NY Times: Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure

[friendly_iconoclast]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26karadzic-t.html

By JACK HITT
Published: July 22, 2009

It was Mina Minic’s wife who first opened the door, that day in 2005, to find a tall man inquiring if this was the house of “academic professor doctor Mina Minic.” The tall man gave Mrs. Minic a bouquet of flowers and kissed her hand. When Mr. Minic, a short, chipper Serbian soothsayer with 19th-century-style mutton chops, came down to the door, he found a “very strange” man who introduced himself as Dragan Dabic. The man wore a long overcoat with a gentleman’s hat, and when he lifted it, he revealed long gray tresses pulled up into a topknot, set beaklike at his forehead. Below, he sported a full bushranger beard. Minic’s first impression, he told me, was that Dabic looked “like a monk who had done something wrong with a nun.” Dabic asked if Minic was the famous “maestro of radiesthesia,” the master of a dowsing method that instead of a stick relies on a pendulum called a visak. (Depending on which account you read, radiesthesia dates back as far as the Egyptian pharaohs or some decades ago to a guy named Albert Abrams in San Francisco.)

Around the same time that Minic opened his door, another Belgrade clairvoyant, Dusan Janjic, had a similar encounter. The tall man appeared one day in the same get-up, again with flowers in hand for the wife. Dabic expressed profound admiration for Janjic’s talents — specifically, his prowess in reading energy grids with something called a Multi-Zap Zapper.

After acquiring his own Zapper and visak, Dabic grew professionally close to both Minic and Janjic. He came to spend vast swaths of time holed up in Minic’s office, a humble basement room where a desk was improvised from a bookcase set upon two chairs. Sometimes Dabic would sleep on a cot there. When Minic or Janjic would ask about Dabic’s history or his credentials, he’d be vague. He had lived in New York, he would say, but his marriage to his wife, who remained in New York with his children, had ended on an ugly note. Minic remembered that his friend maintained “four or five” cellphones and that they rang all the time. “He would always arrange to call everyone back,” Minic explained. “That’s why I thought he was a spy.”

But he wasn’t a spy. As Minic and Janjic (along with the rest of the world) were shocked to find out last July, their tall protégé with the eye-catching hairdo was Radovan Karadzic, the most hunted war criminal on the planet.....

This article is both deeply disturbing and hilarious at the same time. Let's just say there's a whole boatload of
crazy in 'alternative' circles in Serbia, and Karadzic was only one of the loonies..

[onager]

1. Fascinating. Thanks.

“There are two options,” said Kojic, cautiously, hesitantly, as if he were speaking for a nation. “Either we are all a bunch of fools and madmen who believed in the existence of a nonexistent man.” Or, he said, there is the possibility of redemption.

How about the option that you were tricked by an especially good con man?

The story of Yugoslavia's collapse is something I often ponder. I firmly believe it can happen in any "civilized" nation, even the exceptionalist, apple-of-God's-eye USA. All it takes is the right conditions, which I'm afraid are always not too far away. And a leader who knows how to exploit those conditions.

The BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia was very educational in explaining how the whole thing happened.

That docu was made right after the final breakup, in 1996 IIRC. Many of the people interviewed are dead now, and many of them did not die of natural causes.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

2. or is it top-down nationalism?

Political élites have managed to stoke nationalism for personal gain in many cases, and Yugoslavia is just one of them.

It didn't take long for Dixie nationalism to appear in the southern wartime USA given the CSA's short existence. Nationalism of the Confederate variety was a necessary tool to mobilise for total war.

Nationalists like Milosevic managed to stoke ethno-nationalism for personal career gains which undermined the very civic Yugoslav identity that had been established under Tito.

Indeed Czechoslovakia was torn aside by politicians wishing to consolidate power in the two constituent republics, against the wishes of both halves of the state.

Gorbachev's dream of a social democratic USSR was cut-short by a Boris Yeltsin who stoked little-Russian nationalism in the Russian SFSR so he could consolidate his own position as head of Russia without being subject to a supranational Soviet premier.

[Euromutt]

3. A bit of both

A major problem with Tito's Yugoslavia was that he slapped the bandage of Bratstvo i Jedinstvo (Brotherhood and Unity) on a festering wound without cleaning it first, and after his death, all it took to get the pus pouring out was for a few people to give a good hard tug on both ends of the bandage. A few opportunistic types like Milosevic and Tudjman, say (plus some others, but I don't want to get too bogged down in detail). But even though they fostered, harnessed and exploited the nationalism of their respective ethnic groups, they didn't create it; it was already there.

Ditto with Yeltsin, really. There was a lot of tension throughout the Soviet era stemming from the fact that every ethnic group got their "own" territory--from fully-fledged SSR to Autonomous Oblast--except the Russians, who had to share the RSFSR with Tatars, Samoyed, Yakuts, Buryats, all those folks in the North Caucasus etc. etc.