This is excerpted from Danner's long article, "Bosnia: The Turning Point," The New York Review of Books, 2/5/98. Danner, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote. His nine-part series of articles on the wars in the former Yugoslavia (see links below) will be collected in a book in early 1999.

Early one February afternoon in 1994, people in Sarajevo shed their heavy coats and hats and poured out into streets and markets, allowing themselves to forget, in the bright warming sun, that from artillery bunkers and snipers' nests dug into hills and mountains above the city hunters stared down, tracking their prey. But the people of Sarajevo were not permitted to forget. As we cruised the city's streets in a small armored car, climbing, under a trembling, light-filled sky, toward the Spanish Fort, signs fell abruptly into place: a sudden chaos of horns and screams and screeching tires; a blue van tearing by with one eye peering out from a shattered face, and, racing in its wake, a battered white Yugo with a smeared red hand print emblazoned on its door.

We turned and forced our way back, struggling to trace the source of this grim caravan. When a policeman bade us stop, we clambered out and trotted down cluttered streets, dodging and stumbling through jumbles of honking vehicles until we entered once more the tiny square where, the day before, we had edged our way through boisterous crowds, chatting with vendors behind bare wood tables that held the besieged city's paltry wares: handfuls of leeks and potatoes, plastic combs in garish pink and green, scatterings of loose nuts and bolts, a blackened bit of banana, a monkey wrench half-rusted, glinting fitfully in the beneficent sun.

Twenty-four hours later Markela marketplace stood precisely so, when, at 12:37 on February 5, 1994, a 120-millimeter mortar shell plunged earthward in an impossibly perfect trajectory, plummeted within view of the somber gray facade of the Catholic cathedral and then by the windows of gray apartment buildings, passed through the market's ramshackle metal roof and erupted, its five pounds of high explosive spewing out red-hot shrapnel and sending corrugated metal shards slicing through the crowd; in an eye-blink a thick forest of chattering, gossiping, bartering people had been cut down.

Now, turning into the tiny square, we found not infernal smoke or darkness but, amid a terrible clarity, clumps of dark bundles strewn about the asphalt, and, between them, spreading slowly amid shards of charred metal and blackened vegetables and bits of plastic, puddles of slick dark liquid.

We stepped gingerly forward, letting pass two men dragging a limp, softly moaning figure; before us men moved from bundle to bundle, crouching, pressing fingers to a throat, pausing, pushing back an eyelid, staring. I left the curb, feeling my throat constrict as I passed into a cloud of invisible and nauseating cordite; stumbling against a car, I looked down and saw my boot soles already shiny and slick.

A big man danced quickly by me, hoisting the video camera on his shoulder, and close at his back came sound, craning his silver boom forward over the cameraman's head so that the two appeared together like some great rapacious bird. I followed step by careful step,1 and we passed through the bloody topography, tracing our way slowly past torsos and parts of torsos; past arms and hands and bits of limbs and unidentifiable hunks of flesh, all mixed with blackened metal and smashed vegetables and here and there a long splinter of wooden table. At the center of it all a man in a dark overcoat lay on his back, fully intact, face perfectly gray, eyes perfectly empty, staring blankly up at the perfect sky.

I took out my pen and notebook, and looked about me, somewhat bewildered. Here and there I recognized, or thought I did, vendors I had chatted with the day before; some artillery man on one of those mountainsides had made of them objects now, exhibits for us and for the evening news. I tried to tally the corpses, matching limbs to trunks, heads to limbs, counting, counting; but it was impossible. In the back of the market, three blank-faced men worked with black-gloved hands behind a decrepit truck, crouching, lifting, heaving. As I approached I realized they were trying to match up parts of bodies on long pieces of corrugated metal; by now the truckbed was half full and its tires and undercarriage thick with gore.

Turning back I saw a big, mustached man weeping, his hands raised and grasping the air as he struggled to reach a blood-soaked bundle of cloth and flesh on the ground; two smaller men held him, murmuringas they worked to push him back. As the mustached face, red and distorted and full of fury, rose above the shoulders of those imprisoning him, I realized that I had chatted with him the day before, that he had been selling...what? Yes, lentils, that was it, lentils and potatoes, and his wife, now eviscerated at his feet, had stood at his side. Now he lifted his great head, stared upward, and, raising a fist, began to shout. Along with several others I followed his gaze and picked out the glinting specks in the bright blue sky: the planes of NATO, patrolling over the "safe area" of Sarajevo.

Amid the human wreckage of this sun-filled square, what could this phrase possibly mean? Since United Nations diplomats had coined it the previous spring, as Bosnian Serb soldiers stood ready to advance from the hills around Srebrenica and seize the town, 2 no one had quite known. Now, amid the stench of cordite in Markela marketplace, the world had at last been offered the hint of a definition, one that would be affirmed in Srebrenica and Zepa the following year: "safe area" meant very little indeed. Like so many of their "policies" in the Bosnian war, Western leaders had constructed this one solely of words.

Now, for the people who had elected those leaders, large glass lenses-more and more of them bobbing and glinting now as more cameramen pushed their way into the tiny square-would make those words flesh. A few hundred miles away Germans and French would press a button on a remote control and confront overwhelming gore; across the ocean Americans, with (presumably) more delicate sensibilities, would be permitted to see much less, but enough blood would remain for many of these citizens to pose a heartfelt if ephemeral question: Why is nothing being done about this?

Though the Serbs had shelled Sarajevo for nearly two years; though they had destroyed the National Library, burning thousands of books, and had methodically reduced to ruins many of the city's other cultural treasures; though they had cut off electricity and water, forcing Sarajevans to place themselves in snipers' telescopic sights as they chopped down every tree in every park in search of firewood and stood in line filling plastic bottles at outdoor water spigots-though the Serbs had killed and wounded thousands of Sarajevans from their bunkers in the hills and from their snipers' nests in the burned out high-rise buildings that lined "sniper's alley," after two years of siege only "an event" like the "Marketplace Massacre" had a chance of engaging the fickle attention of the world. The day before, the Serbs had launched three shells into the Dobrinja neighborhood, killing ten Sarajevans as they waited for food; twelve days before, two Serb shells had blown apart six children as they sledded in the filthy snow. How many days of such steady, methodical work would be needed to match the marketplace's toll? Six? Seven? And yet such daily work, however deadly, didn't matter, for depending on the news in New York or London or Paris, it could not rise to the level of "massacre."

I stood in the morgue across the road from Kosevo hospital. Compared to the bloodslick ground of Markela, compared even to the hospital entrance across the way-a hellhole now with shattered figures dead and dying in the hallways and a doctor, face brightly flushed, furious, screaming at us ("Get out, get out, I said. Let us do our work!")-compared to that, it was quiet here, peaceful. I found myself alone for the first time that day-alone with those who had suddenly become the most important actors in the Bosnia drama. All unwittingly they had forced reluctant politicians and diplomats to come together-even now in Washington and Brussels and Paris they were gathering in urgent talks-and they would in the next few days change the direction of the war. And yet they had done nothing more than thousands of Sarajevans before them, stand in a particular place at a particular time and, all unknowingly, find a sudden and unseen death. I took out my notebook, drew a deep breath, and began to count. It was easier now, all had been properly arranged, what limbs and parts remained had been matched up by people well practiced in such things. Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three...Yes, this was a big story, perhaps the biggest of the war. Thirty-one, thirty-two...Yes, a huge story....

"Many had ice in their ears."

"What? Excuse me?"

"Ice. They had ice in their ears," said Dr. Radovan Karadzic, psychiatrist, poet, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, as he prepared to take another bite of stew. "You know, the Muslims-they took bodies from the morgue and they put them there, in the market. Even when they shell themselves like this, no one shell kills that many. So they went to the morgue..."

I was-and not for the first time during our lunch-left speechless. Dr. Karadzic, clearly a very intelligent man, had mastered the fine art of constructing and delivering with great sincerity utterances that seemed so distant from demonstrable reality that he left no common ground on which to contradict him. Ice in their ears? Muslim intelligence officers stealing into the morgue to snatch corpses, secreting them in cars, setting off a bomb in the marketplace, and in the smoke and confusion leaving the frozen corpses strewn about the asphalt: it seemed an absurd idea. And yet despite myself I found myself thinking of the man in the overcoat lying on his back, staring upward, open-eyed. His face was peculiarly gray. Strange he bore no evident wounds... Ice in his ears? No. No, of course not.

Dr. Karadzic watched me, lightly smiled, took a bite of stew, and chewed heartily. He is-or at least he was, during that lunch in his office in early February 1994-a hearty man, enormous, wide as the side of a barn and standing six foot four. In fact he appears taller than that, and this is clearly owing to the trademark hair. The hair is huge and sweeping and all-encompassing. It seems to be emerging from everywhere, head, forehead, ears, nose, in a kind of riot of power and fertility. And indeed, though he lived in Sarajevo thirty years, took his psychiatric degree at the university, and practiced in Kosevo Hospital, when he wasn't studying medicine and dabbling in poetry for a year in New York; though he recited and sang his poetry in the cafes and bars of that most cosmopolitan of cities, the Bosnian capital, Radovan Karadzic was in fact a man of the mountains, from a small and rough Montenegrin village.

"He has a sense of grandiosity, like many mountain people-look at the Scots, say," said Dr. Ismet Ceric, the chief of psychiatry at Kosevo Hospital who had largely trained Karadzic and had been his close friend for twenty-five years. "People from the mountains-Milosevic is Montenegrin too, you know, both his parents come from there-these mountain people come down here fresh and strong, and they see city people as soft and corrupt."

In many ways, that theme-fresh, pure, hardy people descending from the mountains and from the countryside to take their revenge on the soft corrupt cosmopolitans of the cities-had marked the conflict from the beginning. During the 1950s and 1960s, the traditional Muslim gentry, deracinated by Tito's land reforms, had migrated to the cities, particularly Sarajevo, where they joined an already well-established secular Muslim intelligentsia. As Ed Vulliamy points out in his Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War,

When Bosnians (usually Muslims, nowadays) tell you that all three people lived together without regard to ethnic groups, they are by and large telling the truth. But... while the towns and cities were nonchalant arenas for the practice of multi-ethnic Bosnia, everyday life in the countryside was one in which Muslims, Serbs and Croats were more insular. The Second World War in Bosnia had been driven by undercurrents of civil war and in the villages, peasants who had fought on all sides, and in particular the Serbs, made sure to keep their weapons. For them, the war had not yet ended; it was a question of waiting for the right moment to recommence it.

...I gazed at a wicker basket on [Pavelic's] desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters-as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly in London. [Italian minister Raffaele] Casertano looked at me and winked, "Would you like a nice oyster stew?"

"Are they Dalmatian oysters?" I asked [Pavelic].

Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, "It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes."3

And that deeply instilled suspicion and fear is partly why-when thousands of Sarajevans marched for peace in the first days of April 1992, moving in a great river through the city toward the Holiday Inn, an impossibly ugly yellow box of a building where Dr. Karadzic had installed Serbian Democratic Party offices, and Dr. Karadzic's bodyguards climbed to the roof and began firing into the crowd, killing six people-that is why sixty thousand Serbs fled the city, almost all of them relatively recent arrivals who had come to enjoy the riches the city offered but still distrusted its sophisticated ways.

Some of these Serbs would enlist in or be drafted into the Bosnian Serb Army, an entity that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and his generals simply created out of whole cloth by rechristening the eighty thousand fully equipped Yugoslav Peoples Army troops then in Bosnia; these Serbs would take their places on the mountainsides, living in the tiny log cabins with their tiny wisps of cooking smoke that marked each artillery emplacement, and spending their days gazing, over the barrel of a cannon, at the beautiful city that had welcomed them.

Radovan Karadzic, doctor, psychiatrist, businessman, poet, a man who had traveled, who had broad and cosmopolitan interests, among them a devotion to American poetry, would seem to have little in common with such men. True, he had been born in 1945, into the violent postwar world of peasant Montenegro; his father had fought as a Chetnik, a Serbian nationalist guerrilla, and served time in Tito's prisons. And during our conversation the war he then presided over and the slaughter of a half-century before often blended together.

"The Serbs did not invent ethnic cleansing," he told me, several times. "The Croatsdid, in World War II. When Tudjman and Izetbegovic formed a [Croat-Muslim] alliance, all Serbs were frightened to death that the same would happen as during the war, when hundreds of thousands of innocent Serbs were slaughtered."

This was partly true, of course: Karadzic well understood, as Goebbels did, that any effective propaganda had within it a kernel of truth. But memories were only the beginning; nationalist leaders like Milosevic, Tudjman, and Karadzic, as former US Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmerman points out, "were able to turn many normal people toward extremism by playing on their historic fears through the baleful medium of television, a matchless technological tool in the hands of dictators."

The nationalist media sought to terrify by evoking mass murderers of a bygone time. The Croatian press described Serbs as "Cetniks." ... For the Serbian press Croatians were "Ustase" (and later, Muslims became "Turks"). People who think they're under ethnic threat tend to seek refuge in their ethnic group. Thus did the media's terror campaign establish ethnic solidarity on the basis of an enemy to be both hated and feared.

Their huge burning eyes, cropped heads and shrivelled, sickly torsos emerged only as one became accustomed to the darkness: hundreds of men, some of them gaunt and horribly thin, crammed like factory farm beasts into the stinking, putrid spaces of two large underground storage hangars built into the hillside.... This infernal tunnel had been their hideous home for ten weeks now....

At the back of the hangars, the walls were pockmarked with bullet-holes.... Prisoners talked about Croatian guards coming up to the hangar doors after drinking sessions and singing as they fired into their quarters.... Estimates of the number of dead on these occasions ranged from three to ten.

Many recall that he wore every day the same dirty white sweater, made from the wool of his native village, and that even then, his big head of hair set him apart. "He had a hillbilly kind of haircut, very fashionable in his village," recalled Mohamed Dedajic, the neighborhood barber. "When I tried to make a suggestion, he'd say, 'No, no, I like long hair.'"4

Perhaps he thought his Byronic locks appropriate to a great poet, for if one theme arises again and again in conversations about the younger Karadzic it is the breadth of his ambition, his single-minded determination to achieve greatness. "He told me he was the great poet of Serbian history," Dr. Ceric told me. "I said, 'I know ten here in Sarajevo who are better than you and maybe seven hundred in Belgrade.' He hardly reacted. He said, 'Well, I have three books out already and soon [my reputation] is going to go: boom!'"

"But it was the same with his psychiatry," said Ceric. "He was good, but not excellent. He had many ideas but to be excellent you must follow one way, have one thought. He had many other interests-soccer, poetry, business-that took too much of his time."

Karadzic married a psychoanalyst, the daughter of an old and well-to-do Serb family. Among his poet friends, his bride was not popular; they thought her unattractive and domineering and they assumed he married her so that, as one man told me, "the peasant could get some money." Soon he was appointed official psychiatrist to the Sarajevo national soccer team, a prominent and desirable position, but unfortunately his pep talks on the psychology of confidence and winning seemed to bring the young players little success. Meantime his face and hair became familiar to Sarajevans as he doggedly read his poems on television and radio and at the cafes, but, as Ceric told me, "his reputation among his colleagues remained relatively low."

One can see a traditional plot taking shape here: ambitious and idealistic country boy arrives in the glittering city, struggles desperately to make good, but succeeds only in earning the laughter and contempt of the cosmopolitan intellectuals he longs to impress; and so he climbs back up the mountainside, rejoins the "clean and pure" fellow peasants, and takes his revenge. It is a convenient story, particularly when one glances at the facades of Karadzic's old apartment house-his name remains on the bell-and of Kosevo Hospital, and notes pockmarks from shells launched by Karadzic's guns, just below his Pale chalet-office where we spoke. Several Saraje-vans told me how the psychiatrist-poet, during a reading, had been laughed and jeered off the stage, how he had fled cursing and redfaced and resentful; but none knew where the event had taken place, or when. In his memoir, The Tenth Circle of Hell, Rezak Hukanovic writes of the planning for the Serb concentration camps:

And where on earth was the poisonous game conceived? In the head of that bloodthirsty lyricist, the mad psychiatrist from Sarajevo, Radovan Karadzic. Years before, clearly spelling out the evil to come, he had written: "Take no pity let's go/kill that scum down in the city."

Radovan had a cosmopolitan approach to problems. You never felt he was a Serb, never. You never felt he was a religious man. I remain quite sure to this day that he is absolutely atheistic. A lot of his friends were Muslims. He was, in fact, a very typical man of this multicultural environment.

Then came 1989, and Milosevic's fiery speech at the field of Kosovo, virtually threatening war; and the rise in Croatia and in Bosnia of nationalist parties under Tudjman and Izetbegovic. Radovan Karadzic, ever ambitious, ever searching for a means to achieve greatness, saw his chance and entered politics. One can gauge the depth of his nationalism by the fact that he first joined the Green Party. Only later did he transfer his loyalties to the Initiative for a Serbian Democratic Party, which Milosevic had started as a Bosnian vehicle to advance his program to achieve a Greater Serbia-"All Serbs in one nation." The embryonic party consisted of little more than a collection of bullies and thugs, and Karadzic, standing out as a well-known and cultured man, rose quickly; in July 1990, his new colleagues chose Dr. Radovan Karadzic, fledgling politician, to lead the now-official Serbian Democratic Party.

It was, as Dr. Ceric told me, echoing a comment I heard a dozen times, "a very big surprise." But though his Sarajevo acquaintances expressed bewilderment at "what happened to Radovan when the war started," by now the logic of his transformation takes on a certain clarity. If one constant in his life was great ambition, a fierce and unremitting conviction that he was in some way destined to achieve greatness, another was a relative disregard for the means by which he would find it. A great doctor, an innovative psychiatrist, a celebrated poet: by 1990, seeing that none of these paths had yet carried him to triumph-though he had likely not lost faith, he was simply impatient, unwilling to wait for the recognition of his genius-he recognized that politics in the era of Yugoslavia's dissolution would offer him instant greatness. And that untrammeled ambition, unencumbered as it was by any true principle-for Karadzic the ideology resulted from the ambition, it had not caused it-could not help but make him attractive to a great political manipulator like Milosevic. As Marko Vesovic, a well-known writer and a Montenegrin who has known Karadzic since 1963, told Time magazine:

In poetry and in life, Karadzic was a person without personality. He was like clay, without personality, without character, who could be molded.... The man of clay was [Milosevic's] ideal student. He did what he was told.5

I asked him, "What is the problem-what is the political problem that you are trying to solve?"

He said, "There is only one problem: Alija [Izetbegovic] wants to organize an Islamic Republic here...."

I said, "This is completely stupid, because even if Alija did want to organize such a thing a majority of Muslims don't want it and wouldn't accept it. I mean, even now, after we've lost 200,000 people, the majority by far wouldn't accept an Islamic Republic."

Anyone who has spoken to Dr. Karadzic will recognize this "mechanism of falsification of reality" as his most distinctive quality. When I inquired of him, over our plates of beef stew, in his small office, with color-coded maps showing successive diplomatic plans for slicing up Bosnia on one wall and an Orthodox crucifix on the other, about the siege of Sarajevo, the siege that people around the world had been watching in transfixed horror for almost two years, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs replied that there was no siege-that in fact those artillery pieces and mortars had been dug into the mountainside to keep the Muslim hordes from breaking out of the city and attacking the Serbs. As always with Karadzic, the words seemed so distant from reality that one had trouble mustering arguments to challenge him.

I asked Karadzic about the shelling of the National Library, whose broken, cluttered ruins I had visited a few days before, perusing the odd charred scrap of paper, the pitiful remains of hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable books and manuscripts. How could he, a man of learning and culture, a poet himself, have countenanced his gunners lobbing shell after shell into the great building, destroying it in a day in a great conflagration that left his adopted city canopied in a cloud of priceless ash? Dr. Karadzic could only shake his head sadly, stare gravely into my eyes, and declare that of course the Muslims had destroyed this building themselves: "It was a Christian building, you know, from the Austro-Hungarian period, and so the Muslims hated it. Only Christian books were burned, you know. The others they removed."

And so it was with the shells that had reduced the world-renowned Institute of Oriental Culture to a burned carcass; so it was with the mortar round that had plunged into a crowd waiting outside a shop in a downtown street and brought the world the Breadline Massacre of May 27, 1992, in which sixteen people died in a telegenic horror that forced the Western countries to impose the first set of sanctions against the Serbs; so it was with the two shells that had killed six children who were sledding twelve days before the Marketplace Massacre, and the three shells that had killed ten Sarajevans and wounded eighteen in Dobrinja on February 4. In each case, Dr. Karadzic told me, the Muslims, "trying to gain the sympathy of the world," had "shelled themselves."

There was a certain brilliance to his blank and impenetrable sincerity. I actually found myself wondering, as a young blond waitress cleared the dishes from Karadzic's desk, whether he could possibly believe anything he was saying. "Mechanism for falsification of reality"-that was Dr. Ceric's term. And yet this seemed insane: Karadzic visited his troops as they sat in their hillside bunkers, shaking their hands and clapping them on the back as they smoked their cigarettes and cooked their soup. In a BBC film about Karadzic, the leader of the Serbs smiles as he sights down a cannon barrel and then offers a Russian visitor, the nationalist writer Eduard Limonov, the chance to fire off a shell into Karadzic's former city. (Limonov gladly accepts.)6

I thought of Karadzic's bodyguards, who lounged about the lobby as I waited for the Great Man. The guards appeared to have been chosen in large part for their beauty and they were clearly conscious of it as they sauntered about, laughing and preening, some wearing combat fatigues, others distinctive purple jumpsuits, all with 9-millimeter automatic pistols belted tightly at their hips; they ignored me while watching me closely. Who could this be, granted an interview with the Big Man, the man who shelled the Turks?

And yet it was clear that the consistent and inarguable preposterousness of Karadzic's answers held within it an importance far beyond any press conference or interview, reaching into the complex diplomatic struggle of the war itself. He was in the business of creating excuses-excuses, however absurd, that let the world allow the war to go on. What he said admitted of no answer. Ice in their ears? How could I respond? I was there, the bodies were real, you can't be serious. And Dr. Karadzic would look me in the eye and answer in that reasonable tone: Yes, but did you check their ears? You didn't? So how can you be sure?

I am finally lost, I am glowing like a cigarette On a neurotic's lip: While they look for me everywhere I wait in the ambush of dawn. -from "A Morning Hand Grenade"
(1983), by Radovan Karadzic.7

Someone switched to Great Britain's Sky News just in time for us to hear the young woman reading the news announce that Dr. Radovan Karadzic had reacted with outrage to accusations that the Serbs had bombed the marketplace, had demanded the charge be withdrawn, and had vowed that, until it was, his soldiers would block all food deliveries into the city. This was a grave threat indeed-not because it might bring Sarajevo's malnourished citizens to the point of starvation, although it might, but because if the Serbs did not permit Western troops to make "humanitarian deliveries" to Bosnia's besieged people, Western leaders-having said again and again that NATO warplanes could not bomb Serb artillery because they had "troops on the ground" who would be vulnerable to Serb retribution-would have difficulty explaining exactly what their suddenly idle troops were doing in Bosnia beyond providing them, the Western leaders, an excuse for refraining from taking some strong action to stop the war that, it had long since become clear, they greatly preferred not to take.

Indeed, in Washington, where President Clinton was even now meeting with his senior advisers, it seemed a process of reevaluation had already begun, for one of those advisers-we learned from the Sky News reader-had hastened to let it be known that "sentiment" was growing that NATO planes should in fact bomb the Serbs. Meantime the President himself had denounced the slaughter-and demanded the United Nations "urgently investigate" who was to blame. Having delivered herself of that bit of news, the news reader looked into the camera and with practiced gravity delivered her closing line: "There is no report yet," she said, "on who could be the author of this terrible crime."

The absurdity of this statement seemed so palpable that I started, then looked around the room, speechless, to see others' reactions. No one flinched. They were used to it. Nor would they have been surprised to learn that at that very moment a Canadian major assigned to the United Nations forces was crouching in the northeast corner of the marketplace, hard at work examining the "splash pattern" left by that afternoon's shrapnel in order to determine whence the shell had come. In fact, the Canadian major was working on no less than the third of that afternoon's "crater analyses," a French lieutenant having conducted the first at two o'clock, and a French captain a second an hour later. As it happened-and not surprisingly with what was a rather inexact science-results differed markedly: while the French lieutenant concluded that the shell had followed a northerly course, and thus either Serb or Muslim gunners could theoretically have launched it, and the Canadian major arrived, by a slightly different path, at largely the same destination, the French captain found that the round had followed an easterly path-which would have put the mortar and its crew behind Muslim lines.8

To an innocent eye, the entire exercise appeared bewildering. Sarajevo lay in a valley surrounded by mountains from which for nearly two years Serb artillery pieces-including a great number of 120-millimeter mortars-had day after day rained down shells on the city. During twenty-two months, Serb gunners and snipers had launched hundreds of thousands of shells and had killed perhaps ten thousand Sarajevans. Yet when a shell happened to kill a large number of people, United Nations officials, acting in the full flower of their "neutral" appreciation for the interests of Serbs and Muslims, felt obliged to treat the explosive's source as "undetermined." As much as anything did, this decision demonstrated the symbiosis that had developed between the Serbs, who were winning the war and thereby had brought Bosnia closest to "peace" (if the irritatingly stubborn Muslims would only accept this as a fact), and the United Nations forces-mainly, but not exclusively, French and British-who showed themselves loyal only to the task of delivering "humanitarian aid" and the "neutrality" that they must maintain in order for the Serbs to permit them to keep feeding the victims.

Karadzic with his apparently absurd statements had in fact read the situation with great brilliance. As Peter Maass well describes in his beautiful and moving memoir Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, the Serb leader succeeded in creating doubt where there should have been none because people wanted to doubt.

I knew that the things Karadzic said were lies, and that these lies were being broadcast worldwide, every day, several times a day, and they were being taken seriously. I am not saying that his lies were accepted as the truth, but I sense they were obscuring the truth, causing outsiders to stay on the sidelines, and this of course was a great triumph for Karadzic.

He needed, for example, to make everyone question whether the Bosnians were bombing themselves, and in fact everyone did wonder about that, because each time a lot of Bosnians were killed by a mortar in Sarajevo, Western governments asked the UN soldiers for a "crater analysis".... "Crater analysis" is not always an exact science.... The incoming direction of the shell could be determined, but not the precise position from which it was fired. If Karadzic denied responsibility, and if the United Nations could not prove scientifically that the Serbs were responsible, then we should hold off on punishing them, right? Right. Thankfully, we have not always been so circumspect, and did not demand, during World War II, that Winston Churchill provide proof that the bombs exploding in London were German rather than British.

1. I was in Sarajevo working with an ABC News crew to prepare a documentary on Bosnia. See Mark Danner and David Gelber, writers, Peter Jennings, correspondent, "While America Watched: The Bosnia Tragedy," Peter Jennings Reporting, ABC News (March 17, 1994), ABC-51.

2. See "Clinton, the UN, and the Bosnian Disaster," The New York Review, December 18, 1997, the third of the present series of articles, which began with "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe," The New York Review, November 20, 1997, and "America and the Bosnia Genocide," The New York Review, December 4, 1997.

3. See Curzio Malaparte, Kaputt (Dutton, 1946; reprinted by Avon, 1966), p. 257. Tim Judah, in his book The Serbs, notes that though the story of the eyes is "for many Serbs the most enduring image of [the Serbian] holocaust," no one can be certain whether it happened as Malaparte described. By now, however, as Judah says: "The scene has become so well known among Serbs that the vast majority believe that it is a description of a real event."

4. See Tracy Wilkinson, "Bosnians Recall Karadzic, a Neighbour Turned Enemy," Los Angeles Times, July 23, 1995.

5. See Deejan Anastasijevic, Massimo Calabresi, Alexandra Niksic, and Alexandra Stiglmayer, "Seeds of Evil: The Opportunistic and Allegedly Criminal Career of Radovan Karadzic May Be Coming to an End," Time, July 29, 1996.

6. See Pawel Pawilokowski, Serbian Epics, Channel Four (British Broadcasting Corporation, 1992).

7. Quoted in "Seeds of Evil," Time magazine.

8 .See David Binder, "Anatomy of a Massacre," Foreign Policy 97, Winter 1994-1995, pp. 70-78.

Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War by Ed Vulliamy 370 pages, (out of print)
published by Simon and Schuster

Blood and Vengeance: One Family's Story of the War in Bosnia by Chuck Sudetic June, 1998
published by Norton

Survival in Sarajevo: How a Jewish Community Came to the Aid of Its City by Edward Serotta 128 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)
published by Vienna: Christian Brandstutter (Distributed in the US by Distributed Art Publishers)

The Serbs: History, Myth and the Resurrection of Yugoslavia by Tim Judah 350 pages, $30.00 (hardcover)
published by Yale University Press

Late-Breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace Operations by Warren P. Stroebel 275 pages, $29.95 (hardcover), $14.95 (paperback)
published by United States Institute of Peace

Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation by Laura Silber and Allan Little 403 pages, $12.95 (paperback)
published by Penguin

Triumph of the Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War by James Gow 343 pages, $29.50 (hardcover)
published by Columbia University Press

Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and its Destroyers-America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why by Warren Zimmerman 269 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)
published by Times Books