Radovan Karadžić exercised a profound influence on the world around him in the course of his relatively brief political career. He destroyed his adopted home republic of Bosnia by leading the Bosnian Serbs to war and committing mass atrocities against non-Serbs. The path that led him there is neither simple nor linear; it is instructive, however, and its end is particularly disturbing. Because his influence led to such deplorable consequences, it is important to determine how and why he and his Bosnian Serb followers adopted the values and made the decisions that ended in mass atrocities against non-Serbs. This chapter considers those questions and proposes some answers based on Karadžić’s life and deeds.

The Man

For forty-five years, Radovan Karadžić lived an unremarkable life. Born in Montenegro in the final days of the Second World War, he experienced hardship and deprivation as he grew up, but he benefited from a dedicated, nurturing mother and a hard-working if more distant father. At age 15 he left home and moved to Sarajevo, the capital of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There he earned a medical degree, married and started a family, and became a successful psychiatrist at the university clinic. Although he demonstrated many personal qualities that would later make him a successful political leader, he remained distant from politics (except for a brief address at a student demonstration in 1968) and had no public profile as a dissident or nationalist of any kind. He wrote and published poetry that was unconventional in style and stark in tone but devoid of political content. As the 1980s approached their end, he was pursuing his search for a grand intellectual synthesis by bringing together his knowledge of group psychology and the idiom of folklore.