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		This is excerpted from Danner's long article, "Bosnia: The Turning Point," The New York Review of Books,2/5/98. Danner, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author ofThe Massacre at El Mozote. Hisnine-part series of articles on the wars in the former Yugoslavia (see links below) will be collected in a book in early 1999.

Early one February afternoon in 1994, people in Sarajevo shed their heavy coats and hats and poured out into streets and markets,allowing themselves to forget, in the bright warming sun, that fromartillery bunkers and snipers' nests dug into hills and mountainsabove the city hunters stared down, tracking their prey. But thepeople of Sarajevo were not permitted to forget. As we cruised thecity's streets in a small armored car, climbing, under a trembling,light-filled sky, toward the Spanish Fort, signs fell abruptly intoplace: a sudden chaos of horns and screams and screeching tires; ablue van tearing by with one eye peering out from a shattered face,and, racing in its wake, a battered white Yugo with a smeared redhand print emblazoned on its door.

We turned and forced our way back, struggling to trace the source of this grim caravan. When a policeman bade us stop, we clambered out and trotted down cluttered streets, dodging and stumbling through jumbles of honking vehicles until we entered once more the tiny square where, the day before, we had edged our way throughboisterous crowds, chatting with vendors behind bare wood tablesthat held the besieged city's paltry wares: handfuls of leeks andpotatoes, plastic combs in garish pink and green, scatterings of loosenuts and bolts, a blackened bit of banana, a monkey wrenchhalf-rusted, glinting fitfully in the beneficent sun.

Twenty-four hours later Markela marketplace stood precisely so,when, at 12:37 on February 5, 1994, a 120-millimeter mortar shellplunged earthward in an impossibly perfect trajectory, plummetedwithin view of the somber gray facade of the Catholic cathedral andthen by the windows of gray apartment buildings, passed throughthe market's ramshackle metal roof and erupted, its five pounds ofhigh explosive spewing out red-hot shrapnel and sending corrugatedmetal shards slicing through the crowd; in an eye-blink a thick forestof chattering, gossiping, bartering people had been cut down.

Now, turning into the tiny square, we found not infernal smoke ordarkness but, amid a terrible clarity, clumps of dark bundles strewnabout the asphalt, and, between them, spreading slowly amid shardsof charred metal and blackened vegetables and bits of plastic,puddles of slick dark liquid.

We stepped gingerly forward, letting pass two men dragging a limp,softly moaning figure; before us men moved from bundle to bundle,crouching, pressing fingers to a throat, pausing, pushing back aneyelid, staring. I left the curb, feeling my throat constrict as I passedinto a cloud of invisible and nauseating cordite; stumbling against acar, I looked down and saw my boot soles already shiny and slick.

A big man danced quickly by me, hoisting the video camera on hisshoulder, and close at his back came sound, craning his silver boomforward over the cameraman's head so that the two appearedtogether like some great rapacious bird. I followed step by carefulstep,1 and we passed through the bloody topography, tracing ourway slowly past torsos and parts of torsos; past arms and handsand bits of limbs and unidentifiable hunks of flesh, all mixed withblackened metal and smashed vegetables and here and there a longsplinter of wooden table. At the center of it all a man in a darkovercoat lay on his back, fully intact, face perfectly gray, eyesperfectly empty, staring blankly up at the perfect sky.

I took out my pen and notebook, and looked about me, somewhatbewildered. Here and there I recognized, or thought I did, vendors Ihad chatted with the day before; some artillery man on one of thosemountainsides had made of them objects now, exhibits for us and forthe evening news. I tried to tally the corpses, matching limbs totrunks, heads to limbs, counting, counting; but it was impossible. Inthe back of the market, three blank-faced men worked withblack-gloved hands behind a decrepit truck, crouching, lifting,heaving. As I approached I realized they were trying to match upparts of bodies on long pieces of corrugated metal; by now thetruckbed was half full and its tires and undercarriage thick with gore.

Turning back I saw a big, mustached man weeping, his hands raisedand grasping the air as he struggled to reach a blood-soaked bundle of cloth and flesh on the ground; two smaller men held him, murmuringas they worked to push him back. As the mustached face, red and distorted and full of fury, rose above the shoulders of thoseimprisoning him, I realized that I had chatted with him the daybefore, that he had been selling...what? Yes, lentils, that was it,lentils and potatoes, and his wife, now eviscerated at his feet, hadstood at his side. Now he lifted his great head, stared upward, and,raising a fist, began to shout. Along with several others I followedhis gaze and picked out the glinting specks in the bright blue sky:the planes of NATO, patrolling over the "safe area" of Sarajevo.

Amid the human wreckage of this sun-filled square, what could thisphrase possibly mean? Since United Nations diplomats had coinedit the previous spring, as Bosnian Serb soldiers stood ready toadvance from the hills around Srebrenica and seize the town, 2 noone had quite known. Now, amid the stench of cordite in Markelamarketplace, the world had at last been offered the hint of adefinition, one that would be affirmed in Srebrenica and Zepa thefollowing year: "safe area" meant very little indeed. Like so many oftheir "policies" in the Bosnian war, Western leaders had constructedthis one solely of words.

Now, for the people who had elected those leaders, large glasslenses-more and more of them bobbing and glinting now as morecameramen pushed their way into the tiny square-would makethose words flesh. A few hundred miles away Germans and Frenchwould press a button on a remote control and confrontoverwhelming gore; across the ocean Americans, with (presumably)more delicate sensibilities, would be permitted to see much less, butenough blood would remain for many of these citizens to pose aheartfelt if ephemeral question: Why is nothing being done aboutthis?

Though the Serbs had shelled Sarajevo for nearly two years; thoughthey had destroyed the National Library, burning thousands ofbooks, and had methodically reduced to ruins many of the city'sother cultural treasures; though they had cut off electricity andwater, forcing Sarajevans to place themselves in snipers' telescopicsights as they chopped down every tree in every park in search offirewood and stood in line filling plastic bottles at outdoor waterspigots-though the Serbs had killed and wounded thousands ofSarajevans from their bunkers in the hills and from their snipers'nests in the burned out high-rise buildings that lined "sniper'salley," after two years of siege only "an event" like the"Marketplace Massacre" had a chance of engaging the fickleattention of the world. The day before, the Serbs had launched threeshells into the Dobrinja neighborhood, killing ten Sarajevans as theywaited for food; twelve days before, two Serb shells had blownapart six children as they sledded in the filthy snow. How manydays of such steady, methodical work would be needed to matchthe marketplace's toll? Six? Seven? And yet such daily work,however deadly, didn't matter, for depending on the news in NewYork or London or Paris, it could not rise to the level of "massacre."

I stood in the morgue across the road from Kosevo hospital.Compared to the bloodslick ground of Markela, compared even tothe hospital entrance across the way-a hellhole now withshattered figures dead and dying in the hallways and a doctor, facebrightly flushed, furious, screaming at us ("Get out, get out, I said.Let us do our work!")-compared to that, it was quiet here,peaceful. I found myself alone for the first time that day-alonewith those who had suddenly become the most important actors inthe Bosnia drama. All unwittingly they had forced reluctantpoliticians and diplomats to come together-even now inWashington and Brussels and Paris they were gathering in urgenttalks-and they would in the next few days change the direction ofthe war. And yet they had done nothing more than thousands ofSarajevans before them, stand in a particular place at a particulartime and, all unknowingly, find a sudden and unseen death. I took out my notebook, drew a deep breath, and began to count. Itwas easier now, all had been properly arranged, what limbs and parts remained had been matched up by people well practiced in such things. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three...Yes, this was a big story, perhaps the biggest of the war. Thirty-one, thirty-two...Yes, a huge story....

"Many had ice in their ears."

"What? Excuse me?"

"Ice. They had ice in their ears," said Dr. Radovan Karadzic,psychiatrist, poet, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, as he prepared to takeanother bite of stew. "You know, the Muslims-they took bodiesfrom the morgue and they put them there, in the market. Even whenthey shell themselves like this, no one shell kills that many. So theywent to the morgue..."

I was-and not for the first time during our lunch-left speechless.Dr. Karadzic, clearly a very intelligent man, had mastered the fine artof constructing and delivering with great sincerity utterances thatseemed so distant from demonstrable reality that he left no commonground on which to contradict him. Ice in their ears? Muslimintelligence officers stealing into the morgue to snatch corpses,secreting them in cars, setting off a bomb in the marketplace, and inthe smoke and confusion leaving the frozen corpses strewn about theasphalt: it seemed an absurd idea. And yet despite myself I foundmyself thinking of the man in the overcoat lying on his back, staringupward, open-eyed. His face was peculiarly gray. Strange he bore noevident wounds... Ice in his ears? No. No, of course not.

Dr. Karadzic watched me, lightly smiled, took a bite of stew, andchewed heartily. He is-or at least he was, during that lunch in hisoffice in early February 1994-a hearty man, enormous, wide as theside of a barn and standing six foot four. In fact he appears taller than that, and this is clearly owing to the trademark hair. The hair is huge and sweeping and all-encompassing. It seems to be emerging from everywhere, head, forehead, ears, nose, in a kind of riot of power and fertility. And indeed, though he lived in Sarajevo thirty years, took his psychiatric degree at the university, and practiced in Kosevo Hospital, when he wasn't studying medicine and dabbling in poetry for a year in New York; though he recited and sang his poetry in the cafes and bars of that most cosmopolitan of cities, the Bosniancapital, Radovan Karadzic was in fact a man of the mountains, from asmall and rough Montenegrin village.

"He has a sense of grandiosity, like many mountain people-look atthe Scots, say," said Dr. Ismet Ceric, the chief of psychiatry atKosevo Hospital who had largely trained Karadzic and had been hisclose friend for twenty-five years. "People from themountains-Milosevic is Montenegrin too, you know, both hisparents come from there-these mountain people come down herefresh and strong, and they see city people as soft and corrupt."

In many ways, that theme-fresh, pure, hardy people descendingfrom the mountains and from the countryside to take their revenge on the soft corrupt cosmopolitans of the cities-had marked the conflict from the beginning. During the 1950s and 1960s, the traditional Muslim gentry, deracinated by Tito's land reforms, had migrated to the cities, particularly Sarajevo, where they joined an already well-established secular Muslim intelligentsia. As Ed Vulliamy points out in his Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War,

When Bosnians (usually Muslims, nowadays) tell you that all three people lived together without regard to ethnic groups, they are by and large telling the truth. But... while the towns and cities were nonchalant arenas for the practice of multi-ethnic Bosnia, everyday life in the countryside was one in which Muslims, Serbs and Croats were more insular. The Second World War in Bosnia had been driven by undercurrents of civil war and in the villages, peasants who had fought on all sides, and in particular the Serbs, made sure to keep their weapons. For them, the war had not yet ended; it was a question of waiting for the right moment to recommence it.

...I gazed at a wicker basket on [Pavelic's] desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters-as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. [Italian minister Raffaele] Casertano looked at me and winked, "Would you like a nice oyster stew?"

"Are they Dalmatian oysters?" I asked [Pavelic].

Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, "It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes."3

And that deeply instilled suspicion and fear is partly why-whenthousands of Sarajevans marched for peace in the first days of April1992, moving in a great river through the city toward the HolidayInn, an impossibly ugly yellow box of a building where Dr.Karadzic had installed Serbian Democratic Party offices, and Dr.Karadzic's bodyguards climbed to the roof and began firing into thecrowd, killing six people-that is why sixty thousand Serbs fled thecity, almost all of them relatively recent arrivals who had come toenjoy the riches the city offered but still distrusted its sophisticatedways.

Some of these Serbs would enlist in or be drafted into the BosnianSerb Army, an entity that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevicand his generals simply created out of whole cloth by rechristeningthe eighty thousand fully equipped Yugoslav Peoples Army troopsthen in Bosnia; these Serbs would take their places on themountainsides, living in the tiny log cabins with their tiny wisps ofcooking smoke that marked each artillery emplacement, andspending their days gazing, over the barrel of a cannon, at thebeautiful city that had welcomed them.

Radovan Karadzic, doctor, psychiatrist, businessman, poet, a manwho had traveled, who had broad and cosmopolitan interests,among them a devotion to American poetry, would seem to havelittle in common with such men. True, he had been born in 1945,into the violent postwar world of peasant Montenegro; his father had fought as a Chetnik, a Serbian nationalist guerrilla, and servedtime in Tito's prisons. And during our conversation the war he thenpresided over and the slaughter of a half-century before oftenblended together.

"The Serbs did not invent ethnic cleansing," he told me, severaltimes. "The Croatsdid, in World War II. When Tudjman and Izetbegovic formed a [Croat-Muslim] alliance, all Serbs were frightened to death that the same would happen as during the war, when hundreds of thousands of innocent Serbs were slaughtered."

This was partly true, of course: Karadzic well understood, asGoebbels did, that any effective propaganda had within it a kernelof truth. But memories were only the beginning; nationalist leaderslike Milosevic, Tudjman, and Karadzic, as former US Ambassadorto Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman points out, "were able to turnmany normal people toward extremism by playing on their historicfears through the baleful medium of television, a matchlesstechnological tool in the hands of dictators."

The nationalist media sought to terrify by evoking mass murderers of a bygone time. The Croatian press described Serbs as "Cetniks." ... For the Serbian press Croatians were "Ustase" (and later, Muslims became "Turks"). People who think they're under ethnic threat tend to seek refuge in their ethnic group. Thus did the media's terror campaign establish ethnic solidarity on the basis of an enemy to be both hated and feared.

Their huge burning eyes, cropped heads and shrivelled, sickly torsos emerged only as one became accustomed to the darkness: hundreds of men, some of them gaunt and horribly thin, crammed like factory farm beasts into the stinking, putrid spaces of two large underground storage hangars built into the hillside.... This infernal tunnel had been their hideous home for ten weeks now....

At the back of the hangars, the walls were pockmarked with bullet-holes.... Prisoners talked about Croatian guards coming up to the hangar doors after drinking sessions and singing as they fired into their quarters.... Estimates of the number of dead on these occasions ranged from three to ten.

Many recall that he wore every day the same dirty white sweater,made from the wool of his native village, and that even then, his big head of hair set him apart. "He had a hillbilly kind of haircut, veryfashionable in his village," recalled Mohamed Dedajic, theneighborhood barber. "When I tried to make a suggestion, he'd say,'No, no, I like long hair.'"4

Perhaps he thought his Byronic locks appropriate to a great poet,for if one theme arises again and again in conversations about theyounger Karadzic it is the breadth of his ambition, hissingle-minded determination to achieve greatness. "He told me hewas the great poet of Serbian history," Dr. Ceric told me. "I said, 'Iknow ten here in Sarajevo who are better than you and maybe sevenhundred in Belgrade.' He hardly reacted. He said, 'Well, I have threebooks out already and soon [my reputation] is going to go: boom!'"

"But it was the same with his psychiatry," said Ceric. "He wasgood, but not excellent. He had many ideas but to be excellent you must follow one way, have one thought. He had many other interests-soccer, poetry, business-that took too much of his time."

Karadzic married a psychoanalyst, the daughter of an old andwell-to-do Serb family. Among his poet friends, his bride was notpopular; they thought her unattractive and domineering and theyassumed he married her so that, as one man told me, "the peasantcould get some money." Soon he was appointed official psychiatristto the Sarajevo national soccer team, a prominent and desirableposition, but unfortunately his pep talks on the psychology ofconfidence and winning seemed to bring the young players littlesuccess. Meantime his face and hair became familiar to Sarajevans ashe doggedly read his poems on television and radio and at the cafes,but, as Ceric told me, "his reputation among his colleagues remainedrelatively low."

One can see a traditional plot taking shape here: ambitious andidealistic country boy arrives in the glittering city, strugglesdesperately to make good, but succeeds only in earning the laughterand contempt of the cosmopolitan intellectuals he longs to impress;and so he climbs back up the mountainside, rejoins the "clean andpure" fellow peasants, and takes his revenge. It is a convenient story,particularly when one glances at the facades of Karadzic's oldapartment house-his name remains on the bell-and of KosevoHospital, and notes pockmarks from shells launched by Karadzic'sguns, just below his Pale chalet-office where we spoke. SeveralSaraje-vans told me how the psychiatrist-poet, during a reading, hadbeen laughed and jeered off the stage, how he had fled cursing andredfaced and resentful; but none knew where the event had takenplace, or when. In his memoir, The Tenth Circle of Hell, RezakHukanovic writes of the planning for the Serb concentration camps:

And where on earth was the poisonous game conceived? In the head of that bloodthirsty lyricist, the mad psychiatrist from Sarajevo, Radovan Karadzic. Years before, clearly spelling out the evil to come, he had written: "Take no pity let's go/kill that scum down in the city."

Radovan had a cosmopolitan approach to problems. You never felt he was a Serb, never. You never felt he was a religious man. I remain quite sure to this day that he is absolutely atheistic. A lot of his friends were Muslims. He was, in fact, a very typical man of this multicultural environment.

Then came 1989, and Milosevic's fiery speech at the field of Kosovo,virtually threatening war; and the rise in Croatia and in Bosnia ofnationalist parties under Tudjman and Izetbegovic. Radovan Karadzic, ever ambitious, ever searching for a means to achieve greatness, saw his chance and entered politics. One can gauge the depth of his nationalism by the fact that he first joined the Green Party. Only later did he transfer his loyalties to the Initiative for a Serbian Democratic Party, which Milosevic had started as a Bosnian vehicle to advance his program to achieve a Greater Serbia-"All Serbs in one nation." The embryonic party consisted of little more than a collection of bullies and thugs, and Karadzic, standing out as a well-known and cultured man, rose quickly; in July 1990, his new colleagues chose Dr. Radovan Karadzic, fledgling politician, to lead the now-official Serbian Democratic Party.

It was, as Dr. Ceric told me, echoing a comment I heard a dozentimes, "a very big surprise." But though his Sarajevo acquaintancesexpressed bewilderment at "what happened to Radovan when thewar started," by now the logic of his transformation takes on acertain clarity. If one constant in his life was great ambition, a fierceand unremitting conviction that he was in some way destined toachieve greatness, another was a relative disregard for the means bywhich he would find it. A great doctor, an innovative psychiatrist, acelebrated poet: by 1990, seeing that none of these paths had yetcarried him to triumph-though he had likely not lost faith, he wassimply impatient, unwilling to wait for the recognition of hisgenius-he recognized that politics in the era of Yugoslavia'sdissolution would offer him instant greatness. And thatuntrammeled ambition, unencumbered as it was by any trueprinciple-for Karadzic the ideology resulted from the ambition, ithad not caused it-could not help but make him attractive to a greatpolitical manipulator like Milosevic. As Marko Vesovic, awell-known writer and a Montenegrin who has known Karadzicsince 1963, told Time magazine:

In poetry and in life, Karadzic was a person without personality. He was like clay, without personality, without character, who could be molded.... The man of clay was [Milosevic's] ideal student. He did what he was told.5

I asked him, "What is the problem-what is the political problem that you are trying to solve?"

He said, "There is only one problem: Alija [Izetbegovic] wants to organize an Islamic Republic here...."

I said, "This is completely stupid, because even if Alija did want to organize such a thing a majority of Muslims don't want it and wouldn't accept it. I mean, even now, after we've lost 200,000 people, the majority by far wouldn't accept an Islamic Republic."

Anyone who has spoken to Dr. Karadzic will recognize this"mechanism of falsification of reality" as his most distinctivequality. When I inquired of him, over our plates of beef stew, in hissmall office, with color-coded maps showing successive diplomaticplans for slicing up Bosnia on one wall and an Orthodox crucifix onthe other, about the siege of Sarajevo, the siege that people aroundthe world had been watching in transfixed horror for almost twoyears, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs replied that there was nosiege-that in fact those artillery pieces and mortars had been duginto the mountainside to keep the Muslim hordes from breaking outof the city and attacking the Serbs. As always with Karadzic, thewords seemed so distant from reality that one had troublemustering arguments to challenge him.

I asked Karadzic about the shelling of the National Library, whosebroken, cluttered ruins I had visited a few days before, perusing theodd charred scrap of paper, the pitiful remains of hundreds ofthousands of irreplaceable books and manuscripts. How could he, a man of learning and culture, a poet himself, have countenanced hisgunners lobbing shell after shell into the great building, destroying itin a day in a great conflagration that left his adopted city canopiedin a cloud of priceless ash? Dr. Karadzic could only shake his headsadly, stare gravely into my eyes, and declare that of course theMuslims had destroyed this building themselves: "It was aChristian building, you know, from the Austro-Hungarian period,and so the Muslims hated it. Only Christian books were burned,you know. The others they removed."

And so it was with the shells that had reduced the world-renownedInstitute of Oriental Culture to a burned carcass; so it was with themortar round that had plunged into a crowd waiting outside a shopin a downtown street and brought the world the Breadline Massacreof May 27, 1992, in which sixteen people died in a telegenic horrorthat forced the Western countries to impose the first set ofsanctions against the Serbs; so it was with the two shells that hadkilled six children who were sledding twelve days before theMarketplace Massacre, and the three shells that had killed tenSarajevans and wounded eighteen in Dobrinja on February 4. Ineach case, Dr. Karadzic told me, the Muslims, "trying to gain thesympathy of the world," had "shelled themselves."

There was a certain brilliance to his blank and impenetrablesincerity. I actually found myself wondering, as a young blondwaitress cleared the dishes from Karadzic's desk, whether he couldpossibly believe anything he was saying. "Mechanism forfalsification of reality"-that was Dr. Ceric's term. And yet this seemed insane: Karadzic visited his troops as they sat in theirhillside bunkers, shaking their hands and clapping them on the backas they smoked their cigarettes and cooked their soup. In a BBCfilm about Karadzic, the leader of the Serbs smiles as he sightsdown a cannon barrel and then offers a Russian visitor, thenationalist writer Eduard Limonov, the chance to fire off a shell intoKaradzic's former city. (Limonov gladly accepts.)6

I thought of Karadzic's bodyguards, who lounged about the lobbyas I waited for the Great Man. The guards appeared to have beenchosen in large part for their beauty and they were clearlyconscious of it as they sauntered about, laughing and preening,some wearing combat fatigues, others distinctive purple jumpsuits,all with 9-millimeter automatic pistols belted tightly at their hips;they ignored me while watching me closely. Who could this be,granted an interview with the Big Man, the man who shelled theTurks?

And yet it was clear that the consistent and inarguablepreposterousness of Karadzic's answers held within it animportance far beyond any press conference or interview, reachinginto the complex diplomatic struggle of the war itself. He was in thebusiness of creating excuses-excuses, however absurd, that let theworld allow the war to go on. What he said admitted of no answer.Ice in their ears? How could I respond? I was there, the bodieswere real, you can't be serious. And Dr. Karadzic would look mein the eye and answer in that reasonable tone: Yes, but did youcheck their ears? You didn't? So how can you be sure?

I am finally lost, I am glowing like a cigarette On a neurotic's lip: While they look for me everywhere I wait in the ambush of dawn. -from "A Morning Hand Grenade"
(1983), by Radovan Karadzic.7

Someone switched to Great Britain's Sky News just in time for usto hear the young woman reading the news announce that Dr.Radovan Karadzic had reacted with outrage to accusations that theSerbs had bombed the marketplace, had demanded the charge bewithdrawn, and had vowed that, until it was, his soldiers wouldblock all food deliveries into the city. This was a grave threatindeed-not because it might bring Sarajevo's malnourished citizensto the point of starvation, although it might, but because if theSerbs did not permit Western troops to make "humanitariandeliveries" to Bosnia's besieged people, Western leaders-havingsaid again and again that NATO warplanes could not bomb Serbartillery because they had "troops on the ground" who would bevulnerable to Serb retribution-would have difficulty explainingexactly what their suddenly idle troops were doing in Bosniabeyond providing them, the Western leaders, an excuse forrefraining from taking some strong action to stop the war that, ithad long since become clear, they greatly preferred not to take.

Indeed, in Washington, where President Clinton was even nowmeeting with his senior advisers, it seemed a process of reevaluationhad already begun, for one of those advisers-we learned from theSky News reader-had hastened to let it be known that"sentiment" was growing that NATO planes should in fact bombthe Serbs. Meantime the President himself had denounced theslaughter-and demanded the United Nations "urgently investigate"who was to blame. Having delivered herself of that bit of news, thenews reader looked into the camera and with practiced gravitydelivered her closing line: "There is no report yet," she said, "onwho could be the author of this terrible crime."

The absurdity of this statement seemed so palpable that I started,then looked around the room, speechless, to see others' reactions.No one flinched. They were used to it. Nor would they have beensurprised to learn that at that very moment a Canadian majorassigned to the United Nations forces was crouching in thenortheast corner of the marketplace, hard at work examining the"splash pattern" left by that afternoon's shrapnel in order todetermine whence the shell had come. In fact, the Canadian majorwas working on no less than the third of that afternoon's "crateranalyses," a French lieutenant having conducted the first at twoo'clock, and a French captain a second an hour later. As ithappened-and not surprisingly with what was a rather inexactscience-results differed markedly: while the French lieutenantconcluded that the shell had followed a northerly course, and thuseither Serb or Muslim gunners could theoretically have launched it,and the Canadian major arrived, by a slightly different path, atlargely the same destination, the French captain found that theround had followed an easterly path-which would have put themortar and its crew behind Muslim lines.8

To an innocent eye, the entire exercise appeared bewildering.Sarajevo lay in a valley surrounded by mountains from which fornearly two years Serb artillery pieces-including a great number of120-millimeter mortars-had day after day rained down shells onthe city. During twenty-two months, Serb gunners and snipers hadlaunched hundreds of thousands of shells and had killed perhaps tenthousand Sarajevans. Yet when a shell happened to kill a largenumber of people, United Nations officials, acting in the full flowerof their "neutral" appreciation for the interests of Serbs andMuslims, felt obliged to treat the explosive's source as"undetermined." As much as anything did, this decisiondemonstrated the symbiosis that had developed between the Serbs,who were winning the war and thereby had brought Bosnia closest to "peace" (if the irritatingly stubborn Muslims would only accept this as a fact), and the United Nations forces-mainly, but not exclusively, French and British-who showed themselves loyal only to the task of delivering "humanitarian aid" and the "neutrality" that they must maintain in order for the Serbs to permit them to keep feeding the victims.

Karadzic with his apparently absurd statements had in fact read thesituation with great brilliance. As Peter Maass well describes in hisbeautiful and moving memoir Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War,the Serb leader succeeded in creating doubt where there should havebeen none because people wanted to doubt.

I knew that the things Karadzic said were lies, and that these lies were being broadcast worldwide, every day, several times a day, and they were being taken seriously. I am not saying that his lies were accepted as the truth, but I sense they were obscuring the truth, causing outsiders to stay on the sidelines, and this of course was a great triumph for Karadzic.

He needed, for example, to make everyone question whether the Bosnians were bombing themselves, and in fact everyone did wonder about that, because each time a lot of Bosnians were killed by a mortar in Sarajevo, Western governments asked the UN soldiers for a "crater analysis".... "Crater analysis" is not always an exact science.... The incoming direction of the shell could be determined, but not the precise position from which it was fired. If Karadzic denied responsibility, and if the United Nations could not prove scientifically that the Serbs were responsible, then we should hold off on punishing them, right? Right. Thankfully, we have not always been so circumspect, and did not demand, during World War II, that Winston Churchill provide proof that the bombs exploding in London were German rather than British.

1. I was in Sarajevo working with an ABC News crew to prepare a documentary on Bosnia. See Mark Danner and David Gelber, writers, Peter Jennings, correspondent, "While America Watched:The Bosnia Tragedy," Peter Jennings Reporting, ABC News (March 17, 1994),ABC-51.

2. See "Clinton, the UN, and the Bosnian Disaster," The New York Review,December 18, 1997, the third of the present series of articles, which began with "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe," The New YorkReview, November 20, 1997, and "America and the Bosnia Genocide," The New York Review, December 4, 1997.

3. See Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (Dutton, 1946; reprinted by Avon, 1966), p.257. Tim Judah, in his book The Serbs, notes that though the story of the eyesis "for many Serbs the most enduring image of [the Serbian] holocaust," no onecan be certain whether it happened as Malaparte described. By now, however, asJudah says: "The scene has become so well known among Serbs that the vastmajority believe that it is a description of a real event."

4. See Tracy Wilkinson, "Bosnians Recall Karadzic, a Neighbour Turned Enemy,"Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1995.

5. See Deejan Anastasijevic, Massimo Calabresi, Alexandra Niksic, and AlexandraStiglmayer, "Seeds of Evil: The Opportunistic and Allegedly Criminal Career ofRadovan Karadzic May Be Coming to an End," Time, July 29, 1996.

6. See Pawel Pawilokowski, Serbian Epics, Channel Four (British BroadcastingCorporation, 1992).

7. Quoted in "Seeds of Evil," Time magazine.

8 .See David Binder, "Anatomy of a Massacre," Foreign Policy 97, Winter1994-1995, pp. 70-78.

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