Karadzic

Ed Vulliamy's account of the tragedy of the massacres of Srebrenica, the "ethnic cleansing" of theBosnian Muslims, his memories, obviously unextinguishable, of the stories of tortures and suffering inflicted by the Serbs on the Muslim and Croation populations in the Guardian's G2 moved me like nothing since the findings of the Nazi death camps.
This was not only because of the almost unbearable accounts of the ,,
sufferings he described, in a detail possible only because of the great attention to detail and interviewing he carried out as a reporter, but also because of the feelings of guilt they inspired in me. How could I - and come to that, so many others - have responded so inadequately at the time to these reports in the early 1990's? What was so distracting at the time? What minor day-to-day concerns were blotting out these reports?
One explanation may be that a postwar generation thought that it was "those Balkan people, at it again" as they had been at the end of the war. The tales of murder, of people strung up and hanged in fields, of Serbs fighting their neighbours, had been brought back by colleagues working or reporting from there at that time. Tito had brought Yugoslavia under totalitarian control and stopped it. Once he and the system had gone, it started again.
But it was no excuse to say that this was just the end of the last World War finally fighting to its end. The people Vulliamy lists as having had serious diplomatic talks with Karadzic - Peter Carrington, David Owen, Douglas Hurd among others - the "siege of Sarajevo played out on television almost nightly, Karadzic's hand eagerly clasped by the world's diplomatic leaders beneath the chandeliers of London, Paris, Geneva and elsewhere" contributes to his bitter sorrow at the way this disaster and suffering were allowed to continue.
His mind clearly will never be free of it, even when Karadzic is before the Hague international tribunal. If it is of any comfort to him (and I don't see why it should be) mine now won't be either, because of his piece.