Several times during our discussions, Radovan Karadzic wanted to demonstrate his skills in bioenergetic therapy. The first was on January 23, 2015, the third of 12 four-hour conversations we had between October 2014 and November 2016. We were seated on small chairs at a small wooden table in the small room allocated to us. United Nations Prison in The Hague. Karadžić went into hiding after being indicted in 1995 on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, including involvement in the murder of 8,000 men and women in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. I wanted to understand why he pretended to be an energy healer when he was in a ram state.
While on the run, he acquired a new identity. He lost about 70 pounds and his hair also grew. He started wearing loose clothes instead of tailored suits. He grew a very long beard, a mystic’s beard, and took on a new name and a new profession. The former president of Republika Srpska, an independent Serbian state from Bosnia, became Dragan David Davić, an energy healer who offers spiritual treatments for infertility and illness.
For more than a decade, the deception worked. Karadzic was the subject of the largest manhunt in modern history since Osama bin Laden. He was eventually arrested by Serbian intelligence agents in Belgrade in 2008. On March 24, 2016, the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia found him guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 40 years in prison. Three years later, the Court of Appeals increased his sentence to life imprisonment.
This is dangerous work, and it’s my job to study violent men and men who incite violence. You need to listen without judgment. I have to surrender to their own image, even if only temporarily. I often float above myself in my imagination and observe my reactions. But that doesn’t mean I’m never afraid of being depressed or losing myself. When I persuaded the court to allow me an interview with Mr. Karadzic, I had to give in to his idea of himself as a powerful mystic, a great poet, and a respected psychiatrist. I knew that.
“Why did you decide to become a naturopathic doctor even though you were in hiding?” I asked him that day in January 2015. “Is it true that no one noticed you when you were in disguise?”
he laughed. “I always say that the people who know me have no idea where I am, and the people who know where I am have no idea who I am. ” He smiled like a proud mischievous child. For a moment, I saw him as a boy.
It wasn’t really a disguise, he said. He was really interested in bioenergetic therapy. I noticed that his features relaxed. Up until this point, in the 10 hours we had spent together, we had mostly stuck to “safe” issues: history and literature. But the subject matter, the period he spent disguised as an alternative medicine doctor, seems to have cheered him up.
He told me that his mother taught him about mystical healing when he was younger and “not as smart.” “I laughed, thinking it couldn’t be possible. But later I realized that what we don’t understand is still true.”
He continued: “I saw some very strange things. My mother’s relatives were whispering to the animals to heal them. I saw her do it. Our sheep. One of the sheep was bitten by a snake. The sheep was dying. She grabbed it by the ear and whispered something to it. Then the sheep stood up, shook it off, and walked away.” This amazing memory is… It gave him obvious pleasure. I noticed that his prison-pale face was flushed with red, and that he looked younger than his seventy years.
Imagining this scene, I let my guard down a little. In my mind’s eye, I saw the sheep stand up, shake, and roam freely.
“We had a lot of land, some cultivated land, some pretty wild land,” he continued. “We kids were very curious about the unexplored land, but we were also scared. There were a lot of snakes. We had cats. I liked running out into the unexplored parts of the property. One day I saw a cat staring at a snake. They just stared at each other.” He paused. He tried to imagine the scene. I don’t like snakes.
“The snake finally bit the cat,” he said. “Then I saw the cat start eating leaves. Lots of leaves. Who ever heard of cats eating leaves? After two hours, she threw up. Then she… I recovered.”
Was he talking about the two of us? I needed to know which leaf would heal me from this encounter?
“My wife and I became interested in bioenergetics when we were young psychiatrists,” he said. “I saw it myself, myself. When I put my hands together, it felt like a magnet.” He placed one palm on top of the other and realized what he meant. showed me. “I tried it on my wife, and when I ran my hand over her arm, I realized I could actually move her arm. And I realized I could cure people’s headaches.” ” He became more and more excited, spoke faster and improved his English dictionary. “We did this research and kept it a secret. I put my hand in ice water and it was very, very cold. My wife could feel my hand freezing. But… As she brought her hand close to her, she felt an intense heat. Then she realized that the heat was not coming from her; it was the Holy Spirit.”
I returned to my professional self. “Why are you keeping this research secret?” I asked. “I thought this kind of folk medicine was very common in Eastern Europe.”
“Yes, but not for doctors and scientists. There’s a lot of interest in complementary medicine right now. But I’m talking about 40 years ago.”
Mr. Karadzic looked straight at me. “Can you show me how it works?”
I was shocked and didn’t know how to respond. I thought, “If I had said no, he would have won.” He would understand that I was afraid of him and his claims to mystical power. But saying yes meant exposing myself to his touch. Not just his touch, but also his “healing” energy. He was still looking at me, accusing me with his gaze. I thought maybe he wanted me to feel his power, to scare me.
I reminded myself that even though he was convicted of genocide, he was never suspected of committing any violent acts himself. I didn’t think he would strangle me. But I knew that the security guard on duty, who was supposed to be watching us and keeping me safe, was sitting at his desk, absentmindedly flipping through the pages of a magazine.
By that time, I had watched him in court for days and talked to him one-on-one for about 10 hours, so I had no idea who this man was and what misdeeds he had committed or supervised. , I already knew that he was also a believer in God. . I told myself that I would be more or less safe with him, even if he got physically close to me.
“Yes,” I said.
He walked around the table and stood directly behind me. I sat low to the ground in a prison chair. I felt his presence behind me. I hoped he didn’t feel the tension in my back.
He instructed me to spread my hands flat, palms up and parallel to the table.
Then he came around to my side and touched the center of my palm. Although he was born into a peasant family, he was trained as a psychiatrist and had never worked in the fields. His hands were soft and clean, like a doctor’s or a gentleman’s, and he had long, unevenly cut nails that made me feel sick. He directed me to think about God or someone I truly love.
“Pray often without stopping,” he commanded me.
He stood behind me again and put his hand on my head.
I could feel him moving his hand back and forth, but I couldn’t see exactly where. I felt something like electricity heat up his head and I felt a little dizzy. But soon things started to calm down, at least a little.
“What do you feel in your palm?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said.
He didn’t react immediately.
I turned and looked at him. It turns out that “nothing” is the wrong answer. I failed the exam.
“You have to concentrate,” he advised me, but said it calmly and with great control. “Please concentrate more.”
An embarrassment-inducing thought occurred to me: I wanted to get an A from this guy. It hurt a lot because I had just gotten my first F in my life. It’s been years since I was graded. Usually I’m the teacher, not the student. I stepped back under his gaze.
I did as I was told. Like a star student, I focused my thoughts hard on the center of my palm.
Again he asked me, “Did you feel anything?” His tone became a little arrogant, but still polite.
This time I told him that I felt as if a cypress tree was growing out of the center of my palm. I don’t know why or how this image came to me. The trees were tall, reaching higher than my head. Then I told him about the heat in his head.
“Interesting,” he said, returning to sit on his side of the small table. There was a puzzled smile in his eyes. Even if I wasn’t sensitive enough to perceive all of his powers, at least I could feel the energy he was calling into my head.
He wanted me to see him as someone with special powers. But the truth is, I understood what he was doing. I have also studied Reiki. I don’t know how this energy works. All I know is that it will happen. I thought that if I didn’t tell him that, he might feel that I was trying to manipulate him by making him think I was in awe of him.
As I was writing this, I realized that I had held out a childish hope that if I was honest with him, he would be honest with me. I told him that I had studied Reiki.
“Then you understand,” he said.
At that moment, and in the days that followed, I swore I would never tell anyone about what had happened. But later on, it seemed to me that a lot of things were captured in this story: his belief in the mystical, his power to manipulate, etc. cat and mouse. Or maybe a cat and a snake.
Jessica Stern (@jessicaesttern) is a research professor at Boston University and the author of the forthcoming book My War Criminals: Personal Encounters with the Architects of Genocide, from which this essay is adapted.
