Crazy Neighbor, part 3
Every once in a while at a party where a group of academics or otherwise respectable intellectuals would gather, we would discuss some of the roughest/sketchiest neighborhoods that we had lived in. As a grad student I had moved in into an apartment building that housed several other grad students, but for some reason had deteriorated rather rapidly and towards the end of my stay there was literally a waking nightmare to be living at. (You can read more about it in my previous posts here and here.) A friend of mine from college, who was otherwise a brilliant guy, for some bizarre reason moved during one of his undergraduate years and lived for a while in East Palo Alto. Palo Alto is known one of the most prosperous and exclusive places to live in the US, while East Palo Alto is some sort of its evil twin, known for one of the highest murder rates in the country, and overall not the sort of place that a Stanford undergrad would choose to live at. Another friend comes from a country where kidnappings of wealthy individuals are common, and one of her neighbors had been abducted in such a way. So in this telling of stories of rough neighborhoods, I sometimes decide to pull out my trump card: one of my former neighbors is an indicted war criminal. Precisely speaking, he was not my neighbor but my high school's neighbor, but I leave that detail for the elaboration of the story. The man in question is Radovan Karadžić, and he has been making news lately. He was the political leader of Bosnian Serbs during the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, during which some some 200,000 people were killed and well over million displaced or forced into exile, including myself and my family. Shortly after the war ended Karadžić was indicted on several accounts of genocide, but he was not captured and even lived in Bosnia for many years in broad daylight. Eventually he went into hiding, and in a really bizare twist to the already bizare life was that he was living and working as a practitioner of alternative medicine in Belgrade for many years before he was captured. He grew a long beard, and even those who interacted with him ona daily basis could not see though his disguise.
Karadžić, like many dictators and strongmen with blood on their hands, is not crazy in the conventional sense. To have him plead not guilty by reason of insanity in a court of law would be a great injustice and highly inaccurate in many respects. He is a cunning, perfidious and very intelligent individual who knew very well what he wanted to accomplish and had no qualms about using even the most brutal and violent means neccessary. There is something very disturbing that this is the same man that I watched scrape snow from his beaten-up car during a cold Sarajevo winter day many years ago. On a surface, he was just your ordinary neighbor.