Radovan Karadžić

Radovan Karadžić is presented as the political and cultural figure at the center of the book’s most unsettling filmed scene from the Bosnian war: a leader who argues that his side is reclaiming ancestral territory, recites poetry about Sarajevo burning, and presides over a wartime world from which Eduard Limonov fires on the besieged city. The account places Karadžić between two kinds of performance, political and literary, while the surrounding violence makes their consequences impossible to treat as merely rhetorical.

Political Position and the War

When the fighting between Serbs and Croats shifted to Bosnia in the spring of 1992, the narrator describes how opinion in his own circles hardened into a clear moral division. Slobodan Milošević was seen as having roused Serbs in Belgrade to fanaticism, while Karadžić was portrayed as a slippery battlefield leader. On the other side, Alija Izetbegović and the Bosnian Muslims were understood as victims of aggression; the language used to describe that aggression escalated from atrocity to genocide. This is the narrator’s account of the political atmosphere among people he knew, not a neutral inventory of the war’s competing claims.

That atmosphere helps explain why the film made by Paweł Pawlikowski matters in the narrative. Disturbed by the prevailing description of Serbs in London and Paris as heirs to the Nazis, Pawlikowski went to see what people on the other side were thinking. His footage follows Serbian songs and stories of defeat on earth and victory in heaven, through weddings and children’s ditties, including songs sung by children carrying Kalashnikovs. In those songs, celebrated ancestors from six centuries earlier give way to present-day heroes: Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. The succession joins inherited memory to current leadership without making the distance between them disappear.

Pale and the Wartime Stage

Pale, a ski resort built for the 1980 Sarajevo Olympics, served as the capital of the Bosnian Serb Republic. The book describes its chalets and bobsled tracks through a pointed comparison to Vichy France: a political center with the trappings of a holiday resort. In Pawlikowski’s film, a council of war shows Karadžić and Mladić bent over maps, marking borders and populations as they consider what may be conceded and what must not be surrendered. The scene resembles the work of diplomats negotiating in Lisbon, Geneva, and Dayton, but its scale is reduced to two men and a map. Political decisions over territory are thus made visible as decisions about people as well as lines.

Pale also provides the setting for Pawlikowski’s first observation of Limonov. At the officers’ mess, Limonov wears a People’s Army overcoat over a leather jacket and carries a 7.65 pistol. To Pawlikowski, the weapon seems less like an ordinary part of his appearance than an accessory he wears as if it were a token of welcome. The detail introduces Limonov as an outsider in the company of Chetniks, but it also anticipates the film’s more consequential image of him handling a weapon in Karadžić’s presence.

The Interview Above Sarajevo

Pawlikowski eventually asks Limonov to interview Karadžić for his film. The arrangement serves the filmmaker’s preference for having people speak on screen rather than relying on an offscreen interviewer or a visible microphone. As a result, the BBC production Serbian Epics includes a conversation between the famous Russian writer and Karadžić, identified in the film as a psychiatrist and poet who leads the Bosnian Serbs.

The interview takes place on the heights from which Serb artillery bombards Sarajevo, a city lying in a basin. Mortar fire rumbles almost continuously, and soldiers surround the two men. Karadžić, tall and wearing a large overcoat, appears imposing beside Limonov, who is slight in a small black leather jacket. The narrator’s description of their relative appearance is sharply unflattering to Limonov, whose respectful nods and eager manner make him seem to be trying to impress a powerful patron.

Karadžić explains that he and his people are not aggressors but are seeking to recover territory that, in his account, has belonged to them since time immemorial. Limonov answers that he admires the Serbs for standing up to fifteen countries allied against them, speaking on behalf of his Russian compatriots and the free people of the world. The book reports this as a sincere response, while also emphasizing how submissive it looks in the scene. The exchange therefore reveals both Karadžić’s justification of the war and Limonov’s public alignment with it; the narrator does not allow Limonov’s sincerity to erase the impression his deference makes.

Poetry, Power, and the Machine Gun

The conversation turns from political claims to verse because both men are poets. Karadžić recites several stanzas from an ode he wrote twenty years earlier that imagines Sarajevo engulfed in flames. In the film’s setting above the city, the poem’s image acquires an ominous relation to the violence already audible around them. The narrator describes the silence after the recitation as charged with foreboding, but interrupts that atmosphere with an ordinary call: Karadžić’s wife is on the telephone. He takes it inside the burned-out shell of a ski gondola fitted with a field telephone. Nearby, a soldier plays with a small dog. These details place literary ceremony, domestic interruption, and the soldiers’ everyday surroundings within the same wartime frame.

Left on his own while Karadžić takes the call, Limonov approaches a soldier greasing a machine gun. The soldier notices his fascination and invites him to try it. Limonov takes position behind the gun as instructed; encouraged by the laughter and the soldiers’ slaps on his back, he abandons his hesitation and empties a magazine toward besieged Sarajevo. The account closes on the repeated sound of the firing. Karadžić is not shown pulling the trigger, but the scene is structured around the authority and company gathered around him: his political defense of the Serbs, the poem of a burning Sarajevo, the armed men, and Limonov’s burst of gunfire at the city below. The narrator’s attention to posture, clothing, silence, and sound makes the filmed encounter more than an interview. It exposes the narrowing distance between a leader’s words about territory and the violence enacted in that territory’s name.