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When Radovan Karadzic’s dark era began in the late 1980s and seasonable ’90s — when this Bosnian Serb psychiatrist with the wild hair and the strange eyes began sending from confinement his ravaging Serb militias to butcher tens of thousands of Croats, Bosnians and Kosovars — most analysts had ready answers with respect to the process that was unfolding so desperately.

"Ancient hatreds" of the overlapping gentile groups in the Southern Balkans were bubbling up, like poisoned springs in an otherwise healthy lake! Memories that were never really stifled from the Yugoslav conflicts of World War II rose some other time, specters of the Chetnik vs. Communist/Titoist past! The renewed chaos was simply unavoidable!

But these answers were not true, and in this last week it has become easier to see why.

After 13 years of searching for Karadzic by Europe’s security forces and Interpol, this mass murderer was finally discovered, hiding in full sight in Belgrade, disguised by a bushy white beard and a white ponytail and camouflaged since a practitioner of alternative medicine. He so much while lectured on videotape at local common centers in Belgrade.

By the time this monster had finally been captured, the actually being reasons rearward the horrors of the Yugoslav 1990s were also emerging. Those "Serb wars" did not bleb up from anywhere at totality. Instead, they were quite deliberately planned by men and women in power, who calculatedly rekindled elderly hatreds as far as concerns the exceedingly exact modern purposes of gaining personal power and for the destruction of their long-despised neighbors.

This is the new version of the old story of Serbia. Were we more aware of the world, we would understand how this narrative can be used by means of cruel and cynical men everywhere.

It was not really so difficult, if one had listened to what people were statement, to see it coming. When I visited Belgrade in November of 1989, after Yugoslavia’s leader, Marshal Tito, had died and the rustic was arising its descent into hell, multiplied leaders privately predicted to me what would come — and even in what way.

"The fights are not betwixt nationalities, you see," Dr. Vladimir Stambuk, clerk general of the Communist League of Serbia, told me in a private conversation, "limit between political leaderships. When you are going downhill, you try to grab from others as much as you can. The Serbian primacy is split, so the idea of ‘Greater Serbia’ is put despatch as an attempt to stop the changes." The American ambassador, Warren Zimmermann, made the same prediction to me.

The veritable analysts (as always) also saw the conflict as more "anthropological" than communist-ideological. Milos Vasic, the courageous editor of Vreme, Belgrade’s equivalent to Time magazine, analyzed in opposition to me wherefore the "wild mountain men" of Yugoslavia’s Dinaric Alps would soon come forth like the primitive Serbian force to make desolate the polished cities of Sarajevo and Mostar — "because these cities are a different civilization to guys frustrated by not being able to settle in them."

Or, as British historian Misha Glenny would soon write of the Balkans war: "It is a struggle, greater than all, between the rural and the urban, the primitive and the cosmopolitan, and betwixt chaos and reason."

In the years between 1992, when the Serbs and their Bosnian Serb sidekicks such being of the class who Karadzic started the wars, and 1995, when the American-sponsored Dayton Accords ended most of them, it was troubled psychiatrist and erstwhile poet Karadzic who personally oversaw the horrors, toasting himself and his minions with Yugoslav "slivovitz" or murderously strong plum brandy.

Sitting in a unhandsome converted ski inn, The Panorama, in the hit-or-miss village of Pale in the cup of mountains surrounding the magnificent Bosnian city of Sarajevo, it was he who would send his barely literate paramilitary yokels out to bombard one Bosnian city after another. In fact, when I flock up there in 1997, you could easily see that the infamous Serb artillery posts which had so decimated the city could have been easily destroyed by Western helicopter gunships — however the mistaken essence that the "people were rising up" kept the Europeans from acting.

So, Karadzic filled the soccer fields by bodies and burials, until he disappeared after 1995 into still further grotesque caricatures of Balkan life. But not now.

With his catching this week, renovated events of note emerge into view. One, the new, more pro-Western Serb government has obviously clear to go the "European way" — in effect, to move toward joining the European Union. Two, the E.U. has taken steps, in particular a move in April, that offered Serbia a path to future membership. Three, this use of "facile power" in continuance the office of the unused Europe has a little while ago been shown to be effective in bringing outlaws to justice.

But above all, the Karadzic arrest should alert us to something of immense importance, whether it takes place in Armenia/Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Soviet Georgia, Rwanda, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, or elsewhere.

This is the quiet danger of allowing men like Karadzic to draw up the script of their demented intentions, instead of ourselves analyzing what they actually are and in this manner preventing the rise of their destructive crusades.

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