The old man on the 73 bus looked like a monk. His bushy white beard obscured half his face, thick glasses covered the rest and his long white hair was tied in a top-knot at the back of his skull.
When the policemen got on the bus at a stop between Belgrade and the satellite town of Batanica they showed him their badges, and the man who called himself Dragan Dabic, practitioner of alternative medicine, went with them without a struggle. With that quiet exchange on a bus Radovan Karadzic’s 12 years on the run came to an anticlimactic end.
“It all went smoothly. He didn’t resist,” said an officer involved in the capture.
Vladimir Vukcevic, Serbia’s chief war crimes prosecutor, explained: “The security was really minimal and no incidents happened. We waited for him to go from place A to place B to see whether he actually had anyone around him because we did not want any victims or shootings or incidents.”
Vukcevic said the arrest took place on Monday. Karadzic’s lawyer, Sveta Vujacic, says it took place earlier and that his client was held incommunicado for three days before the announcement was made.
Whenever it took place it soon became apparent that the man charged with Europe’s worst crimes against humanity since the Holocaust had been hiding in plain sight, preaching about New Age medicine and selling lucky charms on the internet. The florid, burly figure had shrunk with age. His eyes had receded behind his sprawling facial hair until all that was left of the old Karadzic was the hooked nose and the bushy eyebrows.
“I know the guy well. I interviewed him many times in the past, and I could have stumbled on him in the street and not noticed him,” said Alexander Vasovic, a Belgrade journalist who covered the Bosnian war.
Rasim Ljajic, the Serbian official responsible for liaison with The Hague war crimes tribunal, said: “He was very persuasive in hiding his identity and supposedly his job was alternative medicines. He worked for a private company, a private GP, and he said that he was residing in New Belgrade.”
New Belgrade is a near-perfect place for any fugitive to burrow away. Built in communist times it is a warren of enormous tower blocks built of concrete that is now discoloured and weeping, and separated by wide featureless boulevards, as anonymous as any place on earth.
At some point in the past few years it is clear that life became too anonymous for Karadzic to bear. The former Bosnian Serb leader had always been a showman, a dapper dresser with bouffant hair, an amateur poet who loved to read his work aloud at literary salons in pre-war Sarajevo.
In his new life as Dragan David Dabic he began to seek a new audience for his musings on alternative medicine. He built on his training as a psychiatrist and embellished it with oriental-inspired theories of “the life force”, “vital energies” and “personal auras”. He told people his plaited top-knot drew in different energies from the environment.
As Dabic, he set up a website called Psy Help Energy which advertised the David Wellbeing Programme, offering help from “experienced experts from pioneering areas of science where there are immense possibilities for interaction with natural forces in and around us”.
Among other services offered were acupuncture, homeopathy, “quantum medicine” and traditional cures. He also sold necklaces he called Velbing (wellbeing): lucky charms which he claimed offered health benefits and “personal protection” against “harmful radiation”. The website provided no address and the two numbers it listed were prepaid cellphone numbers, now no longer functioning.
In the persona of Dabic he also began to pester Goran Kojic, the editor of Healthy Living magazine, asking to write and lecture on his work. He craved a public.
“Here was this strange-looking man. He said he was freelancing for a number of private clinics and he wanted to publish,” Kojic recalled. “He said: ‘I have a diploma but I don’t have it with me. My ex-wife has it in the United States.’ I said I can’t publish you as a psychiatrist without a diploma, but I will take you on as a spiritual researcher.”
So Dabic the “spiritual researcher” published his thoughts on holistic care in Healthy Living and began to appear at panel discussions on alternative medicine. Videos of these occasions show a soft-spoken pensioner perched at a table with fellow spirits, sitting the way Karadzic the warlord used to sit, with his feet pointing inwards and balancing on the outside edge of his soles.
In October he gave a lecture comparing the silent contemplation of Orthodox monks to oriental forms of meditation. Then as recently as May 23, Healthy Living’s third annual festival in Belgrade advertised a presentation by David Dabic on “nurturing your inner energies”.
The homespun nature of Karadzic’s disguise, relying on a big beard rather than plastic surgery, and the fact that he took such risks in pursuit of an audience, suggests that he was not under the protection of a friendly intelligence service, as many had speculated.
Ljajic said his men had actually been pursuing Karadzic’s former military commander and co-accused, Ratko Mladic, but the people they believed were helping Mladic led them instead to Karadzic.
Such basic police work could have been performed long ago, but it is only recently that there has been the political will in Belgrade to pursue the war criminals wholeheartedly. Behind the scenes the new government, after a fortnight in office, is said to have launched a purge of the security services, which were long suspected of being in cahoots with organised crime and protecting war crimes suspects.
Only last weekend Sasa Vukadinovic, a respected career investigator with a pedigree in smashing prominent Belgrade mafia structures, was appointed the new head of the security service, replacing Rade Bulatovic, who was close to the former nationalist prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica.
“Vukadinovic is a professional, and very loyal to Tadic,” said one source who has been following Balkan crime rings for years. “It’s a new team, a new broom. It just shows you what difference a new regime can make.
Investigators at The Hague tribunal had been working with Bulatovic for years and that was a big mistake.”
A Western investigator with long involvement in Balkan manhunts told The Guardian that only a few months ago it was not known where Karadzic was and also ascribed the dramatic events of Monday to the formation of a new government.
But given that the new government has only been in office for a fortnight and the new security chief only a few days, others believe the breakthrough must have been because of Kostunica officials jumping ship and helping the new government. —