The old man on the 73 bus looked like a monk. His bushy white beard obscured half of his face, thick glasses covered the rest and his long white hair was tied in a topknot 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, Bosnian Serb wartime leader 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.
PHOTO: EPA
“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 has anyone around him because we did not want any victims or shootings or incidents,” said Vladimir Vukcevic, Serbia’s chief war crimes prosecutor.
Vukcevic said the arrest took place on Monday, but Karadzic’s lawyer, Sveta Vujacic, says it took place earlier and that his client was held incommunicado for three days.
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 Karadzic told police he had been living 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 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. He 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 braided topknot drew in different energies from the environment.
As Dabic, he set up a Web site called Psy Help Energy which advertised the David Wellbeing Program offering acupuncture, homeopathy, quantum medicine and traditional cures.
He also sold charm necklaces which he claimed offered health benefits and protection against harmful radiation. The Web site provided no address, and the two numbers it listed were prepaid mobile numbers, now no longer functioning.
As Dabic, he also began to pester Goran Kojic, the editor of Healthy Living magazine, asking to write and lecture on his work.
“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,” Kojic said.
So Dabic published his thoughts on holistic care in Healthy Living and began to appear at panel discussions on alternative medicine.
Last 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 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 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 wholeheartedly pursue the war criminals. Behind the scenes, the new government, after two weeks in office, is said to have launched a purge of the security services, which were long suspected of being in cahoots with organized crime and protecting war crimes suspects.
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