“Can you believe that this is the same man?” the BBC newsman asks. The newsman is talking about former Serbian president Radovan Karadzic. Karadzic had just been captured after spending thirteen years on the international most-wanted list for his role in genocide and ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars. As it turns out Karadzic had been hiding in plain view in Belgrade as “Dr. Dragan Dabic,” an alternative healer and therapist who wrote frequently for “Healthy Life” Magazine in Belgrade and appeared often on the New Age speaking circuit.
Karadzic was a poet and psychiatrist before he became, in the 1990s, Serbian president and responsible for some of the worst crimes against humanity since World War Two. Under his order, the siege of Sarajevo killed thousands of innocent civilians over a period of three years. He was also responsible for the massacre of eight thousand Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.
Social historians of the region can describe far better than I the political and economic factors that led to the heartbreak of the Balkans in the early 1990’s, and Karadzic’s role in the violence. As a historian of religions, I notice something else—the unsettling continuities between his old and new selves.
In his disguised persona, “Dragan Dabic,” he was described by his colleague at the alternative medical clinic where he worked as a cultured, tolerant man who knew a great deal about other religions and other ways of life. A visit to Dr. Dragan Dabic’s website (which has not yet been taken down by the authorities) is particularly revealing. “Dabic” describes himself as born in a small Serbian village near Kraljevo, where as a boy he liked to pick potent medical herbs that grew on the mountains. The website claims that he achieved a psychiatry degree at Moscow State University, and then travelled around India and Japan, ultimately settling in China to study Chinese herbs. “In the mid-1990s,” reports the site, “Dr. Dabic” returned to mother Serbia for good.” The website concludes by asserting that he has since “emerged as one of the prominent experts in the field of alternative medicine, bioenergy and macrobiotic diet in the whole of the Balkans.” And, to top it all off, Dr. Dabic can be reached at healingwounds@dragandabic.com. Healing wounds indeed.
For many it would indeed be hard to believe that this is the same man. Yet for a historian of religion, Karadzic/”Dabic’s” journey has an oddly familiar ring. It was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that historians of religion first began to grapple with historian of religion Mircea Eliade’s association with the Iron Guard, a fascist movement in Romania during World War Two. Not only did we have to grapple with the fact of it, but we had to try to understand why he never publically renounced his association. Eliade never openly discussed this aspect of his past, even as he became a champion of studying yoga, shamanism, world religions and alternative systems of thought in the West. We had to grapple with many others who were criticized in this same light, such as Henri Corbin or Carl Jung. And the debate about these figures and their political sympathies still rages on.
There are, of course, massive differences between the cases. Karadzic was a war criminal responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. Eliade was not. Karadzic was actively involved in evading justice for crimes against humanity. Eliade was not. And there are many scholars, myself included, who think there is something to learn from Eliade' s writing. But the unsettling connections between grand spiritual systems and totalitarian political ideologies remain.
In trying to come to terms with these uncomfortable facts, many scholars have pointed out the connections between the totalizing view of a grand system of symbols and the allures of a fascist ideology: 1) the sense that the world can be imagined and remade in one’s own image; 2) the sense that the world can be purified with the right methods; 3) the sense that an ideal world is possible here on earth if one is given the means and power to achieve it.
And surely the persona of “Dragan Dabic” resonates with all of these similarities. “Dr. Dabic” creates a romantic view of his homeland, Serbia, which is pure with mountain herbs and the cradle of his childhood. Like Eliade, “Dabic” searches in India and other Asian countries for his expertise.
And there is also a continuity of identity as there was with Eliade, who remained a historian of religions, whether as a young fascist in Romania or a wide-ranging intellectual in Chicago. “Dabic” too was a psychiatrist, like Karadzic the president-psychiatrist before him, and Karadzic the practicing doctor and poet before him. And “Dabic,” like Karadzic, has large regional pretentions; as his website claims, his expertise in alternative healing expands to all of the Balkans. Like "Dr. Dabic," Karadzic was happy to speak on panels and forums all throughout Serbia. Like “Dabic’s” focus on awakening in his New Age writings, Karadzic, too, had a renewed spiritual experience and return to the Serbian Orthodox church, just before his nationalist fervor was to take the most violent of turns. Karadzic manipulated an identity so that there was both effective disguise and continuity of purpose.
But how could it have truly been the same man? How could the war criminal have even found the words to write about the inner peace and meditation that he writes about in “Healing Lifestyle” magazine? In a totalitarian way of thinking, an imagined ideal world can be achieved through many different activities. Karadzic might well have been cynically manipulating the present cultural trends in the Balkans. But it is not insignificant that he chose this particular New Age medium within which to “hide in plain sight,” and not, say, opening a restaurant or running a hardware store. Karadzic may well have understood his “healing” work to be the same, whether it was picking herbs in the mountains or bombing innocent civilians during the siege of Sarajevo. The power of alternative healing systems to relieve suffering is well known and widely accepted. But, in this bizarre case, we are reminded once again, of the darker side of esoteric religious systems that thrive in modernity.
Others have different definitions of healing. And even more significantly, others have different definitions of justice. So the healing of the wounds can truly begin, not by making an appointment with “Dr. Dabic” at healingwounds.com, but by keeping a long overdue appointment with the International War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague.
