LIFE IMITATES ART IMITATES LIFE 201Several months later, I learned that US intelligence and/or coalition
forces had made direct contact with two of Jovan’s sources whom I had
reluctantly identified to them in January. Those same sources told Jovan
they would never work with him again, because we had failed to follow
their instructions and Karadžić evaded capture because of it. Just as impor-
tantly, they missed out on collecting their richly deserved reward money
that would have set them and their families up for life. They were not the
first, and would not be the last, to learn the hard way about misplacing
trust in the US government.
Radovan Karadžić was arrested about four years later in Belgrade,
where he was hiding in plain sight under an assumed identity as a spiri-
tual healer (I am not making this up).^2 He had also changed his appear-
ance, by growing a long, bushy white beard and mustache. Picture Santa
Claus, if Santa were a psychotic mass murderer wearing huge 1980s-style
plastic rim glasses. His long, snowy-white hair was pulled up into some sort
of shamanic man bun. I’m somewhat surprised his fellow macho Serbs
hadn’t already beaten him to death on general principle before his eventual
unmasking and apprehension.
It took thirteen years, but Karadžić would finally face justice for the
July 1995 mass murder of eight thousand innocent compatriots in Sre-
brenica. On March 24, 2016, Karadžić was convicted of genocide, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity.^3 The UN tribunal in The Hague sen-
tenced the seventy-year-old mass murderer to forty years of imprisonment.
Not long after his conviction, Karadžić complained that his prison
conditions were “19th century, like some Communist or Turkish prison.”^4
Keep in mind, Karadžić was the political leader responsible for setting up a
network of concentration camps across Bosnia to imprison, starve, and kill
innocent Bosnian Muslims, less than fifty years after the end of World War
II. Karadžić and other Bosnian Serbs would often scornfully refer to their
despised Bosnian Muslim victims as “Turks” to dehumanize and delegiti-
mize them and to justify their rape, torture, abuse, and murder. Karadžić
will deservedly spend the remainder of his rotten life in a prison cell. If
only it were Turkish.