went to Sarajevo to see if war might spill across the border. Not a chance, the official Bosnia-Herzegovina spokeswoman told me. I think she believed it. A devout Musl im in a miniskirt and fiery red lipstick, she explained how Bosnia was a secular, seamless amalgam of disparate communities.

Then I talked to the wild-eyed psychiatrist with wilder hair, head of the Serb nationalist party. Mr. Karadzic jabbed a wooden pointer at a school map to illustrate his plan for an ethnically cleansed state. He traced a Brcko Corridor linking Serb enclaves. He showed how Croats should withdraw toward Mostar, and Muslims should give up strategic ancestral land.

I asked how he intended to get away with all that. He answered, with that smirk, “You watch.” It has been a full generation now, and I'm still watching.

One London newspaper's account began: “He may be accused of ordering the slaughter of hundreds his countrymen, but. . .” It was hardly hundreds. Official charges include systematic genocide and crimes against humanity, with such specific instances as the more than 7,000 men and boys exterminated at Srebrenica. And tho se stiffly phrased words on paper do not begin to capture the enormity.

Earlier this year, journalists who covered the war returned to Sarajevo and then produced a powerful volume of photos: Bosnia 1992-1995. They told far more of the story. But still. . .

We don't retain much memory these days. How, decades after the fact, to explain an essentially simple-to-understand act of aggression that ended up lasting three years, leaving perhaps 100,000 dead, millions displaced, and uncounted others raped and tortured?

Outsiders could have stopped a war that raged a few hours' drive from Italy. When NATO forces finally moved in, they managed not to find Mr. Karadzic in his tiny fiefdom in the hills above Sarajevo.

Mr. Karadzic was arrested in 2008 in Serbia after vanishing behind shaggy hair and a long beard. He is finally on trial, acting as his own lawyer, at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague - a generation afte r the war, with so many memories faded and so many witnesses gone.

Talk about justice delayed being justice denied.