Targeting ‘Turks’: How Karadzic Laid the Foundations for Genocide

The regime of Radovan Karadzic was not totalitarian in the sense that Nazism or Stalinism were; yet it was a regime that existed solely for the purpose of murder - the physical annihilation of non-Serbs, or more specifically, Bosnian Muslims.

Let me quote from Karadzic's court verdict a description of some of the events that took place in Rogatica in eastern Bosnia during the war:

"At night soldiers would bang on the walls and open the doors violently, flash their flashlights onto the faces of detainees, choose women and girls at random, say they were being taken for questioning but they would take them away to be raped. The other detainees could hear the women and girls screaming for help. Women and girls as young as seven, as well as a 13-year-old boy, were taken out of the classrooms almost every night for a period of two-and-a-half months and raped by the police and soldiers who guarded the camp."

The lifetime prison sentence handed down last month in The Hague to the key architect of the Srebrenica genocide is therefore a welcome step; symbolism matters. But it ultimately means nothing, because Karadzic will be outlived by his life's work. His unique contribution to genocide is that he, almost singlehandedly, provided genocide with sustainability by framing it as a public good.

Karadzic is not a marginal figure from the far-right fringe. He was at the centre of a broad nationalist movement hell-bent on pursuing the genocidal strategy of removing and annihilating non-Serbs in the area of Bosnia and Herzegovina that is today known as Republika Srpska.

In a telephone conversation with Karadzic, Dobrica Cosic, the pre-eminent Serb nationalist and later president of the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, emphasised the centrality of...