Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

KARADZIC, RADOVAN
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change their underwear. Concessions like these were worth too much to lose, and the natural
instinct was to try to keep them.
There was the added factor that if an SS order went unheeded, or was not satisfactorily
completed, the functionary could lose much more than just his position. This made the
Kapos just that more vicious, and thus detested by their fellow prisoners. Kapos could be
(and often were) killed by the common prisoners as traitors, and could equally by killed
by the SS owing to their status as detested enemies of the Third Reich.
In February 1944, SS head Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) issued an official order preventing
Jews from serving as Kapos. He did so in order to bring Nazi ideology into alignment
with acceptable practice; that is, that no Jews should ever be placed in a position of
authority over a non-Jew, even someone who was a prisoner of the Nazis and therefore not
normally deserving the same treatment as one who was a respected citizen. The Nazi
world view could not accept Jews “ruling” over non-Jews, no matter what.
Karadzic, Radovan (b. 1945). Bosnian Serb leader. Born in Montenegro, Karadzic’s
father had been a Serb patriot and anticommunist who fought against Josip Broz Tito’s
(1892–1980) partisans during World War II. A psychiatrist by training and a poet by inclination,
Radovan Karadzic made himself the leading proponent of Bosnia’s Serbs. As a poet
he is said to have come under the influence of Dobrica Cosic (b. 1921), a Serb nationalist
writer. It was Cosic, in fact, who convinced Karadzic to enter the world of politics.
In 1990, he was a founder of a pro-Serbian nationalist party, the Srpska Demokratska
Stranka (SDS), or Serbian Democratic Party. His express goal in founding such was the
establishment of a Greater Serbia. In 1991, much like Hitler threatened the Jews in 1939,
he warned that Bosnia’s Muslim population would “disappear from the face of the Earth”
if it chose to “opt for war” by establishing an independent Bosnia-Herzegovina. At a later
point in time, he asserted that “Muslims are the most threatened . . . not only in the physical
sense . . . rather, this is also the beginning of the end of their existence as a nation.”
In the aftermath of the Bosnian declaration of independence from Yugoslavia on April 6,
1992, Karadzic declared the Serbian-peopled sections of the country independent, as
Republika Srpska, or the Serbian Republic. Backed by Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic
(1941–2006), between 1992 and 1995 Karadzic then waged a murderous war against the
Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was Karadzic who orchestrated the three-year-long siege
of Bosnia’s capital city, Sarajevo. Day after day, he ordered a barrage of artillery to rain on
the defenseless city. From his headquarters in Pale, in the mountains overlooking Sarajevo,
Karadzic ordered the systematic destruction of historic Muslim targets such as the National
Library, not to mention the killing of unarmed civilians congregated in open-air markets.
His most egregious crime was the offensive he ordered in 1995 against the six so-called safe
areas under UN protection (Sarajevo, Tuzla, Gorazde, Srebrenica, Zepa, and Bihac). In the
worst of these, and in full view, Karadzic’s senior military officer, General Ratko Mladic
(b. 1942) fell on the city of Srebrenica. Systematically, militias and troops from the Army
of Republika Srpska (the VRS), the Bosnian Serb army, captured as many men and boys
between the ages of ten and sixty-five as they could find, led them out of the city, and killed
them in the surrounding hills, burying them in mass graves. The women and children of
Srebrenica were sent outside the borders of Republika Srpska. This was one of the most blatant
acts of genocide, in the context of the Yugoslav wars, for which Milosevic was held
accountable indirectly, and in which Karadzic was the primary executor. Karadzic has yet
to be tried. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has