VII. Lions to Africa
My main rule for these trips is this: act dumber than you really are. Best of all, much dumber.
Serbia: Pop Art Radovan
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is where Mr. Karadžić lived. These people are his neighbors. Better not take pictures, sir. They’re fed up with journalists. You see—they’re shouting. Please don’t shout! It’s just a tour group. Two Poles, two Russians, and a Japanese. Please don’t be concerned. This is just an unfortunate incident. We Serbs are usually very friendly. Oh look, that lady with the dog is smiling.”
It’s August 3, 2008. I’m in Belgrade on a walking tour in the footsteps of Radovan Karadžić, who hid here while disguised as an expert in alternative medicine, Dr. Dragan Dabić. We’re visiting his apartment block, his local store, and his favorite bar. The tour is called Pop Art Radovan.
The tour guide is a girl of about twenty. When Karadžić was laying siege to Sarajevo, she was barely knee high. Whatever happens, she never stops smiling. “Did you notice? There’s something in his mailbox. No, better not go over there, sir. I know you people from Japan always take a lot of pictures, but this time it’s not such a good idea.”
We’re gazing at the most ordinary apartment block in the world. The same old sun is blazing away like hell. The same old geraniums are blooming in a flowerpot, just as he saw them every time he came outside.
There’s no mountain hideout, no pistols, and no shoot-out. There’s a children’s climbing frame and seven benches painted green. It’s a six-story block on which someone has now spray-painted: “Radovan Karadžić Street.”
On July 22, 2008, he left this house carrying several bags. He walked a few hundred yards, to the number 73 bus stop. According to some, he was going on vacation. Others say he’d realized that the new government would do all it could to send him to the Hague. He boarded the bus, and within a quarter of an hour he was caught. The Butcher of Bosnia.
One thousand years in jail
Where did the name Dragan Dabić come from? Apparently the real Dabić was an engineer in Sarajevo before the war. But can we be sure of that? Nothing about this whole business is entirely certain. The Western journalists in Belgrade say the police are deliberately taking us for a ride. And the authorities are counting on us to seek out the owner of his identity card, by running off to local supermarkets to ask which was his favorite cheese, and to the medical clinics to inquire about the healing methods he used. They’re doing everything they can to sidetrack us on to nonessential questions about the details of Dr. Dabić’s life.
All in an effort to stop us from asking the most important things: how is it possible that the worst criminal since the Second World War was calmly walking around downtown Belgrade?
“But the details matter too,” stresses one of the foreign journalists. “To understand today’s Serbia, you have to understand the double life of the good Doctor Dabić and the bad Mister Karadžić.”
So let’s seek out the owner of the identity card. The most probable version goes like this: Dragan Dabić lived in Sarajevo. He was killed by a bullet from a Serbian sniper in the spring of 1993 while running down the street to the square where humanitarian aid was due to be distributed.
By then, Sarajevo had been under siege for months on end by the troops of Radovan Karadžić, president of the Republika Srpska (Serbian Republic), which is now part of Bosnia.
Life in the city was getting tougher and tougher. There was no water, food, or bandages.
The story of the first death of Dragan Dabić was told on national television by his brother, Mladen, who lives in Sarajevo to this day. “The bullet was fired from the Vraca district. Karadžić’s troops had outposts there. My brother, a Serb, was killed by Serbian soldiers. When I found out later on that Karadžić was pretending to be him, I was horrified. How could anyone be so cynical?”
Almost four years under siege cost Sarajevo more than twelve thousand victims. Fifteen hundred of them were children.
At the Hague Tribunal, Karadžić faced up to a thousand years in jail. The most serious charge against him was genocide. In 1995 his soldiers had carried out the mass murder of the Muslim civilian population of a town called Srebrenica.
“The women and children were told to go to the right, the men to the left. Whether a boy was still a child or already a man was decided by a piece of string that was hung at a height of five feet. . . . Any boy who was taller than that was taken away from his mother,” writes Wojciech Tochman about Srebrenica in his book Like Eating a Stone. “The following spring the women found out from the radio that teams from the Hague Tribunal were working around Srebrenica. Thirty-five hundred bodies had been found beneath the freshly disturbed earth.”*
“The youngest person to survive the scores of executions . . . was only seventeen years old. As he was being taken out of the truck with a group of men, blindfolded and hands bound, they all asked for a sip of water. ‘I didn’t want to die thirsty,’ he said years later,” wrote Bosnian journalist Emir Suljagić in his book, Postcards from the Grave.* Suljagić was one of the few who survived the Serbian army attack on Srebrenica.
Dražen Erdemović was forced by his commanders to execute the Muslims from Srebrenica. “The boy was not blindfolded and Dražen saw his face, though he had promised himself that he would not look at the prisoners’ faces, as it made shooting more difficult. The boy might have been fifteen, perhaps younger. . . . When the prisoners knelt down in front of the squad, just before the command to shoot came, Dražen heard the boy’s voice. Mother, he whispered. Mother! . . . A minute later the boy was dead.” So Slavenka Drakulić re-creates one day in the life of Dražen in her book They Would Never Hurt a Fly.*
Almost eight thousand men and boys were killed at Srebrenica. The youngest was fourteen.
Dabić’s second death
Dragan Dabić died for the second time at the Serbian state prosecution building. This time it just took a few snips with a pair of scissors for the long-haired, charismatic expert in alternative medicine to be gone for good.
Yet some people say that Karadžić had documents in the name of a different Dabić—a small-scale farmer from a village called Ruma, some forty miles from Belgrade. Apparently, the identity card that Karadžić used was a copy of one belonging to Dabić the farmer who, as the Western journalists confirm, lives without a computer or a cell phone. “I never asked for all this fame,” said Dabić, the farmer, on BBC television, which he had no idea existed until now.
Where did Karadžić get Dragan Dabić’s documents? It’s a mystery. Several sets of documents in various names were found at his apartment.
I wanted to feel the current
Nowadays it’s hard to track down any of Karadžić-Dabić’s patients. When you do find them, they talk about their visits to him with some embarrassment. First, because it probably feels odd to discover that your doctor has turned out to be somebody completely different. Second, because alternative medicine has been ridiculed here for some years as pure superstition.
Third, because Dragan Dabić often treated intimate conditions, such as impotence and infertility.
Yelena S., age thirty, is a friend of my contacts in Belgrade. She’s slender, well groomed, and down-to-earth: “The treatment? A friend persuaded me to go for it. She’d been to a meeting where Dabić talked about diet. She said he was from the States, but he’d been living in India and China. He was meant to charge five hundred dinars (then about nine dollars) for a consultation, but usually he took nothing. He gave the impression that money had no value for him.
“At the time I had problems with my kidneys and was at risk of dialysis. I was trying to find help everywhere and anywhere.
“First, he looked deep into my eyes. Then he checked my pulse and told me to stick out my tongue. Finally, he placed his hands on my back. He held them there; then after a while he let go and shook them. After that I had
a warm feeling. To finish he made me a sort of amulet. I never wore it—I was going to throw it away. But now I’m sure I’ll keep it as a souvenir.
“I didn’t have much confidence in him. He looked like a charlatan. He had long hair tied in a ponytail and a beard like Santa Claus. At one point he told me that cosmic energy came to him via the hair and beard. I thought I’d fall off the chair.
“Though my kidneys have gotten stronger. But I don’t know if it’s thanks to him, because I tried a lot of things, including prayer and fasting.”
Dušan M. is a regular at a bar called the Madhouse, which was Dabić’s favorite hangout. He’s an ardent patriot, with a slight squint and very short shorts. “I once complained to Karadžić—that’s to say, Dabić—that I was going to have an operation on my leg. It had healed crooked after a motorbike accident.
“My mother told me to go see him because at her village in Montenegro there was a local quack of the same kind. She said, ‘If he can’t help you, no one can.’
“I knew Dabić—he quite often came in for a beer. He’d clap me on the back and ask after my health.
“I don’t think anyone in our housing development was born in Belgrade. They started building it in the late 1970s. They settled military personnel here with their families. My father was assigned an apartment because he was an officer in the Yugoslav army.
“Plenty of people moved here during the war—Serbian refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Very good Serbs. Some of them had fought in the war. You could say that for Mr. Karadžić it was the ideal place to live.
“My leg? I did go to him. ‘Dr. Dabić,’ I said, ‘can you help with badly healed bones? They’re going to rebreak it. Can’t anything be done?’
“He took a look at me from behind his thick glasses. He said he’d had some wine, and he couldn’t do any healing after alcohol. He told me to come to his apartment the next day.
“It was very clean in the apartment. There were two rooms—in one of them he slept and worked at a large computer. I wondered at the time why he needed such a big computer. Later on I read that he’d been gathering documents for his defense at the Hague.
“Next to the computer was a photo of four boys in American basketball uniforms. Dr. Dabić said they were his grandsons who live in the States.
“Treatment? He laid his hands on my legs. He asked if I could feel the current. I couldn’t feel anything. But there was something about his tone of voice that made me want to feel it. So I said, ‘Yes, I can.’
“Even so, they rebroke those bones at the hospital. But they say it has grown together well now. I don’t know if that’s true, because I’m still limping.”
This is an apolitical tour
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is where Dr. Dabić did his shopping. Tomatoes, thirty-nine dinars. Pears, sixty-nine dinars.* They say he fed himself a very costly diet. Nothing but fruit and vegetables. And cheese. Apparently, he was adamant that everything he ate should be from Serbia. The saleswoman says she also has tomatoes from Spain on offer. They’re bigger, nicer looking, and not much more expensive. But he always chose the Serbian ones.
“Now please look to your right—here’s the bar, the Madhouse, where he used to sit under his own portrait, drinking Bear’s Blood wine and chatting to people. Everyone was sure he was called Dragan Dabić and was a doctor of alternative medicine. The wine? Why don’t you give it a try? Our agency will treat you. Don’t you like it? It’s cheap wine. Unsophisticated people drink it. Dr. Dabić lived a very simple life.”
There’s an awful mess at the Madhouse. The tables are wiped clean only when someone remembers to do it. Yelen beer is the most popular, but you can also get Montenegrin Nikšićko. There’s plenty of everything—beer mugs, beer mats, dishcloths, and bottles. And in place of honor are the portraits. We ask the tour guide about them.
“The one on the right is General Mladić. They haven’t caught him yet.* Apparently, he’s hiding somewhere in the mountains, in an old bunker used by Marshal Tito. We do a tour in the footsteps of Tito too. And the NATO bombings. I’ll show you our catalog.
“The one on the left? What do you mean, you don’t know? Well, okay, you’re from Japan. You’ve no reason to know. That’s Slobodan Milošević, the former president. Hello, the gentleman from Poland—sorry, I didn’t hear your question. Is what legal? Putting up these portraits? Why should it be illegal? This is a democracy. I guess you can put up whatever you like in Poland too. Oh no, you’re trying to provoke me, but this is an apolitical tour. That’s not nice. Please come and board the bus.”
I miss Doctor Dabić
Dragan Dabić’s friends are missing him. Mina Minić, a therapist who was Dabić’s guru, tells me over the phone: “Please understand that it’s not Karadžić I miss. I only ever knew him as Doctor Dabić—a very nice man, whose thoughts were taken up with astrology and levitation.”
Dabić was going to write a book about Minić. Out of gratitude, Minić gave him a new first name—David. After the biblical king, because Minić and Dabić’s ideology was closely connected with Christianity.
“Ours is an atheist version of Orthodoxy,” says Minić. “We took all the best elements from the Orthodox Church: the mysticism, the meditation, the healing by fasting and prayer. Did you know that Orthodox monks were capable of levitating? That in the early Christian church it was a fairly universal ability? What happened to the monks? What keeps them to the ground? Those were the sort of questions we asked ourselves. And we rejected the institutional church—its tinsel, its pomp, and its involvement in politics.
“Now I’ve been reading that as president Karadžić was very close to the church. Which means that the whole time he was deceiving me.
“Karadžić—I mean Dabić—fasted twice a week, on Fridays and Wednesdays. He sought analogies between Orthodoxy and the things he learned in India and China. Now I know that he never went there at all. But he talked about it very convincingly. I thought he was a great sage. But he was just a great actor,” says Minić.
“He mainly listened,” says Miško Kovijanić, owner of the Madhouse. “That’s not typical for Serbia, where people mainly talk rather than listen.
“The people living here are poor, and wherever you find poverty, that’s where they do the most gabbing about politics. Dabić used to sit under the portrait of Karadžić and watch us. We talked away many a winter evening like that. Occasionally, if someone went too far, Dr. Dabić would shake his head and say, ‘It’s not that simple, my children.’ But never once did he say what his own views were.
“It’s a pity he didn’t tell us the truth. Nobody would have given him away—we’d have given him even better protection. Only decent Serbs come here.”
“Meaning what?” I ask.
“Patriots. Former soldiers. Opponents of the goddamn European Union. But I understand why he couldn’t tell us. He was very careful, but even so someone betrayed him. I read in the paper that five million dollars was paid for his head.
“Why the Madhouse? When we were building the bar eight years ago, my wife called. It was terribly noisy. ‘I’ll have to go outside,’ I said: ‘it’s a madhouse in here.’ The workers picked it up, and it stuck.
“But we’ve had a real madhouse here ever since they caught our Dr. Dabić. Journalists, tourists, everyone. The worst of all are the nationalists. I don’t like to say it, I’m a Serb and I love Serbia. But they tried to set fire to my bar because I sell Coca-Cola—in other words, an American drink. Is that normal? I had to hide the entire refrigerator. Now they show up here every day.
“You know what? My dream is that one day the door will open and Dr. Dabić will walk in, cool as ice. I’ll buy him a glass of wine and say, ‘Doctor, what an adventure you’ve had!’ And he’ll sit down, nod his head, and tell us how they apologized to him at the Hague Tribunal for their mistake. I didn’t know Karadžić personally; I only respect him as a l
eader. He wanted Serbia to be just for the Serbs, and that’s how it should be.
“But I do miss Dabić. And the peace and quiet we had a few weeks ago.”
I was not his lover
When I arrived in Belgrade, the most sought-after person in the city was a woman named Mila Damianova. Dr. Dabić was head over heels in love with her, according to those who knew the couple.
“We used to go to conferences and symposia together,” says Tatiana Jovanović from a publication called Healthy Life. “Dabić never took his eyes off her. They always sat next to each other, and they spent the breaks hugging and stroking each other’s hands.”
“I often saw them together, holding hands,” says Milica Sener, a neighbor of Dr. Dabić. “A polite lady, though I did sometimes wonder, ‘What does a young woman like that see in such an old-timer?’ But my husband said that after the war in Serbia there were too few men. Better an old one than none at all.”
I too went looking for Mila among the high-rise apartment blocks in Belgrade’s Zemun district. In vain, until Mila turned up of her own accord. She gave an interview to a Serbian tabloid called Press. “I disappeared first because I wanted to explain to Mr. Karadžić’s family that I was never his lover. Only when I was sure the information had reached Mrs. Karadžić did I agree to do this interview.
“Who was I? A woman fascinated by the man’s deep wisdom and spirituality. Dr. Dabić was immensely knowledgeable about mysticism but also about art, philosophy, and history. But the relationship between us was never what I might call intimate.”
Now there’s a new theory about Mila on the streets of Belgrade: from the very start she was an agent for the special services, whose job it was to expose Karadžić.
The Karadžić pancake
Dancing Bears Page 17