Post by Novus Dis on Jul 26, 2008 4:10:28 GMT -5
ON KARADZIC’S FEAST DAY.
The Serbs have a very old, strict tradition that the host, on the day of the feast of his Patron Saint, must not sit for a moment at the festive table, but has to serve the guests standing all the time.
Despite being the President of the Republic, my friend respected the rule going from one guest to another and pouring red or white wine into their glasses. The festive table was placed in the form of the letter U, in a small, low-ceilinged guest-room of the former weekend cottage in the small mountain place Pale above the city of Sarajevo, which he had by force transformed into a residence. At the table were sitting his relatives who arrived from different places, a few war ministers and officers, a priest and the three of us, his old friends, who came through snow and blizzard, over icy roads to wish him joy and happiness for the day of the feast of his Patron Saint, Archangel Michael.
November 21, 1995.
The General, the commander-in-chief, arrived carrying on the palm of his hand, according to the tradition in the mountain villages, a big red apple, on which was placed a box of cheap cigarettes without filter. The General was in conflict with the President, yet he came to the Feast without escort, although feeling uneasy about how the President’s personal guards would meet him.
An old Serbian writer who loved them both, tried to reconcile them in a letter in which he cited George Washington, who at his time was also in conflict with the commander-in-chief of his army: "General – wrote Washington – if we are not together today, we will hang separately tomorrow!"
That night, in the American military base Dayton, the peace treaty was to be signed, so the big TV set was on, placed on a chest-of-drawers, so that it could be seen from any angle. Everyone was waiting for the live transmission of signing of the peace treaty.
The President was not allowed to travel to America. He lived in that small house with a miniature garden, as if under house detention, and we would come from time to time to tell him about the literary news from the capital. Being an excellent poet, he was interested in what the colleagues were writing and what they were doing, since he was in no position to follow it himself. Our meetings would start around midnight, after he had finished his statesman’s duties, taken off his dark suit, untied his tie and put on a tracksuit and athletic shoes; therefore we called him, between ourselves, the Midnight Man. During those vigils he drank very little, just a sip now and then, while we took advantage of the house full of whiskey that visitors brought him, to get properly drunk. It used to happen to me to doze off on the nearest sofa, being in need of sleep and tired of road, then after a short rest to join the conversation again.
He told me once: "I have never seen anyone fall asleep five times and five times wake up as good as new, in the course of one night only!" "Neither have I" – I admitted – "ever met anyone who would five times fall asleep in the presence of a president of a state!"
The President was otherwise accused of war crime and had to be delivered to the Tribunal in The Hague. He was even put on the wanted list that promised a 5,000,000 US Dollars award to anyone who would give any information about him. Those who were looking for him knew very well his whereabouts, but did not dare to engage in his capturing because they would lose a lot of their men. Therefore, they sent a helicopter from time to time, which would hang for hours, as a lamp in the air, over the roof, thundering with its powerful engines, so that the small house and all things in it would shake and tremble, from the cellar to the loft, in insufferable noise.
A Russian surgeon operated his injured knee. In order that it could be fully healed, he would have to walk a few kilometers every day, but he could not leave the house, so we brought him an exercise bike which he rode by night with his eyes closed, travelling on it in the dark on the roads of the state whose founder he was, but on the roads of which he was allowed to travel only in dreams.
Maybe those long night journeys should be described; dusty roads of Herzegovina, going around Sarajevo on side roads, and the view of that cursed town in which he used to be an esteemed poet and psychiatrist. The promenade on the Main Street and halls in which he used to read his poem "Sarajevo", throwing back the flocks of his untamable hair from his forehead; the roads of Krajina and the border with Montenegro in Vilusi, where he met on his knees, with thousands of mountain dwellers, the holy relics of Saint Vasilije, that the monks took for the first time out of the Ostrog Monastery, for the salvation of the people from annihilation; all that and many regions and a multitude of faces that he passed by at night, driving his bike without wheels, not leaving the room.
Finally, the TV transmission started.
On the monitor, the presidents and representatives of the warring sides shook hands with the President of the United States of America. They delivered speeches, then they put their signatures on a document by which I lost my hometown Sarajevo – which I will never be able to see again.
The only man who was not present there was the one who founded the youngest Serbian state in history.
I felt his hand on my shoulder and turned my eyes off the monitor. He was standing there, in his full-dress suit, holding a jug of red wine in his left hand. His eyes were fixed upon the people who were at that moment tearing to pieces his country, the one he had been creating for years.
"There goes Sarajevo!" - I said hardly fighting back tears.
"Some more wine?" – he asked, and without waiting for an answer, he filled up my glass.
MANHUNT.
I have known Radovan Karadzic for decades. I remember him from the period when he was a young long-haired poet, but at that time we were not that close. When I would come to spend summer holidays in Sarajevo, I used to read his poems, which were unusual and different from others. As it is the matter with all acquaintances – for me he was just a small part of the image of the city which I occasionally visited.
When the creation of the Republika Srpska started, and when I felt the need - let me be a little pathetic – to be with my people, I started to go to Herzegovina and to Pale, which became a small mountain capital.
I saw Radovan Karadzic again. It was the same thin man with the uncontrollable hair, clever, delicate, sensitive, exceptionally honest. I believe in Camus’ thought that after a certain number of years every man is accountable for his face.
On the other hand, he is a perfect gentleman, both in behaviour and in his private life. Unlike the people in power, he is a good listener, not going into monologues. Regarding his dressing, he usually wears well-tailored suits that perfectly fit to his grizzled hair; ties of subdued colours and shirts of discreet patterns. He is very kind to ladies, as well as to people of the lowest positions. His perfect English enables him for easy orientation and moving in international circles, and his extraordinary height (and not only physical) contributes to his charisma of a real gentleman. The only bad trait that I noticed in him is certainly that mild feeling of superiority which is the result of his profession of a psychiatrist. However, it is not strange; people who have a psychiatrist as a leader probably have pathological types as enemies. Anyway, it is a gentleman who will hardly meet his match in the near future.
Today, Radovan is a myth, and one cannot murder or arrest a myth. I used to be a frequent visitor in his modest house in Pale. His wife Ljiljana had no attendants, she cooked by herself, on a cooker with just one ring working.
Radovan’s men used to come by jeep and pick us up in the place where we were accommodated. Everything was rather mysterious. They take us to one place and he is not there. He is not in the second or third place either. We find him after the fifth, sixth try.
Radovan changes his statesman suit, puts on a tracksuit, and we don’t discuss politics all night long. We talk about poets, poetry, old friends, our lives. He used to say that those were the only moments when he felt like a poet again. (…)
After a certain period of time, when he had already abdicated from the office of the President of the Republika Srpska, for the benefit of his people, and had withdrawn from the political life, the Americans put him on the wanted list, dead or alive: whoever catches or murders him gets five million dollars as an award. Since then, he has disappeared into thin air, and the whole series of stories and speculations has started – in which mountains and monasteries is hiding the man who has created the first Serbian state, after many years of slavery and lies in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The great manhunt after the most expensive head in the world has started, but as far as I know, not one of Radovan’s writer friends has denied the friendship with him, considering it to be a special honour and privilege. (…)
When he appeared on the wanted list, manhunters bred like rabbits. In the middle of the persecution I published a story about it under the title:
MANHUNT
In New York, in Greenwich Village and SoHo, there are souvenir shops in which tourists can have their own APB printed for a couple of dollars, with a big photo and a dollar amount that they themselves specify, in order to be able to boast how important they are, once back at home, in Europe. Wanted! Dead or Alive! The imagination of these jokers at their own expense usually does not exceed $10,000, while megalomaniacs and myth-maniacs will immediately be recognized by asking for themselves the whole $100,000. Interesting, but it is never more than that.
I read in newspapers that the Americans have put Radovan Karadzic on the wanted list, and that the award was the whole five million of dollars! Knowing Radovan’s innate modesty, I immediately suspected that it was a Greenwich Village wanted list, and that it was not him who printed it but somebody else.
Five million dollars! Well, for Tito and General Draza Mihailovic only 100,000 German Reichsmarks were offered, and the children still learn about it at school, and fail the makeup exams in history if they do not know the correct amount and say that for these historical personalities a million per person was offered.
What a movie it would be! If Spielberg by some miracle could read in Serbian, he would certainly buy the rights for this story.
If you noticed, by chance, all American films always start with a shot under the opening credits in which a car approaches some private or official building. This time it is the Sate Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, along the long corridors of which the wards take Kevin Costner in chains; he was sentenced for life, plus one hundred and twenty years, for a series of murders. The warden Donald Sutherland hands him over to a CIA official (Gene Hackman), and in the next sequence they are flying to Washington, while Kevin, drinking champagne, meets the child sitting next to him, who has nothing to do with this movie.
To put it briefly, in Washington they let him see a film about Radovan Karadzic: Radovan skiing, at the promotion of his poetical book, with family, at the frontline, in Geneva at negotiations, in New York at the time of his specialist training, taped in the shop "Stop & Shop" in the Blinker Street printing his own APB with a $100 award. After getting acquainted with the looks and characteristics of the wanted person, Kevin sets his conditions: half a million of dollars for expenses and the right to make his own group of commandos, of which he will be the leader.
Two of them are let out of jail the next day; Sylvester Stalone, who has been serving a long-term prison sentence for kidnapping the daughter of the Governor of California, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, sentenced for life for killing King Kong, who does not stand Kevin Costner because of his love for wolves. The three of them together pay a visit to Robert de Niro, the last living manhunter from Dakota, who quit his old job and entered the computer business; they want to talk him into joining them in this dangerous mission, after which they will all become rich. They need him because there is no American movie today in which the pursuers do not search their victim by means of a computer. They also need one black man with a prison haircut, who will be inconspicuous in the Republika Srpska (because there are many of them there, in the UN troops), and of course because there is no American movie in which a white policeman does not have a black partner in order to chase together a red-headed European, who is a criminal.
What movie would it be without a women and occasional rolling on the bed, when the love game is necessarily interrupted by ringing of a phone? So, the woman is Sharon Stone, the famous platinum blonde bitch, who was raped by her father when she was a little girl, and who wants to reach doctor Karadzic at any cost, in order to have a psychotherapy and get healed from that old trauma, and also to earn something. She is indispensable also for the fact that she is a CNN reporter (without whom such an action cannot go off) and because the whole manhunting group will pretend to be a TV crew, which is otherwise very often the case in our crisis areas.
The group first visits Sarajevo, for the exoticism of mosques, madrasah, and Bascarsija, and for necessary consultations with the former pursuers of doctor Radovan Karadzic. Before leaving for the wilderness they hire two Sherpas, i.e. Serbs coming from the mountains which they are going to climb, but the guides run away even before crossing the border, with stolen chewing gums and a carton of "Marlboro". So they find themselves all alone in the wild Pale. There they lose the first member of their group – Arnold Schwarzenegger, who dies in pain the first night, after having drunk on a bet with the people from Pale the whole bottle of grape brandy "Guslar", full of methyl-alcohol.
On their way, they make false interviews with peasants, making enquiries where is Radovan Karadzic hiding. Sharon Stone suffers the most in the mountains covered with deep snow, although she is being warmed every night in her sleeping bag by Robert de Niro, whom Kevin Costner murders out of jealousy. Interesting, but in whatever stormy weather or natural disaster the heroines of American movies may be, they always wake up with a perfect hair-do, make up and false eyelashes.
One morning, they find out that Sylvester Stalone has disappeared into thin air with the money for the operation "The Olympic Tracks". The Black Man gets lured over to the side of the peasants from Romanija mountain, to rap along the gusle (one-stringed Balkan folk fiddle), and he takes up permanent residence in Sokolac, where he sells suntan lotions. There remain only Kevin Costner and Sharon Stone who fight their way through a blizzard, and half-frozen arrive to a house with no one inside. After a blazing row they kill each other. It turns out, of course, that Sharon Stone is not fully murdered, just easily wounded in a shoulder. With the last atoms of strength, guided by a satellite, living on anti-baby pills only, she goes downhill and fainting falls into arms of Jack Nicholson, not knowing that he is already married, with three kids.
THE END!
And, where is Radovan?
Radovan is in the legend.
The Serbs have a very old, strict tradition that the host, on the day of the feast of his Patron Saint, must not sit for a moment at the festive table, but has to serve the guests standing all the time.
Despite being the President of the Republic, my friend respected the rule going from one guest to another and pouring red or white wine into their glasses. The festive table was placed in the form of the letter U, in a small, low-ceilinged guest-room of the former weekend cottage in the small mountain place Pale above the city of Sarajevo, which he had by force transformed into a residence. At the table were sitting his relatives who arrived from different places, a few war ministers and officers, a priest and the three of us, his old friends, who came through snow and blizzard, over icy roads to wish him joy and happiness for the day of the feast of his Patron Saint, Archangel Michael.
November 21, 1995.
The General, the commander-in-chief, arrived carrying on the palm of his hand, according to the tradition in the mountain villages, a big red apple, on which was placed a box of cheap cigarettes without filter. The General was in conflict with the President, yet he came to the Feast without escort, although feeling uneasy about how the President’s personal guards would meet him.
An old Serbian writer who loved them both, tried to reconcile them in a letter in which he cited George Washington, who at his time was also in conflict with the commander-in-chief of his army: "General – wrote Washington – if we are not together today, we will hang separately tomorrow!"
That night, in the American military base Dayton, the peace treaty was to be signed, so the big TV set was on, placed on a chest-of-drawers, so that it could be seen from any angle. Everyone was waiting for the live transmission of signing of the peace treaty.
The President was not allowed to travel to America. He lived in that small house with a miniature garden, as if under house detention, and we would come from time to time to tell him about the literary news from the capital. Being an excellent poet, he was interested in what the colleagues were writing and what they were doing, since he was in no position to follow it himself. Our meetings would start around midnight, after he had finished his statesman’s duties, taken off his dark suit, untied his tie and put on a tracksuit and athletic shoes; therefore we called him, between ourselves, the Midnight Man. During those vigils he drank very little, just a sip now and then, while we took advantage of the house full of whiskey that visitors brought him, to get properly drunk. It used to happen to me to doze off on the nearest sofa, being in need of sleep and tired of road, then after a short rest to join the conversation again.
He told me once: "I have never seen anyone fall asleep five times and five times wake up as good as new, in the course of one night only!" "Neither have I" – I admitted – "ever met anyone who would five times fall asleep in the presence of a president of a state!"
The President was otherwise accused of war crime and had to be delivered to the Tribunal in The Hague. He was even put on the wanted list that promised a 5,000,000 US Dollars award to anyone who would give any information about him. Those who were looking for him knew very well his whereabouts, but did not dare to engage in his capturing because they would lose a lot of their men. Therefore, they sent a helicopter from time to time, which would hang for hours, as a lamp in the air, over the roof, thundering with its powerful engines, so that the small house and all things in it would shake and tremble, from the cellar to the loft, in insufferable noise.
A Russian surgeon operated his injured knee. In order that it could be fully healed, he would have to walk a few kilometers every day, but he could not leave the house, so we brought him an exercise bike which he rode by night with his eyes closed, travelling on it in the dark on the roads of the state whose founder he was, but on the roads of which he was allowed to travel only in dreams.
Maybe those long night journeys should be described; dusty roads of Herzegovina, going around Sarajevo on side roads, and the view of that cursed town in which he used to be an esteemed poet and psychiatrist. The promenade on the Main Street and halls in which he used to read his poem "Sarajevo", throwing back the flocks of his untamable hair from his forehead; the roads of Krajina and the border with Montenegro in Vilusi, where he met on his knees, with thousands of mountain dwellers, the holy relics of Saint Vasilije, that the monks took for the first time out of the Ostrog Monastery, for the salvation of the people from annihilation; all that and many regions and a multitude of faces that he passed by at night, driving his bike without wheels, not leaving the room.
Finally, the TV transmission started.
On the monitor, the presidents and representatives of the warring sides shook hands with the President of the United States of America. They delivered speeches, then they put their signatures on a document by which I lost my hometown Sarajevo – which I will never be able to see again.
The only man who was not present there was the one who founded the youngest Serbian state in history.
I felt his hand on my shoulder and turned my eyes off the monitor. He was standing there, in his full-dress suit, holding a jug of red wine in his left hand. His eyes were fixed upon the people who were at that moment tearing to pieces his country, the one he had been creating for years.
"There goes Sarajevo!" - I said hardly fighting back tears.
"Some more wine?" – he asked, and without waiting for an answer, he filled up my glass.
MANHUNT.
I have known Radovan Karadzic for decades. I remember him from the period when he was a young long-haired poet, but at that time we were not that close. When I would come to spend summer holidays in Sarajevo, I used to read his poems, which were unusual and different from others. As it is the matter with all acquaintances – for me he was just a small part of the image of the city which I occasionally visited.
When the creation of the Republika Srpska started, and when I felt the need - let me be a little pathetic – to be with my people, I started to go to Herzegovina and to Pale, which became a small mountain capital.
I saw Radovan Karadzic again. It was the same thin man with the uncontrollable hair, clever, delicate, sensitive, exceptionally honest. I believe in Camus’ thought that after a certain number of years every man is accountable for his face.
On the other hand, he is a perfect gentleman, both in behaviour and in his private life. Unlike the people in power, he is a good listener, not going into monologues. Regarding his dressing, he usually wears well-tailored suits that perfectly fit to his grizzled hair; ties of subdued colours and shirts of discreet patterns. He is very kind to ladies, as well as to people of the lowest positions. His perfect English enables him for easy orientation and moving in international circles, and his extraordinary height (and not only physical) contributes to his charisma of a real gentleman. The only bad trait that I noticed in him is certainly that mild feeling of superiority which is the result of his profession of a psychiatrist. However, it is not strange; people who have a psychiatrist as a leader probably have pathological types as enemies. Anyway, it is a gentleman who will hardly meet his match in the near future.
Today, Radovan is a myth, and one cannot murder or arrest a myth. I used to be a frequent visitor in his modest house in Pale. His wife Ljiljana had no attendants, she cooked by herself, on a cooker with just one ring working.
Radovan’s men used to come by jeep and pick us up in the place where we were accommodated. Everything was rather mysterious. They take us to one place and he is not there. He is not in the second or third place either. We find him after the fifth, sixth try.
Radovan changes his statesman suit, puts on a tracksuit, and we don’t discuss politics all night long. We talk about poets, poetry, old friends, our lives. He used to say that those were the only moments when he felt like a poet again. (…)
After a certain period of time, when he had already abdicated from the office of the President of the Republika Srpska, for the benefit of his people, and had withdrawn from the political life, the Americans put him on the wanted list, dead or alive: whoever catches or murders him gets five million dollars as an award. Since then, he has disappeared into thin air, and the whole series of stories and speculations has started – in which mountains and monasteries is hiding the man who has created the first Serbian state, after many years of slavery and lies in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The great manhunt after the most expensive head in the world has started, but as far as I know, not one of Radovan’s writer friends has denied the friendship with him, considering it to be a special honour and privilege. (…)
When he appeared on the wanted list, manhunters bred like rabbits. In the middle of the persecution I published a story about it under the title:
MANHUNT
In New York, in Greenwich Village and SoHo, there are souvenir shops in which tourists can have their own APB printed for a couple of dollars, with a big photo and a dollar amount that they themselves specify, in order to be able to boast how important they are, once back at home, in Europe. Wanted! Dead or Alive! The imagination of these jokers at their own expense usually does not exceed $10,000, while megalomaniacs and myth-maniacs will immediately be recognized by asking for themselves the whole $100,000. Interesting, but it is never more than that.
I read in newspapers that the Americans have put Radovan Karadzic on the wanted list, and that the award was the whole five million of dollars! Knowing Radovan’s innate modesty, I immediately suspected that it was a Greenwich Village wanted list, and that it was not him who printed it but somebody else.
Five million dollars! Well, for Tito and General Draza Mihailovic only 100,000 German Reichsmarks were offered, and the children still learn about it at school, and fail the makeup exams in history if they do not know the correct amount and say that for these historical personalities a million per person was offered.
What a movie it would be! If Spielberg by some miracle could read in Serbian, he would certainly buy the rights for this story.
If you noticed, by chance, all American films always start with a shot under the opening credits in which a car approaches some private or official building. This time it is the Sate Penitentiary in Tucson, Arizona, along the long corridors of which the wards take Kevin Costner in chains; he was sentenced for life, plus one hundred and twenty years, for a series of murders. The warden Donald Sutherland hands him over to a CIA official (Gene Hackman), and in the next sequence they are flying to Washington, while Kevin, drinking champagne, meets the child sitting next to him, who has nothing to do with this movie.
To put it briefly, in Washington they let him see a film about Radovan Karadzic: Radovan skiing, at the promotion of his poetical book, with family, at the frontline, in Geneva at negotiations, in New York at the time of his specialist training, taped in the shop "Stop & Shop" in the Blinker Street printing his own APB with a $100 award. After getting acquainted with the looks and characteristics of the wanted person, Kevin sets his conditions: half a million of dollars for expenses and the right to make his own group of commandos, of which he will be the leader.
Two of them are let out of jail the next day; Sylvester Stalone, who has been serving a long-term prison sentence for kidnapping the daughter of the Governor of California, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, sentenced for life for killing King Kong, who does not stand Kevin Costner because of his love for wolves. The three of them together pay a visit to Robert de Niro, the last living manhunter from Dakota, who quit his old job and entered the computer business; they want to talk him into joining them in this dangerous mission, after which they will all become rich. They need him because there is no American movie today in which the pursuers do not search their victim by means of a computer. They also need one black man with a prison haircut, who will be inconspicuous in the Republika Srpska (because there are many of them there, in the UN troops), and of course because there is no American movie in which a white policeman does not have a black partner in order to chase together a red-headed European, who is a criminal.
What movie would it be without a women and occasional rolling on the bed, when the love game is necessarily interrupted by ringing of a phone? So, the woman is Sharon Stone, the famous platinum blonde bitch, who was raped by her father when she was a little girl, and who wants to reach doctor Karadzic at any cost, in order to have a psychotherapy and get healed from that old trauma, and also to earn something. She is indispensable also for the fact that she is a CNN reporter (without whom such an action cannot go off) and because the whole manhunting group will pretend to be a TV crew, which is otherwise very often the case in our crisis areas.
The group first visits Sarajevo, for the exoticism of mosques, madrasah, and Bascarsija, and for necessary consultations with the former pursuers of doctor Radovan Karadzic. Before leaving for the wilderness they hire two Sherpas, i.e. Serbs coming from the mountains which they are going to climb, but the guides run away even before crossing the border, with stolen chewing gums and a carton of "Marlboro". So they find themselves all alone in the wild Pale. There they lose the first member of their group – Arnold Schwarzenegger, who dies in pain the first night, after having drunk on a bet with the people from Pale the whole bottle of grape brandy "Guslar", full of methyl-alcohol.
On their way, they make false interviews with peasants, making enquiries where is Radovan Karadzic hiding. Sharon Stone suffers the most in the mountains covered with deep snow, although she is being warmed every night in her sleeping bag by Robert de Niro, whom Kevin Costner murders out of jealousy. Interesting, but in whatever stormy weather or natural disaster the heroines of American movies may be, they always wake up with a perfect hair-do, make up and false eyelashes.
One morning, they find out that Sylvester Stalone has disappeared into thin air with the money for the operation "The Olympic Tracks". The Black Man gets lured over to the side of the peasants from Romanija mountain, to rap along the gusle (one-stringed Balkan folk fiddle), and he takes up permanent residence in Sokolac, where he sells suntan lotions. There remain only Kevin Costner and Sharon Stone who fight their way through a blizzard, and half-frozen arrive to a house with no one inside. After a blazing row they kill each other. It turns out, of course, that Sharon Stone is not fully murdered, just easily wounded in a shoulder. With the last atoms of strength, guided by a satellite, living on anti-baby pills only, she goes downhill and fainting falls into arms of Jack Nicholson, not knowing that he is already married, with three kids.
THE END!
And, where is Radovan?
Radovan is in the legend.