June 18, 1996

In Sarajevo, They Remember Karadzic, a Friend Who Turned Foe

By MIKE O'CONNOR

ARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- A block up the hill from both the American Embassy and the headquarters of NATO forces in Bosnia, the residents of an old Sarajevo neighborhood keep asking a question foreign diplomats and military commanders are having a difficult time answering.

"How can they say we can't live together when Radovan Karadzic lived right here with us for more than 30 years, and he fit in like any Muslim or Croat on this street?" asked Meho Usanovic, a Muslim, and, according to the people on Sujeska Street, the best friend of Karadzic during the years he lived in this ethnically mixed neighborhood near Kosevo Park.

That is the question almost everyone in this neighborhood asks.

"When my father got cancer in 1990, Radovan came to see him every night because our families were so close," Usanovic said. "On the last night, he was holding my father when he died."

The next year, Karadzic was the leader of a Serbian nationalist movement propelling the country into war and ethnic cleansing by preaching that Muslims and Serbs were irreconcilable adversaries. And today he is under indictment by an international war crimes tribunal on charges of genocide for his actions during the ethnic war.

Exasperated by the years of violence and the intransigence of some local leaders, many of the foreigners who were sent here to help unify Bosnia now talk about the inevitability of the country's being cut into three pieces, each one the exclusive homeland of an ethnic group.

To the people here, that conclusion seems to ratify Karadzic's doctrine of enforced separation and to provide not a solution as much as an excuse for failure.

In the old neighborhood, most buildings are from the last century, when the Hapsburg dynasty extended south and east into the Balkans and began to impose a European sternness on the haphazard Turkish look of Sarajevo.

The buildings, colored in pastels, with shops and cafes facing the street and apartments above, go up about six floors. It is a middle-class neighborhood, but, in the Sarajevo style, both beggars and the well-off are mixed in.

Hazim Olovcic described his neighborhood before the war as a rainbow mosaic.

"Every family was a tile, the Karadzic family, too," he said. "We all fit together to make a wonderful picture, and no even one cared about who was which ethnic group."

The families Karadzic had weekend barbecues with, and the men he played cards and drank with, attribute his fight for separation to a sudden thirst for power, not to historic inevitability.

Despite the predictions by some NATO officers and foreign diplomats that ethnic divisions have become irreversible, Olovcic and others here said they hoped their Serbian neighbors who left during the war would soon come back.

"We are all waiting for them," Olovcic said, "because without them our mosaic is incomplete."

Karadzic left his native village when he was in his late teens to study in Sarajevo. He took a room with the Zelen family at No. 2 Sujeska Street.

He later married Ljiljana Zelen, his landlords' daughter, and they moved to an apartment upstairs. Their son and a daughter were born while the couple were living in the building.

The light-green building still has the Karadzic Family and the Zelen Family written on the hallway mailboxes, but refugees live in those apartments now.

The front of the building, like many others in the neighborhood, is scarred from the shelling that Karadzic ordered. There are two large holes from direct hits.

Their old friends say that, except for the fact that both husband and wife became psychiatrists, the Karadzics were a thoroughly typical family in an average downtown Sarajevo neighborhood where members of the three ethnic groups were completely intermingled.

It was so integrated that around the corner and three blocks down was the apartment of Alija Izetbegovic, then the leader of the Muslim political party and now Bosnia's president.

The two men shopped at the same stores and went to the same barber, Muhamed Dedajic.

"Until the last year, when he became a Serbian nationalist, we all liked Radovan, I can't lie about it," Dedajic said. "If you were sick he'd come to see you at home, anytime."

For 20 years, the barbershop also has been a spot where people come to socialize, including, Dedajic said, a number of men who are now ministers in the Bosnian Serb government.

"When I see the pictures of their Cabinet meetings I see my old customers," he said.