Click to enlarge the horror
So Serbia arrested Radovan Karadzic on Monday, finally. The Times had an arresting image of skeletons scattered across a wintertime hillside near Srebernecia, where Serbian forces murdered 8000 men and boys in 1995. I spent most of my commute from Brooklyn just staring at it. Often atrocities such as this seem distant and unreal but the sweater on the nearest victim, it’s patterns and knitting visible against the dead grass, renders the scene palpable. The wooded backdrop evokes the hills around the Indiana town where I grew up. I can picture the victim selecting the sweater from a drawer the morning of the day he was going to die.
In an overview of Karadzic and his crimes, John Burns reminds us of a time when he was considered one of the best international correspondents at the Times (or anywhere). But is it just me or was he getting in a dig at Obama with this bit: “The grandiose manner he developed in the years of conflict was encouraged, many who knew him then believed, by the willingness of the United Nations and the Western powers, primarily the United States and Britain, to negotiate with him.”