By Peter Andreas, an associate professor of political science who directs the international relations program at Brown University. His latest book, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo, was recently published by Cornell University Press (THE WASHINGTON POST, 20/09/08):

Among the many alleged war crimes of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader who refused to enter a plea when he appeared in court at The Hague this week, none received more attention during the Bosnian war than the targeting of civilians during the long siege of Sarajevo. In retrospect, the siege can also be viewed as an extreme case of organized crime. Karadzic acted like a predatory mafia boss, profiting from the misery of the population and collecting payoffs, in the form of skimmed humanitarian aid, in return for granting the United Nations access to the besieged city. The United Nations and major Western powers acquiesced in this extortionist scheme, largely tolerating the siege even as they condemned it.

Unlike the mass killing of Muslim men in the village of Srebrenica in July 1995, the slow strangulation of Sarajevo by Karadzic’s forces was televised to a global audience and became a media spectacle over its 3 1/2 -year duration. In the words of journalist David Rieff, “A European city was being reduced to nothing; Carthage in slow motion, but this time with an audience and videotaped record.” By the time the U.S.-brokered Dayton peace agreement was concluded and the siege was finally lifted, portions of the city were in ruins and more than 10,000 people had been killed.

Siege warfare in Europe was supposed to be obsolete. In the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, though, it stubbornly persisted. Indeed, the Serb military encirclement that Karadzic directed became the longest-running military siege in modern history. It was an urban magnet for aid workers, U.N. peacekeepers, journalists and smugglers. Sarajevo became the centerpiece of an expanded U.N. commitment to humanitarian intervention, reflected in an ambitious U.N.-led relief aid effort that included the longest-lasting airlift ever attempted. But critical activities that took place away from the cameras included massive clandestine commerce and skimming of aid. Some U.N. peacekeeping forces were also complicit in the black market activities.

While most Sarajevans struggled for survival and lived in a state of terror from 1992 to 1995, some key figures, on all sides, were reaping benefits. This was particularly true of Karadzic and his closest associates, based in the nearby mountain town of Pale. Publicly, they portrayed themselves as motivated by ethnic grievances and animosities; privately, they turned the city’s captivity into a profitable enterprise. The collaborators were involved in large-scale looting, theft and diversion of U.N. supplies; sanctions busting; and clandestine trading of food, arms and other supplies across the battle lines. Siege dynamics were often more about controlling humanitarian supplies and smuggling routes than about military success or failure. With Sarajevo a captive market, prices for both luxury goods and basic necessities inflated extraordinarily. Such underhanded activities were not new to Karadzic; he was convicted of embezzlement and theft of state property in Sarajevo in the mid-1980s.

Sadly, much of the black market activity in Sarajevo was made possible by the United Nations. To gain access to the city, the United Nations agreed to hand over about a quarter of all relief aid, primarily food, to the Serb besiegers, regardless of where the need was greatest. Much of this skimmed aid, in turn, would trickle into Sarajevo via smugglers. The former Bosnian Serb political leader Biljana Plavsic has claimed that some war profiteers became millionaires in only months by smuggling humanitarian aid and that Karadzic “was fascinated by such people. He admired them, he consorted with them, and then he followed in their footsteps.” An internal Bosnian military memo from April 1993 appears to support this, claiming that in June 1992, Karadzic gave written permission to ship certain weapons and communications gear across the siege line — in other words, informally selling to the very forces he was formally fighting.

To some, Karadzic was the model defender of greater Serbia. In reality, he was not simply promoting “Serbdom” but creating and protecting his own mafia-like fiefdom. The siege of Sarajevo was not only a war crime but also a criminal enterprise. As the main architect of the siege, Karadzic should be viewed as a war profiteer, too. This seamier side is often overlooked, but the organized criminal conspiracy should not be glossed over simply because it is beyond the mandate of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.