yugoslavias implosion

Glorification of war and its protagonists, for example, Ratko
Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, is a regular occurrence at cultural
events in the country. At the state-sponsored international book fair
in October 2004, a novel by Karadžić became a hit overnight. All copies
were snapped up in a matter of days; the book’s promoter and
publisher made daily guest appearances on television. Kosta Čavoški,
an influential professor and president of the Radovan Karadžić
Defense Committee, spoke at promotional events. 511
When Karadžić was arrested in July 2008 in Belgrade, where he
had been hiding under the name Dr. Dragan David Dabić, the patriotic
circles became hysterical because Karadžić had been celebrated
as a symbol of Serbdom and heroism. He was glorified as a man
capable of standing up to the West, a man who was going to expose
in The Hague the Western powers’ primary responsibility for the
break-up of Yugoslavia. „Patriotic Serbia“ took the arrest as an act
of treason and evidence of Serbia’s weakness and loss of identity and
dignity. The government was accused in particular of hastening to
comply with the Tribunal’s request for his extradition to The Hague;
had it waited a few months more, the argument ran, Karadžić would
have been tried in Serbia instead of in The Hague. 512 Momo Kapor,
a writer and Karadžić’s close friend, said „This is going to be the
trial of the century, in comparison to which the notorios Dreyfus
affair, of which Zola wrote, will look like appearing before a magistrate
in connection with a parking offense.“ 513 Kapor was referring
511 Another example of this celebration of men regarded as war criminals outside Serbia was
the publication in 2004 of the novel Gvozdeni rov (The Iron Trench), allegedly written by
Milorad Legija Ulemek, who has been sentenced to forty years’ imprisonment for his role
in the murder of former Yugoslav president Ivan Stambolić and forty years for organizing
the assassination of prime minister Zoran Đinđić . He was a member of the paramilitary
police unit JSO . Seventy thousand copies of Gvozdeni rov were sold in a few days when it
first appeared . The novel offers a simplistic explanation of the Serb defeat, attributing it
to a “conspiracy on the part of the Great Powers, who swooped down on Orthodoxy and
especially on the Serbs, who after the First World War were the mother of the Balkans .”
512 Pečat, 25 July, 2008
513 Standard (a weekly newspaper published in Belgrade), August 1, 2008
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