alicubi journal :: in karadzic country

SRBINJE, Bosnia-Herzegovina, May 2 (PNS) He's an accused war criminal on the run. He's one of the most wanted men in the world, with a $5 million bounty on his head, and the NATO dragnet closing in. Where to run? Where to hide?

A good place would be a few miles south of here, spectacularly rough country near the Montenegrin border, where the foothills are thick with evergreens and hardwoods, and limestone mountains are slashed with deep gorges and ravines. A place where clannish villagers in remote valleys see strangers coming from miles away.

It's an ideal hideout for Dr. Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war. On the US, UN, and NATO wish list of Serbian leaders to stand trial for Balkan war crimes, Karadzic ranks second, right behind former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, currently on trial in The Hague for war crimes.

Milosevic's senior aide, Nikola Sainovic, and a second indicted suspect, Bosnian Serb Momcilo Gruban, have surrendered to the war crimes tribunal. Karadzic, a psychiatrist and published poet, won't give up.

A large man with an unruly mane of gray hair, he's been spotted everywhere--from Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia (soon to be called simply Serbia and Montenegro), to Pale, the Serbs' wartime mountain stronghold above Sarajevo, 45 miles northwest of Srbinje. A NATO armored column reportedly missed sweeping him up March 1 in the village of Celebici, an hour's drive southeast of Srbinje.

But folks who live in tiny villages that lie along the armored column's corkscrew route still laugh about the failed raid. They affectionately refer to the doctor by his nickname, "Raso" (pronounced Rasho). "He is," they say, "our icon."

At first glance, this land is a postcard perfect. Boys and girls frolic on country roads in soft morning sunlight, carrying schoolbooks in backpacks. A man and his dog expertly move a flock of frisky sheep across a stony meadow laced with blue and yellow wildflowers.

But it is also a hard land of tough farmers and weather-beaten herders, men and women intimate with guns and knives, living in a borderland with a bloody history of Christian and Muslim conflict.

Bars, restaurants and homes display a 2002 calendar featuring a portrait of the 56-year-old escape artist who has managed to elude arrest since 1995. He's the small-town lad from Montenegro who made good in the big city: a respected medic given to lyric verse, a team physician to a Sarajevo soccer club and the Serb leader when Serbs overran 70% of Bosnia and thumbed their noses at the world.

To these folk, Karadzic is a war hero, not a war criminal guilty of murder, rape, ethnic cleansing, and the three-year siege of Sarajevo. Here in Srbinje, Muslims made up more than half the metropolitan population of 40,000 until they were driven out of the Drina river district on a paramilitary riptide of beatings, killings, rapes, and destroyed mosques.

Outside a roadside cafe, a still-wet and bloody pelt dangles from a sturdy pole, signaling that a spit-roasted spring lamb has just been taken off beechwood coals. Inside, a dozen men sit at wooden trestle tables. They are a happy group. They have savory meat, green onions, fresh-baked bread, and cold beer. They have grape brandy, called loza, and plum brandy, or sljiva.

And now they have an American who just walked through the door asking if this is Radovan Karadzic country.

"Call me Janko," says one hefty man, and takes charge. Under a big mustache Janko flashes a big smile. He says he's a truck driver who volunteered during the Bosnian war.

"The Muslims wanted an Islamic state and we weren't about to give it to them," he says. "End of story. What else do you want to know, my friend?"

Has anyone seen Dr. Karadzic lately?

Everyone laughs, and Janko says to the waiter, "Give the American a beer on me."

Then, grinning broadly: "Yes, we saw him, but NATO didn't, did they? You could see them coming from 30 kilometers away and hear them from 60.

"Ah, my American friend, the only way you will see Raso is if he wants to see you, and I don't think he wants to see you. So what will you Americans do next, send in your Special Forces, their faces painted for war like in the movies? Rambo sneaks silently through the woods while ignorant peasants are blind and their dogs mute?"

Janko sips his beer. "Or perhaps you will come with helicopters, the lightning strikes you are famous for. But where would you land, and where would you go after you land? Who will tell you where Raso is hiding?" Perhaps someday there will be a traitor, Janko admits.

"But here," he says, "we are for Raso. We salute him with drink, praise him in song, and name boy babies after him. As it stands, the only way NATO gets him is if he gives himself to NATO. That is what I say and that is what I believe."

At the door, on my way out, the big man with the madcap grin has parting advice: "My friend, I do not say this in a threatening way, truly, but we have saying around here: 'If you are afraid of wolves, do not go into the woods.' There are still wolves in these woods."