Hans Rustad Hvorfor er ikke Radovan Karadzic og Ratko Mladic, de ansvarlige for den verste massakren i Europa siden annen verdenskrig, funnet? En ny amerikansk film, «The Hunting Party» handler om journalisten Scott Anderson som forsøker å gjøre det NATO ikke har greid på 12 år: å finne Karadzic.
Man vet omtrent hvor han befinner seg: i et lite område som strekker seg fra det østlige Bosnia, fra byen Foca via landsbyen Celebici og inn i det nordlige Montenegro. Her er Karadzic helt, og NATO gjør ikke noe forsøk på å vise hvor makten ligger. Haddde de det gjort, hadde ikke lokale serbere våget å true modige journalister på livet, slik det skjedde med Anderson.
Ed Vulliamy fikk samme behandling da han nylig besøkte området. Vulliamy var Guardian-journalisten som sammen med Newsday-reporter Roy Gutman og den britiske TV-kanalen ITN avslørte de serbiske interneringsleirene der fangene ble behandlet som i en konsentrasjonsleir.
Vulliamy husker så alt for godt krigen. Den var Karadzic og Mladics verk. Det spesielle var den etniske rensingen. Forestillingen om at bare serbere kunne leve sammen. De andre måtte fordrives.
The plan was that wherever Serbs lived, only Serbs would live. In practice, this meant the obliteration of the Muslim (occasionally Croat) populations – often the majority – on any terrain claimed by the Serbs, whether by death, internment or mass deportation, and the wholesale destruction of any memory of their existence – their homes, mosques and property.
Vulliamy traff Karadzic tre ganger. Det var Karadzic selv som ga Vulliamy og ITN tillatelse til å besøke Omarska-leiren. Det ble en PR-katastrofe for serberne. Bildene av de forskremte, utsultede fangene gikk verden rundt. Det var som å se bilder fra befrielsen av leirene i Tyskland.
When we came to meet Karadzic, it had been by helicopter from Belgrade over Eastern Bosnia, with a view of his handiwork from the air: village after village, town after town, razed, lifeless and empty. The reason for our appointment, however, was a gulag of concentration camps over the other side of the country, markedly that at Omarska, from which reports of mass murder, torture and beatings had leaked. Karadzic denied the allegations and guaranteed that I, along with a crew from ITN, would get into Omarska on his personal authority to verify his word. Most of his rambling, however, was about the tribulations of the Serbs throughout an epic history of suffering and struggle; were it not so deadly, Karadzic’s faux academic veneer would have been pathetic. He instructed a couple of lads to take us to a ridge overlooking the besieged capital, Sarajevo, whose prolonged torture Karadzic oversaw personally. They derided the ‘filthy Gypsies’ living below, and made with their Kalashnikovs, and a jocular grimace, as if to line up the entire people and exterminate all of them – a terrible prophecy of Srebrenica three years later.
Two days after our meeting with Karadzic, and on his authority, we entered Omarska. There had been a gun battle on the way, Karadzic’s men leaping from their vehicles to return fire into the woods from which ‘Muslim extremists’ were supposedly shooting (the bullets flying above our convoy). It was a typically crass prank to scare us off and we demanded to press on. Once inside the camp, men in various states of decay, some skeletal, were ushered from a hangar, blinking into the sunlight, and drilled across the yard into a ‘canteen’ under the eyes of a beefy gunner atop his post. There, they devoured watery bean soup like famished dogs, dry skin folded over their bones like parchment. Under the eyes and guns of their captors, they were too scared to talk, apart from one man who said: ‘I don’t want to tell any lies, but cannot tell the truth.’ When the camp commander refused to let us inside the hangar to see the inmates’ quarters, we started walking towards it. The commander blocked the way while his henchmen slipped the safety catches of their guns. We protested that Karadzic had guaranteed that we could inspect the camp thoroughly, to which the local police chief, Simo Drljaca, retorted through his translator Nada Balban: ‘[Karadzic] told us you can see this and this, but not that.’ When we tried again, we were bundled out of the camp.
We had seen very little, and only with time did it become clear what Karadzic did not want us to see. Scenes of routine sadism like that described by survivor Halid Mujkanovic, concerning a prisoner forced to perform fellatio on a fellow inmate, then ordered to bite off his testicles. The victim was Fikret Harambasic and the man was forced to castrate him in order to save the lives of his roommates, threatened with execution if there were no ‘volunteers’. The crowd of Serb guards who oversaw this entertainment ‘looked as though they were attending a sports match, supporting a team’.
Krigen begynte med avsløringen av Omarska og Trnopolje-leiren og sluttet med Srebrenica. Likevel er Karadzic en helt i det østlige Bosnia. Vulliamy får oppleve noe av det samme som Anderson:
Now, when you approach Celebici, villagers simply go inside their houses and will not answer their doors. Likewise, the Orthodox priest; the silence is defiant. It is on the way back down that the communique comes. A navy blue Volkswagen Golf edges its way downhill, as though out of petrol. We stop to ask if we can help. ‘Fuck you and your Muslim sunglasses!’ comes the unexpected reply to my Bosnian colleague in the passenger seat. She is from around here but was forced to flee in 1992, being the wrong ethnicity, in this man’s view and that of others. We drive on and, before long, the Golf – customised so that it sounds like a Harley-Davidson – is revving on our tail, bumping against the back of our car so that we play cat-and-mouse down the narrow track on the edge of a ravine for a good five kilometres, trying not to think about the guns found at Celebici, until the Golf finally overtakes, the maniac at the wheel pointing ahead, and we continue alone, hearts in our mouths. A few kilometres on, there is a strange disruption in the road: a Renault stops to pick up a passenger in forestry commission uniform with a long zipper-bag containing either a rifle or fishing rod. With a lunatic trailing us out here in what Bosnians call the Vukojebina – ‘where wolves go to fuck’ – any company is welcome and we try to wait for the Renault to catch us up. Instead, it disappears and the Golf is back, revving against our bumper, the driver hurling abuse. He finally overtakes, pointing this time down a track leading to a riverside motel, into which he turns. We speed past and into town, to become two of the very few visitors who have ever been pleased to see the baleful town of Foca. The message of the chase couldn’t be clearer: ‘We know why you’re here, strangers, so get out and don’t come back.’ This is Karadzic country.
Tiden har stått stille
I Foca er det morderne som minnes, ikke ofrene. Dette skjer ikke i skjul, men helt åpenlyst. Republika Srpska befinner seg i en tidslomme, og det samme gjør Serbia. De har ennå ikke greid å ta noe oppgjør med fortiden. Derfor går forhandlingene om Kosovo så tregt.
When Bakira Hasecic, leader of the association of women war victims, tried to place a plaque on the sports centre in now all-Serb Foca, a crowd assembled and smashed the modest monument. But in this town where Karadzic has been spotted and sheltered while fugitive, there is a huge concrete monument by the River Drina: ‘To the heroes and victims… during the war of liberation 1991-95.’ ‘From your ashes,’ promises the plaque, ‘rises the dawn of the Serbian people. The bells from the altar proclaim that with your blood you made freedom.’
At man stadig oftere hører folk i Europa som rettferdiggjør serberne og mener Vesten sto på feil side, er uhyggelig. Så kort tid tar det å glemme – 12 år. Karadzic, Mladic og hans menn var virkelig mordere. De angrer ingenting. Heller ikke Srebrenica.
When an infamous war criminal and rapist, Radovan Stankovic, was recently sent to prison in Foca, he was freed within weeks by a breakout involving local police and prison staff. The site of the Omarska camp has been bought by the Indian steel mogul Lakshmi Mittal, who lives in Britain, and reopened as an iron ore mine, refurbished as though nothing had happened, employing only Serbs. Serbs still celebrate the ‘liberation’ of Srebrenica and other places they ravaged. ‘Noz zica Srebrenica’ has become a standard chant at football matches: ‘Knife and wire Srebrenica’. Hardly a reckoning – more relish that it was done, and willingness to do it again.
Vesten begikk uhyrlige feil under krigen i Bosnia. At de ikke har tatt de to krigsforbryterne er nok en unnlatelsessynd som styrker de forbryterske kreftene, også andre steder. Når Putin går inn for serbernes sak, er det ikke bare blodets bånd og kulturen som binder. Også forbrytelsene binder.
And so the continued liberty of Karadzic and Mladic is more than a matter of two fugitives at large. Their freedom is iconic, helping to keep their cause alive.
