Posted on 10/26/2003 2:58:45 PM PST by mark502inf
BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - Like many Serbs across the Balkans, Sinisa Espek reveres a man accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. He considers Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic a defender of his people.
"Thirty-seven members of my family were killed in World War II," said Espek, 34, the owner of a popular bakery in Belgrade. "I owe my thanks to Karadzic for keeping something like that from happening again."
Espek, a Serb from Sarajevo who rebuilt his life in Belgrade after the 1992-95 Bosnian war, says that crimes were simply committed on all sides — and he credits Karadzic with keeping him and other Serbs from perishing.
Such devotion, which often goes hand-in-hand with virulent anti-Western rhetoric, is hampering the efforts of Serbia's democratic leaders and foreign powers to stabilize the republic and integrate it into Europe.
But few of the Serbs who idolize Karadzic and other top suspects wanted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal — most notably Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military chief during the war in Bosnia — hope for renewed warfare.
Instead, most are average people convinced that the world is against them. They express their anger over that sense of oppression by idolizing ex-leaders like Karadzic, Mladic and former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Milosevic is now on trial by the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, for war crimes committed in Bosnia and Kosovo. But Karadzic and Mladic have eluded capture since their indictments in 1995.
They are accused of masterminding the worst massacre in Europe since World War II: the slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica. They also are accused of organizing the 44-month siege of Sarajevo, in which 12,000 people were either fatally shot or starved to death.
Those horrors were underlined anew in late September when a former Bosnian Serb captain described how he separated Muslim men from their families in Srebrenica. Momir Nikolic, 48, told the war crimes tribunal that Mladic had discussed practical arrangements for killing the prisoners at a meeting before the systematic killings began.
The horror of such testimony, however, hasn't tainted Mladic or Karadzic in the eyes of many Serbs.
"When the war started, Muslims came and kicked me out of my home where my family had lived for 300 years," Espek said. "Karadzic had warned us this would happen and saved us. He is a defender of Serbs."
Espek expresses his gratitude by keeping a small photo of Karadzic above the counter in his bakery alongside a painting of Serbs fleeing the Turks in the 17th century.
Such reverence for the wartime Serb leaders results in part from a deep-seated sense of Serb victimhood nurtured by Milosevic-era propaganda.
During the Bosnian war, which killed an estimated 260,000 people and made refugees of 1.8 million others, the Milosevic regime claimed that Serb attacks on rival Muslims and Croats were purely defensive. They said the thousands of civilians who fled in fear were "voluntarily emigrating" — what the United Nations called "ethnic cleansing."
Such beliefs persist, feeding a conviction that Serbs are perpetual victims: of the Turks who ruled over them in centuries past; of the Nazis and their Croat allies during World War II; of Croats, Bosnian Muslims and ethnic Albanians for opposing Belgrade's authoritarian rule in the 1990s; and of the United States for leading efforts to end the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo by bombing Serbs.
A popular postcard sold these days shows a drawing of a Serb soldier urinating on a U.S. flag with the caption: "You can't beat the feeling." T-shirts bear the images of Karadzic and Mladic with the words "Serbian Heroes."
In addition, ultranationalist leaders repeat wartime claims that Muslims massacred their own people to win the world's sympathy.
"The Sarajevo market bombing was a fabrication," Dragan Markovic, parliamentary leader of the Serbian Unity Party, said in a recent interview, referring to the notorious 1994 mortar attack on a downtown marketplace that killed 68 and wounded 200.
"Muslims placed corpses and dummies there to make it seem like they were the victims and to blame the Serbs," Markovic said. "A reason had to be found for NATO to bomb the Serb population."
James Lyon, a Belgrade-based analyst with the International Crisis Group, dismisses such notions as "typical Milosevic-era propaganda."
"It continues to generate a certain level of paranoia," he said.
Milan Protic, a historian and prominent anti-communist who had a key role in ousting Milosevic in 2000, said the same perceived sense of Serb victimhood which justified Belgrade's wars in the 1990s now feeds the worship of war crimes suspects.
"Karadzic and Mladic have become symbols of the Serbian fight to get revenge for what happened 50 years ago in World War II," Protic said. "They don't see them as war criminals, but rather those who got revenge in a blood feud."
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