Poet Laureate of Pale
Posted on July 30, 2008
Radovan Karadžić, the Poet Laureate of Pale — what a serendipitously macabre coincidence the name of the de facto ‘capital’ of Republika Srpska turned out to be — is in a cell in the Hague. It is quite comfortable according to reports. There has been a frenzy of marshy, gaseous emissions threatening a micro climate disaster in the days since he was captured in Belgrade, where he has been hiding in plain sight as a peddler of quack remedies, and drinking in a bar with a large photo of his former less hirsuite self on the wall, reportedly even reciting
an epic poem in which he himself featured as the main hero, performing epic feats of extermination.¹
His nationalist, Karadžić and Mladić worshipping, drinking partners were stunned to discover they had been sitting with their hero all this time.
Karadžić is reportedly adept at boring all comers with interminable self-pitying monologues about the victimisation of the Serbian nation and the threat of imminent extermination by the Muslim (or ‘Turkish’) hordes, a motif common, lest there be any doubt, to all nationalist extremists. Serbian nationalists believe (what they consider) Greater Serbia is being attacked and undermined by people they describe as ‘rats’ and ‘cockroaches’. White supremacists and nazis believe that ‘degenerate’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ elements are conspiring to weaken the ‘race’ and destroy the ‘nation’. In all cases the aim is to purify the volk and the state by expelling or killing the ‘foreign’ and ‘unclean’ intruders. The need for an ethnically ‘pure’ Republika Srpska is a modern retelling of Blut und Boden².
The swamp gas has been emanating from the defenders of Serbian nationalism, and its paladins Karadžić and the late but not late enough Slobodan Milošević. Here we have an inane clown posse of comedy ‘anti-imperialists’, who agitated against the Bosniaks’ right to self-defence by ‘opposing all sides equally’ when one ’side’³ had access to the equipment of the former JNA. These howling gibbons serve Serbian nationalism by variously denying that the leadership in Belgrade or Pale had any knowledge of ’so-called’ atrocities being carried out in their name, by disputing the scale of the atrocities, or by arguing that there were no atrocities at all, while at the same time consistently refusing to consider the role of Serbian nationalist racist ideology and aggression in the war. Ideological blinkers allow them to see only the interests of British and American imperialism in the actions of the Bosniaks, and everything must be framed in those terms, so that the oppressed are cast as the oppressors and the oppressors the oppressed.
On the part of the soi-disant ‘leftists’ the Serbian nationalist apologia stems from the delusion that Serbian nationalism was an actually existing continuation of Titoist socialism, that post Yugoslav Serbia is (or was) an actually existing socialist state and the concomitant idea that the subjects of any such state do not require self-determination, having already achieved it by dint of absorption into Yugoslavia. Hence any attempt to break from the motherland is ‘counter-revolutionary’. The right supports the Serbian Orthodox bulwark against — here they are again — the Muslim ‘hordes’. In fact Serbian nationalism is the very sort of ‘Gates of Vienna’ filth that the likes of the SWP have been at such pains to denounce at every other turn.
‘Victors’ justice’ is the phrase which has been bandied about since the capture of Karadžić. Maybe it is. Perhaps he should try losers’ justice. Hand him over to the Bosniaks.
¹ Genocide’s Epic Hero — New York Times, 27 July 2008.
² There is also a commonality between all of these rightist abberations in the value they ascribe to quack cures, naturopathy and some of the more outlandish claims of the benefits of vegetarianism.
³ The unspoken assumption that the ’sides’ split cleanly along ethnic/confessional lines is erroneous. The split was political, with Serbian nationalists fighting for an ethnically ‘pure’ Serbian statelet where all traces of Bosniak habitation and history had been erased, while the Bosniak ’side’ was fighting to defend a multi-ethnic multi-confessional society.
