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BELGRADE — At first, it looked like the old Serbia: An angry and sometimes violent crowd of 300 people marched through the streets of Belgrade Wednesday afternoon, chanting the name of Radovan Karadzic, showing their support for the recently arrested war-crimes suspect and denouncing the United Nations tribunal that is likely to try him.
Then, when the crowd reached a downtown square, the new reality of Serbia emerged: Some young men pulled out the flag of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia, which governed Serbia through the 1990s, and burned it with cigarette lighters, receiving loud cheers.
“The SPS are traitors to Serbia,” the protesters shouted, denouncing the party that had given their heroes, the Bosnian Serb leader Mr. Karadzic and his military leader, Ratko Mladic, their authority in the early 1990s.
During the nearly 13 years that Mr. Karadzic lived in open hiding in Belgrade, most recently posing as a natural-health guru, his world changed around him.
Supporters of Partizan Belgrade wave a flag with Radovan Karadzic's picture during a friendly soccer match against Olympique Lyonnais in Belgrade on Wednesday. (Ivan Milutinovic/Reuters)
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Two weeks ago, the SPS joined a coalition government with the same pro-democracy parties that had thrust Mr. Milosevic out of office in 2000, the former Milosevic allies in the party expressing a desire to break from the extreme ethnic nationalism that had defined its past, and become more like a modern European social-democratic party.
This combination of the late Mr. Milosevic's party and its erstwhile opponents made possible the arrest of Mr. Karadzic, Serbian officials said in interviews Wednesday. For the first time since 2000, Serbia's government did not contain a single party that supported the war fugitives, and in the first week of July they appointed a new security chief, Sasa Vukadinovic, who quickly moved in on the suspects.
That was only one of the cosmic ironies that rocked Serbia as citizens realized that the accused mass murderer had been living among them, posing as a healer.
Mr. Karadzic, whose campaign to create an ethnically pure Serbian state in Bosnia had triggered a decade of wars against North Atlantic Treaty Alliance armies and polarized Serbian politics against the United States, had spent the past few years pretending to have a family in America, even hanging a photo on his mantle of four children in Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and claiming they were his grandchildren.
The man who drew on Serbian Orthodox religious piety to build his movement in the early 1990s, using fundamentalist religious imagery to make speeches calling for the extermination of Bosnia's Muslim population, appears to have spent the past few years living in sin with a much younger mistress, whose existence was unknown to his wife.
On Wednesday, Mr. Karadzic shaved off the enormous beard and long pony-tail that had provided his extremely effective disguise, and announced that if he faces trial at the United Nations war-crimes tribunal in the Hague he will provide his own defence, a colourful but counterproductive method employed by Mr. Milosevic and other Serbian suspects.
He is almost certain to face a trial, which UN officials pledge will be less cumbersome and lengthy than the one against Mr. Milosevic, which lasted six years until the former leader's death of heart failure in 2006. His avenues for appeal will be exhausted Friday, when he is likely to be transported to the Netherlands for trial.
It appears, in another grand irony, that Mr. Karadzic's bold move into public life was based on an assumption that Serbia's politics had allowed him to beat the clock. The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the body that will likely try him, will cease to exist at the end of next year – its mandate requires it to complete all trials by the end of 2009.
Mr. Karadzic would have expected Serbia's March elections to produce a more nationalist government with a more hostile attitude toward the Hague tribunal.
Those elections had been called by Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica, a nationalist, over the declaration of independence by Kosovo, Serbia's Muslim-majority southern province. Most observers had expected nationalist parties to win a majority.
But while the nationalist Radical Party won the most votes, it was denied any part in the government when the SPS switched sides and joined the Democrats in a coalition – making Mr. Karadzic's arrest possible, and turning Serbian politics upside down.
The SPS, observers say, is willing to lose former allies such as Mr. Karadzic in order to gain a stronger future in a Europe-oriented Serbia.
“They are hoping to reinvent themselves over the next four years, bringing Serbia into the European Union and bringing people economic gains instead of nationalism,” said Lilijana Smajlovic, editor of the influential Belgrade newspaper Politika.
“That's why their condition for joining the coalition was that the government stand for at least four years – they knew they were going to have to convert their supporters into different kinds of people.”
In a sign that those supporters have not quite changed with their party, the SPS did its best Wednesday to distance itself from the arrest of Mr. Karadzic.
Interior Minister Ivica Dacic, who is also the SPS party leader, made a point of announcing that the Serbian national police, which are under his command, played absolutely no role in the arrest of the fugitive.
“The secret service protected him, the secret service has now handed him over,” Mr. Dacic said as the protest took place with the participation of the opposition Radical Party.
“Not one policeman participated in the location or arrest of Karadzic. It was all done by security forces.”
