Thread by @zkusovac

THREAD #WarCrimes
In 1992 I spent hours talking with Radovan #Karadzic. I had that dubious honour mainly thks to the fact that I was the only Western journo (stranded) in Pale who knew the region & its people, history, myths, beliefs, politics, culture./2
nyti.ms/3ahrgnb

2/ Those bizarre sessions would usually start late in the evening and, over gallons of whiskey, oft went on till the wee hours of the morning. He obviously wanted to know what I had seen in Sarajevo just a few hours earlier (for insurance reasons, in the early months of the war/3

3/ our sat uplink was kept in the safety of Pale, so I kept crossing the frontlines on a daily basis, being shot at regularly but living to tell the story). He would listen with interest but when I finished he'd inevitably tell me that I had not seen what I had seen and that /4

4/ truth was different from what I had just lived through. It was weird in more ways than one but I kept returning becasuse it offered me not just some newsworthy snippets but also a valuable insight into his skewed mind. Except for one fairly short article at the beginning of /5

5/ his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, I refrained from writing about those weird nighttime conversations in the generator-lit villa that was built by a Serbian wall tiles factory so they could send their workers to rest & recuperate their /6

6/strained lungs in the mountain air of Pale, Ruritania. I keep war diaries so I have it all well documented, with quotes, topics of each conversation & my feelings & immediate comments. Having such an exclusive material itched me to write, but I never did because I did not /7

7/ trust myself to be able to portray his evil, calculated, premeditated, heartless, unscrupulous mind accurately, leaving no room for misinterpretation. If you write of your personal experiences with Dr Evil you have to include anecdotal details @JessicaEStern does it with /8

8/ "cypresses growing out of her palm" & (too) many more. But I did not want either anecdotes or MY feelings to overshadow what is the essence of a war criminal: knowledge that the lives & fates of thousands hang on the whims of one lunatic, conscious and proud of his madness. /9

9/ Madness that is not a medical condition but chosen & deliberate attitude, stance, manner. I didn't want to have anyone willingly or ignorantly misnterpret my writing and claim that it proves that Radovan Karadžić was just an eccentric psychiatrist with romantic nationalist /10

10/ dreams & illusions who stepped forward to lead his people, even though that IS one level at which one could interpret him. But NOT at the cost of forgetting who he really is and what he instigated, inspired, encouraged, led & did: A MASS MURDERER PROUD OF HIS ACHIEVEMENTS./11

11/ And THAT is exactly where @JessicaEStern & @nytimes fail miserably, doing a huge disservice to all the victims of the cynical exterminator & ethnic cleanser from Pale and his genocidal ilk.
Shame, shame, shame and pitty!
Withdraw the book! /END OF THREAD
#Bosnia #WarCrimes

@JessicaEStern @nytimes @janinedigi