April 6, the anniversary of the Partisans’ liberation of Sarajevo in 1945 from German and Ustasha occupiers, had been a special holiday in Bosnia ever since then. But in 1992, that date acquired an additional and different association as the beginning of the longest, bloodiest war in Europe since the Second World War. In the first weeks after April 6, SDS local officials and their allies implemented the municipal strategy largely as they had planned by launching temporally and geographically staggered attacks and carrying out mass atrocities against non-Serbs. Karadžić fled Sarajevo in the first days of fighting; by the end of May he was directing the campaign from Pale, seventeen kilometers east of the city center. This chapter describes his harrowing flight and examines his transformation from a planner and political leader to the head of an armed takeover, and it discusses how he established state territories purged of non-Serb inhabitants.

Flight

For the first six days of April, Karadžić remained in Sarajevo. Although large-scale conflict had yet to begin, there was nothing tranquil about the city in those days. SDS leaders were forming a separate Serb police force in each jurisdiction, touching off struggles with non-Serb officers for control of police stations and neighborhoods. Residents formed committees by block, street, or neighborhood to secure their homes against uncertain threats, turning parts of the city into warrens of checkpoints and barbed wire barriers. Criminal gangs, many of them Bosniak in leadership and composition, controlled whole sections of the city while also defending those areas against Serb paramilitary and police units.