SEEDS OF EVIL

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In 1990, with Yugoslavia coming apart, Karadzic plunged into politics. He dabbled with the ecologically concerned Green Party, then moved on to meetings of the Initiative for a Serb Democratic Party in Sarajevo. The militant faction was a response to the rise of Muslim and Croat national parties in Bosnia. Serbia's President, Slobodan Milosevic, soon took control of the movement and gave it a mission that ultimately put the former Yugoslavia to the torch: creation of a Greater Serbia. Few respectable Serbs in Sarajevo wanted anything to do with the scheme, choosing to align instead with the multiethnic Reformist Party. The Serb Democratic Party seemed to include too many brutes and bullies. When the party was formed officially in July 1990, its organizing group chose Karadzic as president. Assuming that Karadzic was only a temporary front man, Milosevic approved. "The man of clay was their ideal student," says Vesovic. "He did what he was told." Karadzic turned out to have staying power.

That was the takeoff time for Karadzic. He bought new clothes, cars for his family, expanded his apartment. In 1992 he moved with his family to Sarajevo's Holiday Inn, where his party had its headquarters, and when the war began in April they withdrew to Pale, 12 miles east. From there Karadzic ordered the siege and shelling of the city in which he had spent more than 30 years of his life, directing the killing of an estimated 10,000 former neighbors, colleagues and patients.

In July 1992 he told visiting reporters that the Muslims were sniping from Sarajevo and the Serbs had to reply with artillery. "Since our gunners are badly trained, they often miss and hit the wrong block," he said blandly. "They need more practice. We're working on it." A BBC television feature produced in 1994 and presented as evidence to the tribunal at the Hague shows Karadzic leading a guest to a 50-mm gun on a hillside overlooking Sarajevo and offering him a chance to fire a few rounds into the city. The guest did so.

Does Karadzic now feel guilty about all that? No, says Vesovic. "He considers himself completely innocent. He sees himself as a man fulfilling his destiny, a tool of history, the man who has given the Serbs in Bosnia a state and pushed the Turks [Muslims] back. He has a criminal's mind, like the Godfather in that Mafia movie. It's the attitude of 'Sorry, don't take it personally, but my job requires me to kill you.'"

Karadzic's former hospital colleague agrees, saying he must always have had the potential for brutality and aggression lurking within him. "Due to the circumstances," she says, "it finally erupted." That sums it up: Karadzic was made by circumstance. He was out for his big opportunity all along and tried various approaches. Nothing worked for him until he seized upon Serb nationalism and rode it to power.