Part Two: Radovan Karadžić: The Genocidal Dictator Who Became a New-Age Guru

We conclude the harrowing story of Radovan Karadžić with his war crimes and third act as an energy healer. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  And we're back. This is part two of Behind the Bastards on Radovan Karadzic. And I know what everyone's been asking, at least everyone watching on the Netflix since the first episode, probably on the subreddit who's been going crazy over like, Robert's in a new room. Why is Robert in a new room? And like, guys, look, it's nothing crazy. I'm not on the run from anywhere. Right? Obviously, I haven't committed a series of horrible crimes like Jamie that I've had to go into hiding over. You know, it's, I'm just in a different room.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  This is, okay.

• 0:33Robert Evans?

  Yes, Jamie.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  You're deflect, you're deflecting. You're deflecting. And now, and what happens when you deflect and accuse me of your crimes is that I don't hear the end of it for, I think this might be for half a decade.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Decades.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Not, not a week goes by that there isn't some neckbeard side eyeing me in the grocery store.

• 0:55Robert Evans?

  Cause that axe thing, yeah.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  And, and I, and I love each and every one of them. And I'm so nice.

• 1:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  I think I weirdly got it the worst in Pittsburgh somehow.

• 1:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes sense, actually. I got a lot of Pittsburgh fans, a lot of people standing up for the show in Pittsburgh. The Yinzers love it.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  The Yinzers were really shaking in their boots when, when I came around. Look, where, you know, the, so where's your, where's your secret room at? I think.

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  It's underneath the Denver Airport. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. I bought, actually own the Denver Airport now. Power bills are eating me alive. Yeah. It was a lot cheaper than you'd expect. Yeah.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Love your horse. Love the horse statue.

• 1:38Robert Evans?

  Thank you. Yeah. I do. That's, that's, that's what really sold me on it too, actually. Yeah.

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• 1:51Robert Evans?

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• 5:48Robert Evans?

  We've been talking about Radovan Karadzic, who at this point in the story is a psychiatrist who has been slightly disgraced for his criminal activity, may be informed on his friends for the regime, uh, and yeah, is, uh, is, is eyeing the, the coming disillusion of Yugoslavia and being like, how can I make this work for me? Right?

• 6:09Speaker 01

  It is interesting that he, he ends, um, he ends part one basically just as kind of like a white collar criminal, um, with, who's starting to get some ideas.

• 6:19Robert Evans?

  Shitty dad. Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's like flopped at a couple things. It's, I, I'm, I'm curious, he's a fed, but many such white collar criminals.

• 6:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  But, yeah.

• 6:32Robert Evans?

  If you had to guess what political party in our system, a guy like this who like believes some weird things about like natural healing and like magic, and has committed a series of white collar crimes and may be informed on people for the government, if you wanted to guess what, what party in like the US he would join, right, to start his political career, what, what would you guess?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Oh, gosh. There's, I mean, there's a strong whiff of, uh, upper middle-class centrist to that kind of behavior.

• 7:03Robert Evans?

  Not a centrist.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  Not a, well, I know, well, yeah, he's a dictator. Hmm. I don't know.

• 7:08Robert Evans?

  What's the kooky, the, what, what party would like a kook?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Is he like a libertarian kind of guy?

• 7:12Robert Evans?

  No, no. I'm getting like Maha vibes. He, he joins the Green Party. There's an actual Green Party, like it is the Green Party in Yugoslavia that he joins. And it's kind of the same as our Green Party, as far as I can tell. And that it's all the people who are into like weird woo bullshit, right?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 7:33Robert Evans?

  They love trees and not taking medicine that works. Like that's, those are the two big uniting factors of the Green Party, both here and over there.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Knowing that he loves trees is kind of the one sincere thing I feel like I truly know about this man.

• 7:48Robert Evans?

  He loves trees. Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  He was pissed about those oaks. And you know what? I think he was right.

• 7:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And he would have been a Jill Stein voter. So, uh, I don't know why having a nutty Green Party is endemic to democracy, but as soon as Yugoslavia starts to get the slightest bit of democracy, they're like, well, we gotta have a party for the kooks, right? We gotta have our crank party.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  They gotta go somewhere. They gotta go somewhere.

• 8:11Robert Evans?

  And it's gonna be a fucking Green Party. So he joins the Green Party at first. Um, now, as historian Robert Donia explains, in the late 1980s, before communism fell, Yugoslavians began experimenting with political parties. And this, quote, "represented more of an artistic performance than a practical party." Cause again, you don't really have democracy yet, but people are allowed to play act it. And it is kind of play acting at this point. There's sort of, in the same way that like kids play with guns before they're old enough to join the army, right? Like they're playing with politics before they get to have their first elections in Yugoslavia a little bit, right?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  But he's, he's getting, I mean, he's not super young at this point, right? Like, I mean, he's had a couple careers.

• 8:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:54Robert Evans?

  He's, he's had a full career, pretty much, and done some crimes.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  And I was like, Eddie's served time. Wow.

• 9:00Robert Evans?

  He's done some time.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  There's a really depressing, like, one of those, like memes in there where it's like, it's never too late.

• 9:08Robert Evans?

  It's never too late.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  To pivot and be a dictator.

• 9:11Robert Evans?

  Julius Caesar was just some dipshit, like fucking side act in Roman politics, until he was a little middle-aged man, you know? There are late bloomers out. What I'm saying is, if you're 45 and you're thinking life has passed you by, you could still commit a genocide, my friend. I believe in you. I believe in you. Probably don't, but you could, is what I'm saying. I'm not saying you should, but you could, you know?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  You, you could. I mean, look, I, did, did we think 10 years ago you would own the Denver Airport? Certainly not. But here we are.

• 9:47Robert Evans?

  Anyway, so yeah, the Greens become known as this, this holding place in early party politics in Yugoslavia for the counterculture. They were environmentalists first and foremost. One of the first activist campaigns Radovan participated in was they, they go out and they cover the limbs of acacia trees with plastic bags as like a protest against plastics, right? It's a very eighties environmentalist campaign.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  That's kind of sweet.

• 10:15Robert Evans?

  Sweet, yeah, yeah. Hearts are in the right place.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're like, okay.

• 10:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So far, seems pretty far from genocide. Radovan and his fellow Greens were also bound together by an interest in what we might call folk medicine, right? This includes a mix of like, these traditional remedies that people like the Karajics grew up with in the mountains, as well as weird spiritual beliefs about like, nature that were pretty rooted in Serbian identity. But in a failing communist state, belief in what I prefer to call quack remedies was also political. So the, the people who believe in natural medicine and shit are also kind of dissidents to the communist regime, because that's very much not a, not a communist sort of thing in this period of time, right? I want to quote from a 2009 New York Times article by

• 11:01Robert Evans?

  Jack Hitt, who writes, quote, "In communist Yugoslavia, alternative medicine was suppressed, along with all anti-science superstitions, including in the eyes of the communists, the Serbian Orthodox Church. In Serbia, then, the politics of alternative medicine became a haven for right-wing anti-communists, an expression of ancient Balkan heritage." Right? So, the fact that they're into this stuff does, I mean, we've seen today that there's a lot of interplay between our fascists and the alternative health movement, because if you, if you're willing to discard a big chunk of modernity, you might be willing to discard other parts of it, right?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  And, and it's interesting how, you know, for, for at least the people at the top of that movement, they'll always have access to modernity when it, when it suits

• 11:45Robert Evans?

  them. When they really want to, when they need a vaccine, yeah.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  How unfortunate that we could sort of like, tell the story of American fascism, at least in the last 25 years, through the lens of Gwyneth Paltrow. We don't love to think about it this way, but it could be done, and it's on the table, if you just have a loose three years to write that dissertation.

• 12:04Robert Evans?

  And this also is, there's kind of a dark lesson in here for some of us on the left, because I hear a lot of like, people talking about what is to be done about Maha, and like, all of the, the millions that are going to die because of this bullshit, and like, well, this needs to be, the government needs to crack down more on this. And I, I agree, like, you shouldn't be able to market things as medicine that aren't medicine. But the story of Yugoslavia shows, even when you've got a really, like, very strong, like, state that is capable of repressing stuff like this, it doesn't last. As soon as the repression ends, people go right back to it, and it, and it becomes stronger than it had been before. So it's, there's not an easy fix in terms of people believing nonsense. We've never really figured out how to make people believe in reality. You can't force it, so I don't know what we're supposed to do, actually.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  No. So, I, I, I wish I knew. How many, how many more family members would we have if we, if we knew that answer?

• 13:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  But, so in Yugoslavia, they're, they're very against this. So this is, this is counterculture, basically.

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  Counterculture, and it's specifically anti-communist counterculture, right?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  I see, okay.

• 13:11Robert Evans?

  Karajic begins bringing in, you know, while he's in the Green Party, he starts organizing with them first, but he also starts gathering with some of his friends, some of the people who hadn't, you know, cut bait with him after the 1968 protest movement, I guess the guys who didn't think he'd been an informer. And he starts gathering together some of these Serb nationalists to him too, and, and they start talking about like, maybe the Green Party isn't going to take us all that much further. And the thing that binds

• 13:35Speaker 01

  How many times have we had that conversation?

• 13:37Robert Evans?

  How many times has that happened? The thing that kind of binds all of these-

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Guys, I don't think Jill's gonna, gonna make it.

• 13:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I don't know if this is gonna do the trick.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Wait, guys, I don't know if this is gonna work.

• 13:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The thing that kinds of, kind of binds them all together, is a rejection of Yugoslav nationalism and of communism. And these men are Serbian ethno-nationalists, or at least that's what they become over the course of the next several years. Maybe they don't fully start there, but they are going to get really pilled on that. I think as they all start hanging out and realizing the things they have in common, they get increasingly violent towards the idea of anyone else existing in the area, right? And increasingly, they, they start getting angry again too about World War II. They never stopped being angry about the genocide in World War II, right? But there's a lot of, we never paid the Muslims back, we never paid the Croats back for what they did to us, right? That's also bubbling up here. So there's some ugly stuff being discussed.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  In, in that way, was it like, the time that Tito was in power, did that sort of like, stave back that sort of eventual processing, okay, that makes sense, okay?

• 14:43Robert Evans?

  But again, it, it's, it's, it suppresses it, it doesn't get rid of it, right?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And now it's like, you're a generation removed from that as well, so.

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. So in 1990, a group of Bosniak, these are, again, the Bosnian Muslims, center-right nationalists formed the SDA, or Party of Democratic Action. And this is a majority Muslim party, the SDA, but they're also a secular party, right? They get described a lot as like Islamists, they were not, or are not, because they're still around. It's, this is, they support a broadly secular state, and they support an independent Bosnia, right, that wants to get closer to NATO and to the EU, right? That's, that's sort of like, what the SDA wants. So they're, they're supportive of the right that Bosnia has to secede from Yugoslavia. And they are Muslim, but they're not, they're not looking to

• 15:35Robert Evans?

  start like, a, a strict, like, theocratic regime. Now, Radovan would not interpret things this way. He would later claim to his biographer, Jessica Stern, that the SDA were, quote, "A bunch of Muslim extremists, creating a militant Islamic party." Again, that's not really true, right? There might be, there's some bits of that at the edges, but that's not really largely accurate. But it is true that a lot of Serb nationalists believe that, and for the same reason that a lot of, a lot of people in Texas think that like Sharia law is right around the corner if they let there be a mosque in town, right?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:09Robert Evans?

  Racism.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, yeah. There's a word for that.

• 16:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's a word for that. It's also true that like, Radovan is working tirelessly at this point to convince them that the SDA are radical Islamists, right? And he is successful in creating what he called "a sense of paranoia" that allows him and his friends to leave the Greens and create a new political party, the SDS, which Jessica Stern describes as "not only pro-Serb, but anti-Muslim and anti-Croat," right? So now we've got a party that's not just, you know, in favor of some of these like, traditional Serb values, but we specifically hate the, the Bosniaks and the Croats, right?

• 16:47Speaker 01

  How quickly is this happening? Because it's like, this is, um, yeah.

• 16:51Robert Evans?

  Because they're, I mean, they're, part of what it is, is they're looking at what's going to happen next when we all split up. And if you're a Serb who lives in Bosnia, and you see these Bosniak Muslims creating a party that represents the majority of the people in the area, and they're not Serb, you're like, well, they're going to oppress us, right? Maybe there'll be another genocide, like, so we have to get ready to take power to stop them from fucking us over, right?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:15Robert Evans?

  There's a lot of that going on, a lot of that in the air, not just with the, and there's other ethnic groups. I'm very much simplifying the breakup of Yugoslavia. And this is where I get into an issue I have with Jessica's book, My War Criminal, beyond the title, because it is the source of more detail on Radovan's family and personal life than anyone else has, right? But she also, by her own admission, falls for his spell several times, and she does not push back on him enough. She doesn't really push

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Consider the title, yeah.

• 17:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She spends a lot of time talking to this guy, she doesn't push back on him describing the SDS as an Islamist party, and she also describes him as such, writing, "Karajic did not seem to have a personal animus to Muslims prior to the war, even though by his admission, the party he formed in 1990 was framed in opposition to Muslims and Croats. It's also true that he was, as she points out, the godfather to the son of a celebrated Bosniak poet, and that pre-war, he had extensive personal connections to Muslims. But my read is that, by the end of the 80s, he has decided the road to Serb political power requires framing Muslims as the enemy and as the other, right? He just tries to keep this hidden at first, but, and, and so he's, he's not fully admitting

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  to this, but it seems pretty clear to me, in the summer of 1990.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  The follow-up questions kind of write themselves.

• 18:34Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:35Robert Evans?

  And I, there's, there's a couple of issues I, I have with some of her framing. She, she does this, because there'll be this claim that like, well, you know, Al Qaeda got started, there were like proto, early Al Qaeda offshoots in, in Bosnia. And the truth is that like, well, some Mujahideen wound up fighting there, because of the things that are going to happen during this genocide. And people mistakenly believe the Mujahideen were the, it's the same thing people wrongly state about like Afghanistan, like, oh, you know, we actually really like funded and built Al Qaeda. And it's like, no, we built a different group of people who got overthrown by the Taliban, and then invited Al Qaeda in. It's more complicated than that, right? It's not, it's not that.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:18Robert Evans?

  Hey, everyone, Robert here. And at the risk of being accused of like, being an apologist for stuff, I wanted to make sure I made a little bit more of an extensive note about some of the extremist Islamist groups that, that swarmed into Bosnia, because a number did, including Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda had like, a regional franchise in Bosnia as a result of the war and the genocide. Although, even some of these guys who are with Al Qaeda should not all be seen as like, the same as the Al Qaeda that would come later. One influential person who's in Bosnia during this time fighting with the Mujahideen is a dude named Ayman Dean. Dean was part of a Mujahideen brigade that is accused of a number of pretty horrible war crimes after the battle for Vazuka. And after the war,

• 20:01Robert Evans?

  he was recruited by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and wound up going and being a part of Al Qaeda. But then he got sort of pilled against Al Qaeda as a result of their justification of attacks that killed civilian bystanders, and he became a double agent for MI6 and spent years infiltrating Al Qaeda before he was exposed. So, you know, even when we're talking about some of these extremist figures who do come to Bosnia, they're all not, you can't all paint anyone who is like, an extremist Islamist fighting against a genocide as the same as the different kind of extremist groups that came after, because they're, they're just not identical.

• 20:39Robert Evans?

  But there are some people who are also like Islamist, like Mujahideen types, who wind up fighting in Bosnia because Muslims are being slaughtered, right? So there is, it's messy, but it's wrong to say that like, well, you know, the, the, the Serbs were trying to stop Al Qaeda because they fucking weren't. But that is how some people will like depict that today, right?

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:01Robert Evans?

  So he does try to keep things hidden, his biases hidden initially in the summer of 1990, when he's, he's organizing and still trying to like reach political power. He tells the journalists, "The Serbs and Muslims do not have conflicting interests." And he denies the existence of Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia. But within his party, anti-Muslim rhetoric is already prevalent. And after Yugoslavia holds ill-fated elections in November of 1990, and the Bosniak start pushing for Bosnian independence, Karadzic starts holding large public speeches warning about the coming Islamic threat. Now, because we're talking about the Balkans, shit's a lot more complex than this. One thing that's happening is that over in Croatia, there's also a nationalist movement. The Serbian Democratic Party had been created in Croatia by a Serb nationalist who was

• 21:46Robert Evans?

  also a psychiatrist named Raskovic. And he and Raskovic-

• 21:50Speaker 01

  What is this psychiatrist?

• 21:51Robert Evans?

  I don't know, but there's two of them. And they form like identical parties, one in Bosnia and one in Croatia, right? And Raskovic and, and Radovan Karadzic are like friends and are very much like working together. Like, these are, these are movements that are allied, right? And the SDS, as it came to be known, was born under the guns of, the thing that they're protesting in Croatia is this fascist adjacent Croatian nationalist party has risen up in Croatia to advocate for Croatian independence. And they're using a lot of symbols and like, uh, like even like repeating some of the politics of the old fascist Croatian state that had existed in World War II, which scares a lot of Serbs for reasons that are very understandable, right?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, due to recent hysteria, yeah, that makes sense.

• 22:39Robert Evans?

  And so this is not just a matter of like, oh, Radovan's inventing stuff to scare them. No, they lived through a genocide, a lot of the survivors are still alive, and they see people organizing in Croatia who are trying to like using like the logos and shit of the old fascist party. And that provides a lot of fear and a lot of motivation to believe, oh, we may have to clear them out of all these areas, right? To defend ourselves, right? So there are real reasons to be afraid, and he is very much drumming up additional fear, right? You know, in what would always have been, anytime a country is breaking apart and going to be dividing along ethnic lines, there's going to be a lot of fear of horrible ethnic violence. I don't know of any case where something like that's happened and a lot of people haven't died. Look at the partition of India, right?

• 23:24Robert Evans?

  In Pakistan, you know, like it is always a pretty fucked up thing when shit like this goes down. So it's not weird and nobody, I don't want to, I don't want to act like the Serbs have no reason to be like on edge, right? There's a very good reason to be on edge.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Like, one-ish generations removed from

• 23:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  a quarter of the population being wiped out, like it's-

• 23:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  I too would be on edge.

• 23:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  What is, what sounds, and it's maybe it's like me not understanding the region well enough, but it's just, it is fascinating that, I guess so, but like, but that it ends up being this guy feels very like, you know, this is a role that was going to be taken by someone and it ends up being him because it's like, it's more of a like a circumstance that requires a bad actor like this.

• 24:17Robert Evans?

  Yep. And my read is that he knew someone like this is going to wind up existing. It just has to happen. It's inevitable. It might as well be me because then I can make a buck off it, right? That's kind of what I think Radovan is, right? Right. And, and Raskovic, the other psychiatrist who's organizing the Serb nationalists in Croatia is a bit different, right? And his argument, because he, he has a real fear. He thinks he's trying to stop, he would say, he was trying to stop ethno-nationalist violence. Because his belief was that the years of communist rule had just suppressed the trauma left over from the war, which I think is accurate. And he feared that if the state suddenly fell, as it was about to, there would be ethnic madness. That's the term he used. As Stern explains, "The sudden release of these memories could lead Serbs to submit

• 25:01Robert Evans?

  to the collective will of the mob and massive acts of revenge," Raskovic warned. "Even a dangerous and genocidal campaign of vengeance against the Croats and Muslims, a tendency that could be monitored and controlled only by a skilled psychiatrist in touch with the Serb collective unconsciousness." So that's why he's like, we need a psychiatrist, like I can stop the genocide. He's doing the Homer Simpson thing where he's like, maybe if I'm part of the mob, I can lead it in positive directions.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  That is so weak. God, they must have, that's how you know, like no one is in their right state of mind where they're like, yeah, the psychiatrist, yeah, totally.

• 25:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  He has no skills. He has no applicable skills.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Not an out of it skill.

• 25:44Robert Evans?

  And Raskovic is not going to succeed in using his psychiatrist powers to stop a genocide. As a spoiler, it's going to be another psychiatrist who helps cause the genocide. But you know who's never caused a genocide that you can prove?

• 26:01Robert Evans?

  They were declared innocent in court of all those killings, is all I'm going to say.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:04Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of our podcast.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  I was, I was volunteering until the court part, but I got scared.

• 26:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, look, did they, did they have a couple of, a couple of whistleblowers assassinated? Who hasn't, you know?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Ah, Robert Evans.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Blueberries are gonna have shards.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Robert Evans.

• 26:20Robert Evans?

  That's right.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:22Robert Evans?

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• 31:06Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So after Tito's death and an inter-party coup, the guy in charge of Yugoslavia by the late 80s during this period of like declining communist state power was, we'll cover him in the future, Slobodan Milosevic, right? That's, that's the guy who winds up running things in Belgrade. And he's, you know, he's running all of Yugoslavia, right? He, he had been kind of a communist apparatchnik. He's one of these like upper mid-level figures when the decline starts after Tito's death. And one of the things that he-

• 31:38Speaker 01

  So at least he has some, some credentials. I think you're gonna be like-

• 31:40Robert Evans?

  He's in politics.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  He was just kind of this like therapist who thought like, why the hell not? Okay.

• 31:47Robert Evans?

  And we're, we're gonna have to yada, yada a lot of Milosevic. I'll cover him in the future. Please forgive the fact that we're not going into detail here. But basically, part of his, one thing he really hates is Milosevic does not like the 1974 Yugoslav constitution, which gives these individual republics a right to secede. Cause he knows that Bosnia and Croatia at least are about to secede along with other places. And he's like, I don't want that. Cause I want to be in charge of Yugoslavia, right? Milosevic represents his base of power are a bunch of conservative factions within the crumbling communist state. And he had been largely responsible for purging the institute. So first off, before he, when he starts being in power, he purges a lot of these communist institutions that had kept Tito's Yugoslavia functioning. Cause he is one of these like guys who wants to be able to make more money and stuff. So we gotta get rid of some of

• 32:32Robert Evans?

  the state-supported shit.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, we can't, we can't remember that at all. Decimating, longstanding, okay, cool.

• 32:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Decimating the, the parts of the state that like make people feel like they're the same thing. Yeah. Maybe not a great move.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Kill, kill the libraries and stuff. Sure.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. After 1987, when Gorbachev and the USSR started opening things up, nationalists in Yugoslavia get inspired. And that same year, Milosevic, who was again a middling communist apparatchnik in 87, is sent to Kosovo because there's a bunch of Serb nationalist protests that start up and things get pretty ugly. And he's sent to calm things down, like stop this, you know, uprising campaign. And he kind of does the opposite by turning himself into a mouthpiece for Serb grievances and funneling that into personal power, right? He declares himself protector of the Serbian nation and then embarks on a campaign to win power, which he does by 1989. So that's how he comes to be in charge of the state is by being like, I'll protect the Serbs. And, and I think part of what he's doing

• 33:32Robert Evans?

  is Serbs are the most powerful group in the country, more or less, at least within like the military. So if I declare myself protector of the Serbs, we can kind of crack down on these other nationalist movements by, and, and stop the Serbs from wanting to secede. And that will be how I maintain things, right? So that's kind of, I think his idea.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So it is so wild how hard it is to track his thinking.

• 33:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  And because the people who-

• 33:59Robert Evans?

  It's complicated. Yeah.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  It is very complicated. And I know that that, that's also just like part and parcel to this story, but it's, I cannot, I cannot track this man to save my life.

• 34:11Robert Evans?

  He's got a lot of fucking balls he's got to keep in the air, right? Because

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:15Robert Evans?

  He's, he's both got, he's this protector of the Serbs, right? And he's also an anti-nationalist. And so he has to describe everyone who isn't a Serb as the bad kind of nationalist. He is backed by the old guard of the Yugoslavian army, right? Which is heavily Serb dominated. And also by the old communist hardliners. These are the people who think any, if, if Yugoslavia breaks up, my entire power base is held up in the state maintaining. So these are all the different kind of, sometimes conflicting interests that he's trying to balance in order to keep power for himself. Per the Institute for War and Peace reporting, quote, "Milosevic sought to placate Orthodox communists and nationalists. He promised continuity to the former, while the latter saw him as the brave and bellicose leader who would eventually

• 34:58Robert Evans?

  deliver something resembling a greater Serbia. But he was actually promising the impossible to both. Yet they desperately wanted to believe him. Some saw him as a genuine communist, masked as a nationalist for tactical reasons. Others thought the situation was the other way around." So you're not alone in being like, where the fuck is this guy coming from? Milosevic is doing, trying to do a very complicated dance, you know?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  There's just a random soccer player being like, is that the guy that made us play bumblebees? He's in charge?

• 35:27Robert Evans?

  And he's doing a lot of like, one of his big things, he's holding these rallies for truth where footage of Serbs being victimized by Muslims or Croats are played to outraged crowds, right? That's like a thing that Milosevic, which is helping to drum up this like violent nationalist sentiment that's going to become eliminationist, right?

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. Bosnia and Herzegovina follow in 1992. And throughout this period, Radovan had become increasingly radical and militantly pro-Serb, and he's risen to command the SDS. He's not initially the leader of the party, but kind of by this point in time, the early 90s, he is running things. And his success mirrors Milosevic's, right? As political scientists Gerard Toll and Adis Maksic explained to Stern, quote, "Karadzic was an effective public speaker with an effective makeup that allowed him to connect with rural Serb mores and habits of thought. One of his friends, another poet named Mimitovic, described Radovan's behavior as changing overnight.

• 36:28Robert Evans?

  He starts carrying a pistol at all times and he wants, he wants it to be visible. And he starts playing down his like backstory as a psychiatrist and a poet by remaking himself as his like militant leader who is like, I'm the historically ordained leader of the Bosnian Serbs. Like I'm almost like our kind of fascist Christ figure come to redeem the Serb nation. That, that's how he starts talking in a lot of ways.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  He's literally, he's like on like a fascist era's tour. This is like so, yeah.

• 36:57Robert Evans?

  He's speedrunning a lot of it. Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:00Robert Evans?

  Now, almost as soon as Bosnia and Herzegovina have their referendum for independence, Bosnian Serb militias, so they, they have this referendum and it becomes clear Bosnia is going to become independent. And the Bosniaks have the most powerful political bloc in the country, but the Serbs have more weapons in part because the Yugoslav military is giving a bunch of arms to these Bosnian Serb militias who are being led by the SDS and under Radovan's control. And after this, this referendum, these militias seize land. They lead a bunch of assaults and they conquer most of Bosnia and Herzegovina, right? So they use the fact that they have the guns to take political power for themselves. And they declare an independent state, the Republika Srpska. So you get Bosnia has this referendum for independence

• 37:44Robert Evans?

  and like, okay, we'll be independent, but because we have the guns, we'll overthrow everyone else and we'll, we'll make it our state, the Republika Srpska, right?

• 37:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So there's, there's this independent now Serbian like controlled state, but that's still mostly Bosniak, right? And the SDS, because it had been the embryo around which the military and state formed, Radovan Karadzic becomes the first head of the republic, right? So he is, he is now the dictator of this like Serbian kind of militant republic that's taken over a bunch of Bosnia.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's always bad. It's always bad to have a dictator, but this is, I, I just like, a dictator that has kind of an identity crisis every half decade or so, just, you're not on steady ground with this guy.

• 38:33Robert Evans?

  No, he could go anywhere, right?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's gonna, he's gonna like pivot to become a jewelry maker in the middle of everything.

• 38:42Robert Evans?

  That's a cool, that's a cool job though.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  That's a fun, I love, I'm a big fan of that pivot.

• 38:47Robert Evans?

  I agree. Same. So immediately pre-war, the population of the area that becomes the republic had been about 44% Bosniak and 17% Croat and only about 33% Serbian. So you've got about a third of the populace are Serbs, but Serbs are the only people really represented under the government headed by Radovan. And this has all been done, the guy who's like endorsing all of this is Milosevic, right? He is, he's very much in favor and he's often guiding like what's happening here. And Radovan comes to see himself in almost mythic terms as a man brought forward to defend his people in their moment of need. And their main need is to commit genocide. Cause you can't, you can't have this country just be a third Serbian. And we're not going to get a bunch more Serbs to move here. So what we gotta do is get

• 39:32Robert Evans?

  rid of the people who aren't, right? That's who we're gonna pump, how we're gonna pump those numbers up.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  This is so fucking bleak. Yeah.

• 39:40Robert Evans?

  It, yeah, it's, it's very ugly. Psychiatrist writing for the American Journal of Psychiatric Law analyzed the language that Radovan used in his speeches around this time. Quote, "Karadzic's language bespeaks his grandiose sense of destiny imbued with a collective sense of myth and sacrifice. Karadzic speaks of being a servant of the people and his language of myth merges with that of sacrifice. I am willing to sacrifice this generation if it means that future generations of Serbs will live better. Karadzic rediscovered a mythical, primordial language identifying with Petar Petrovic Njegos, Montenegro's 19th century prince bishopette, in which he provokes themes of blood soil and hallowed ground. Group therapist to his wounded nation, Karadzic was someone who, according to his wife, understands the

• 40:22Robert Evans?

  depths of a person's soul, set himself to the task of healing the collective sorrow of the Serbian people. And he's going to heal it by getting revenge for the violence that was done against them, right?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  This is, I mean, this is all, you know, both obviously horrifying and also just feels so in step with what a dictator with an identity crisis would be. He'd be like, oh, so I'm actually God. And, and it kind of hearkens back to all of his, his, his father problems, right? Like his father, the, the mythic storyteller. So

• 40:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  He's just-

• 40:59Robert Evans?

  We never escape our parents fully.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:02Robert Evans?

  Now, Radovan's chief military leader, the guy who's going to be carrying out all of the things that he once done, is General Ratko Mladic. He just died recently, a couple of weeks ago. He was prosecuted for war crimes after all this and then literally just passed on the same week as Dali Parton. And Ratko leads this, this army of the Republic, is about 100,000 man Serbian army that he's able to use to consolidate power with tremendous brutality. And this write-up by the BBC describes what happened next. "A vicious war ensued in which Serbs besieged Sarajevo for 44 months, shelling Bosniak forces, but also terrorizing the civilian population with a relentless bombardment and sniper fire. Thousands of civilians died, many of them deliberately targeted.

• 41:45Robert Evans?

  Bosnian Serb forces, assisted by paramilitaries from Serbia proper, also expelled hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats from their homes in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Numerous atrocities were documented, including the widespread rape of Bosniak women and girls." So that their kids won't be, will have Serb blood, right? That's the idea behind that sort of thing, right?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:08Robert Evans?

  So this is, I mean, I, it's hard to exaggerate how bad things are in Sarajevo. When I was there in like 2015 and I, I went to, I was in Ukraine, which was actually at war. I was in like part, like a city under siege in Ukraine. And then I go to Sarajevo and decades after the war ends, Sarajevo still looked about as bad as the places that were actively being shelled. Like in tur- because there's, they, and obviously it's, it's much more built up, but they kept a lot of the bullet holes as like, and a lot of the shell holes and stuff as a memorial, right? So you, that you can, you can tell by how much is left, how bad things would have been at the end of the fighting. Like, I can't exaggerate how fucked Sarajevo gets as a result of all this. It is a nightmare.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  As close as I could remember, I mean, this is like, this is the period of-

• 42:55Robert Evans?

  We're kids when this is happening, yeah.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Right, I was, I was like, this is, I actually do remember, I, do you remember Zlata's Diary?

• 43:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember, there was like an old copy of Zlata's Diary that I read, I probably too young, but I remember seeing it at the library and reading it and that being sort of, kind of my only education on, on, on the Balkan area at all, and certainly on Sarajevo growing up entirely was, was that book.

• 43:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And it is, and there's all sorts of horrible shit. It's just come out that they were basically, some of the Serb forces were taking money to lead like people from South Africa and shit on sniper tours where you would just get to kill people, like shoot random Muslims and whoever in the streets of Sarajevo with sniper rifles. There, Sarajevo's in like a big bowl depression, like you've got like mountain valleys and stuff around it. So it, because the cities in the low part and the heights surround it, if you can just get a bunch of tanks and artillery in the heights around the city, you can just shoot into Sarajevo endlessly. And that's what they do for like four years. Like it, it's just awful.

• 44:04Robert Evans?

  Radovan had written a poem about Sarajevo drowning in blood in 1971, and he sees this poem and the war he helped start as preordained. And he's almost like, "Well, these visions came to me because it was what I was going to need to do. My own artistic visions are proof that me and Ratko are doing the right thing by just massacring people in this city."

• 44:25Speaker 01

  What is it with these fucking people and their college age art projects being seen as a prophecy?

• 44:34Robert Evans?

  Never get over this shit.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  Almost without exception. It is like, it is remarkable.

• 44:42Robert Evans?

  I mean, I'll say this, Jamie, in my first novel, I did nuke the city of Dallas, and if I ever gain political power, I might. I'm not gonna say I wouldn't, because I had to live there for 20 something years.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  That's good, I mean, as is your right, and-

• 44:55Robert Evans?

  As is my right. Every dictator's the right to nuke the high five.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess my, my version of this, what, I, I came up with the idea for Santa University when I was 19, so, which I do see as kind of a grand prophecy.

• 45:13Robert Evans?

  If you become a fascist dictator, that's what we'll have, yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  I mean, and there are some pretty, some pretty violent ideas inside of Santa University. I mean, it's right there.

• 45:22Robert Evans?

  It's mostly that.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  It's mostly, it's a lot of killing, yeah.

• 45:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, a Santa story. "So, the resultant violence would kill more than 100,000 people, and Radovan personally helped to plan mass deportations and mass murders. During the years-long siege of Sarajevo, Mladic, acting under Radovan's orders, flattened much of the city with artillery and tank fire. Snipers massacred women and children, and men trying to gather food or simply walking down the street. The Serb army murdered more than 10,000 people there. Here's how the CBC described the behavior of the army of Radovan and Mladic. Quote, "The army of Mladic created to fight in Bosnia was a model of ruthlessness. In some of the most horrific examples, prisoners suffocated in the heat after being forced to eat salt and denied water. They were starved and raped in prison camps, were made to jump off a bridge and shot,

• 46:11Robert Evans?

  and were gunned down at night by the hundreds after being driven out of detention with chemical gas." So, this is just a, just a war crimey army. There is not any, any getting around that.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it like, truly, that, that impossible to avoid growing, growing up and, but still, I mean, it is just, I mean, and we can talk about, you know, three different genocides that are treated much the same in, in Western media, basically, that are like all but ignored, probably so that we don't know what a genocide looks like-

• 46:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  -when our government is participating in one.

• 46:49Robert Evans?

  One of the really frustrating things too about this genocide is that because it does get stopped, like NATO and the UN like take action and it is, and the perpetrators are punished, and then that part's good, that they go after the perpetrators, and it's good that it is eventually stopped. One of the most like iconic pieces of graffiti from Sarajevo is the UN logo with United Nothing underneath it, because as the victims will say, "Yeah, but it took you, you took your sweet fucking time."

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like, it, it, it's always when things are at an absolutely desperate point that intervention actually happens.

• 47:23Robert Evans?

  Finally, after 44 months, thanks.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:27Robert Evans?

  Right. Glad you got your shit together after my family was killed.

• 47:33Robert Evans?

  "So while Radovan was not a soldier or a military leader directly, he was directly involved in operating a string of concentration camps in which thousands of people were tortured and killed. Per a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatric Law, quote, 'Disturbing suggestions have emerged that Karadzic deliberately used his psychiatric training to create military and political policies that would create fear, terror, and extensive post-traumatic stress disorder in civilian populations. Allegations have been made of Karadzic's direct personal complicity in acts of violence and torture, including claims that Karadzic had participated in and witnessed tortures at various Bosnian Serb-run concentration camps.'" So he's like just showing up at the camps to kind of make sure they're doing the torturing, right? Like he wants it to be the maximum amount of fucking up people's brains.

• 48:18Robert Evans?

  The psychiatrist, he feels he really knows how to fuck up someone's head.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Ah, I, like, cool. Yeah, he's, he really is fully committing to this, to this pivot to being one of history's greatest monsters.

• 48:32Robert Evans?

  He really is.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  Incredible, right, guys?

• 48:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:36Robert Evans?

  And the war culminates in the slaughter of Bosniaks in a town called Srebrenica.

• 48:43Robert Evans?

  This is like, just an awful act of genocide. I'm gonna read another quote from that CBC article here describing some of what happens. "Mladic had a cameraman film the blitz on the encircled enclave of Srebrenica, haranguing Dutch UN peacekeepers who misguidedly accepted his solemn word that the inhabitants would be safe in his hands. Srebrenica supposedly had safe area status, meant to protect civilians from ethnic cleansing. 'We give this town to the Serb people as a gift,' Mladic said to the camera, claiming the victory is revenge against Muslim Turks who had once held the area as part of the Ottoman Empire. When NATO tried in 1995 to rein in his forces with the threat of limited airstrikes, his troops defiantly seized UN peacekeepers as human shields, chaining them to likely targets."

• 49:27Robert Evans?

  So again, the UN, super effective, really do their job there.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, no no's for the UN. They're always there right in the nick of time.

• 49:36Robert Evans?

  Right in the nick of too late. Uh, as a result of all of this, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys are rounded up and executed by Mladic's men. Another 20,000, I went to Srebrenica and interviewed survivors of the genocide. One of the guys who was like a boy when it happened was literally, it was, he was at the bottom of a pile of the corpses of his family members and had to like crawl out after it got dark to escape. Like, there's a lot of stories like that. "This is the worst single genocidal act of the war. Very soon after, Mladic and Radovan seemed to have known that they had gone too far. Mladic's men were ordered to bulldoze the dead into mass graves and then dig them up and rebury them elsewhere to hide the evidence.

• 50:17Robert Evans?

  NATO and UN pressure was, eventually, far too late, enough to force Radovan and Mladic to step down in November of 1996. In 95, like the end of 95, they, there's a ceasefire that gets negotiated in Dayton, Ohio, these are the Dayton Accords, and they hold on to power a little bit after that, but they've both been indicted for war crimes, and so they have to step down. Radovan would later claim that US diplomat Richard Holbrook promised him immunity from prosecution if he stepped down. Holbrook has always denied this. Maybe Holbrook lied. I don't think it's bad to actually lie to a genocidal dictator about not prosecuting him to get him to leave power. Like, if Holbrook did that, that actually makes him cooler. Sure, I don't have an issue with that, really.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Worst things you could do in that situation, sure.

• 51:03Robert Evans?

  Sure.

• 51:05Robert Evans?

  "For the first roughly two years after he stepped down, Radovan lived openly in the former capital of the Republic and continued something like a normal life, now living as a celebrity among far-right Serb nationalists. But it soon became clear that the UN eventually meant business, and Serb war criminals were going to be the first and almost the only genocide perpetrators held to account for their crimes since Nuremberg."

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, before and since.

• 51:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you will get, every now and then you'll get, because there, there'll be something about like some African warlord who's getting prosecuted for war crimes, and they'll be like, "Oh, so they prosecute like the non-white war criminals." It's like, no, no, they did go after a lot of Serbs, like that was kind of the first case of it for the ICC.

• 51:49Robert Evans?

  And, you know, they, they do eventually get their shit together. And so this means that Radovan's gonna have to go into hiding if he doesn't want to face the music. "And since Radovan considered himself blameless and innocent of any war crimes, he certainly did not want to go into trial. However, he's also not the kind of guy who looks like he would be able to hide very well. And so he's gonna show you a picture of him during the war. This is him next to Radko Mladic. I don't know how to describe his hair other than super San. Like, he has like a white shock of straight up, like, I don't, how do you, like, what is happening? What is happening with that man's hair? He looks like fucking Goku."

• 52:26Speaker 01

  I love it. He does look like an anime villain. This.

• 52:31Robert Evans?

  It's amazing. Of all the genocide perpetrators, he has the best hair.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  This sucks.

• 52:39Robert Evans?

  Cause he looks so good?

• 52:42Speaker 01

  This sucks, man.

• 52:43Robert Evans?

  You don't want him to be a bad guy, looking that cool.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  I, you don't want that to be the bad guy. You don't want someone with hair that falls quite like that.

• 52:53Robert Evans?

  No.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  To be, to be a monster. This is like, ah, man, I, yeah, this is just like overwhelming.

• 53:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's a lot to cope with here.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:06Robert Evans?

  So, the fact that Radovan was able to escape into hiding was a direct result of NATO and US incompetence. More than 64,000 UN peacekeeper, or NATO peacekeepers were stationed in the Republic after the war. And everyone knew where Radovan was for like two years. Per an article by The Guardian, quote, "There was no political will to risk either peacekeepers or the peace itself on arrest operations." And so they don't do anything when he's living openly.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  That's just like, that's what NATO does, right?

• 53:36Robert Evans?

  We can't have peace if we punish these guys for genocide.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  They're like, they're like wily coyote in these situations without fail. They're just like, I don't know, where'd he go?

• 53:44Robert Evans?

  It is the, yeah. It's the same mistake liberals and centrists always make, which is like, once you've had these like monster genocide fascists and you get them caged up. It's like, well, we can't like punish too many people because that won't lead to peace. And it's like, no, no, you actually have to hold people to accountable for doing awful things very quickly.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  How many, how many years has, how many years has it been since like the, you know, Netanyahu was declared a war criminal? And he's just going around.

• 54:13Robert Evans?

  Did what it should have done. They don't have an army, right? But yeah, it's, I'll blame everyone, but they at least did indict him, right?

• 54:20Speaker 01

  They did, they did.

• 54:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So by the time, by the, where's he at? And he's still in power. Yeah. By the time that shit changes in 97 and they decide it's actually worth going after these people, Radovan is long gone. He has gone into hiding despite his incredible hair. By 2000, Bill Clinton is on his way out and one of the things slickly wants is he wants the capture of this legendary war criminal to be part of his legacy. Right? He like that, he wants that as like a foreign policy coup. So in kind of his last year in office, he sets, he creates a new task force at the NSC to launch the largest and most expensive manhunt in history up to that point. Up until we go after Bin Laden. This is the biggest.

• 55:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And a lot of the same people who go after Bin Laden, they, they learn the ropes of the job going after Radovan. And as a spoiler, they're bad at getting him. So I don't know if we should have used the same guys to go after Bin Laden because they actually suck at both jobs. So the, the hunt for Radovan Ladic was the largest deployment of special operations forces anywhere in the world prior to 9/11. Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the British SAS were involved, as are a number of CIA units, MI6, the DIA. They're like, all, every fucking intelligence agency and special forces unit you can imagine are hunting after this man. Who looks like he's got, he's got a fucking shock of silver white hair standing up.

• 55:46Robert Evans?

  And they accomplished fuck all. They cannot find him. He is, he's a fucking ghost. The guy in charge of this effort is David Petraeus, who is going to be a future director of the CIA. He's eventually disgraced after he sleeps with his, the reporter, writing a book about him.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Wow. I didn't think, I didn't, I didn't see, I didn't see him coming.

• 56:07Robert Evans?

  Didn't see Petraeus coming, huh? You never do.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Petraeus coming down.

• 56:12Robert Evans?

  He was so excited by all the cool toys, because this is his first real time getting to work like closely with special forces, that he forces his way. He like demands to be allowed to attend some night raids with Delta Force. Their commander described him as a kid in a candy store. And again, he sucks at this job. Per The Guardian.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  And he'll keep sucking.

• 56:30Robert Evans?

  Wait till you hear how bad he sucks at his job, though.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Oh.

• 56:34Robert Evans?

  Per The Guardian, "Petraeus and his men would make unannounced visits in the middle of the night to Liliana Karadzic, the fugitive's wife, with the aim of rattling her with a show of bravado about his imminent capture, in the hope she would rush to warn him and give away his location. Petraeus called it his Eddie Murphy routine after Murphy's role as convict turned cop in the movie 24 Hours. However, bulk in reality did not work like Hollywood. Liliana was followed wherever she went and was only one of the first targets of surveillance drones. A new toy US special forces were trying out in Bosnia, but she led them on a wild goose chase. The manhunters used every trick they could think of, scanning the remote villages along the Bosnia-Montenegro border for signs of unusual activity. Internet logons in the middle of the night, TV satellite dishes in otherwise poor settlements, newspaper subscriptions.

• 57:18Robert Evans?

  The NSA was persuaded to weigh of normal practice and allow intercept intelligence to be shared, unfiltered and without delay, with the operational units tracking Karadzic in Bosnia. In one of the more bizarre episodes of The Chase, Delta Force soldiers lay in wait for his convoy on a mountain road. One of them dressed in a gorilla suit, which had been flown in from the US the previous day. The idea was that Karadzic's bodyguards, known as the preventiva, would be dumbfounded and slow down their vehicle long enough for the Delta Force ambushers to fire a specially designed concussion grenade at the car doors to stun the passengers. The daring scheme would have gone."

• 57:52Speaker 01

  The gorilla suit. This is like a.

• 57:55Robert Evans?

  What? Who picked that?

• 57:58Speaker 01

  We're gonna paralyze him with random humor.

• 58:02Robert Evans?

  Comedy with a Family Guy cutaway gag. Like, what?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  This is like a fucking Scooby Doo plan.

• 58:11Robert Evans?

  You thought that was gonna work, huh?

• 58:13Speaker 01

  Who are they putting in the gorilla suit?

• 58:16Robert Evans?

  And of course, all of this is pointless. Like the whole tip off that a caravan was coming through this area was probably deliberately misleading information like fed to them in order to get them to waste their time. Because Karadzic and his supporters love the fact that they are able to, they're just dunking on the US and the entire Western world's like surveillance and special forces apparatus, unable to find this one man with crazy hair, his psychiatrist.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  They, they have like five backup gorilla suits. They're like, don't worry, sir, if we don't scare him with the first gorilla.

• 58:49Robert Evans?

  And again, this is similar to what happens with Bin Laden, where he like goes into hiding and like the entire US intelligence and special forces apparatus is hunting him in like Tora Bora. And we later realize like, no, he just like went right to Pakistan. He like, he like left. He, he left the country.

• 59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was watching DVDs for like eight years.

• 59:07Robert Evans?

  He was watching Looney Tunes.

• 59:10Robert Evans?

  And the, the thing is Karadzic didn't like disappear really. He like shaves his head because his hair is distinctive and he grows a long crazy Santa beard. But as soon as he can, he just goes to Serbia. He leaves Bosnia. And I guess they hadn't thought of that as a possibility, that the Serb might go to Serbia. Like they're like, well, he's gotta be in Montenegro still. Like, no, he just went to Belgrade.

• 59:33Robert Evans?

  I mean, yeah, he spends some time, he's, he's in rural villages and stuff for a while, but he just like crossed the border. And while they're hunting him, he still is writing and publishing poetry specifically to dunk on them. In fact, during the height of Delta Force trying to find this man, he publishes a book of poetry just to humiliate US special forces. One chapter is titled, "I Can Look For Myself."

• 1:00:01Robert Evans?

  I mean, he's a monster, but you gotta respect that.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  I mean, it, he is absolutely unquestionably a monster and like, the, the US is so fucking embar. The US is so embarrassing. What an embarrassing place to be from.

• 1:00:18Robert Evans?

  Money on Delta Force, couldn't catch the poet.

• 1:00:21Speaker 01

  God. And it's just, and, and it's because the pedophile president is like, maybe, maybe if we put on a gorilla suit, people will forget.

• 1:00:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, maybe a gorilla suit. David Petraeus, get your brilliant mind down there.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:00:34Robert Evans?

  He also publishes a novel that sells out and does really well while he's hiding.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  What is with?

• 1:00:41Robert Evans?

  It's amazing. "The Trail Goes Cold." And after 9/11, most of the world moves on from obsessing over Serb war criminals as the US takes the lessons it had learned failing to capture Radovan and applies them towards failing to capture Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Radovan was busy reinventing himself in Serbia. Prior to giving up power, his intelligence guys had furnished him with the real identity of a real dude to use as his fake identity. Like the real guy is named Dragan Dabic, and that's the name he takes, Dragan Dabic. And the real dragon is a rural peasant who just like, doesn't ever leave the small village he leaves, lives in. So like, well, no one's gonna notice his identity being used by anyone else.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  Renting out his identity?

• 1:01:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. He's just, I don't think he knows. Yeah. Cause they find this guy and he's like, I don't know, man. I'm like a fucking peasant. I don't, I don't interact with the government. What are you talking about?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  It's like, wow, that's crazy.

• 1:01:33Robert Evans?

  Wild. So now living under the name Dragan Dabic, Radovan reinvents himself, right? And starts living openly in Belgrade as an energy healer. He reinvents himself as a new rage guru and is like very prominent. So.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:01:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah. His last chapter is incredible, Jamie. You're not, you're not ready for this.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  No, you cannot pivot after committing a genocide. You cannot pivot.

• 1:02:02Robert Evans?

  He does. He has a whole post genocide career.

• 1:02:08Robert Evans?

  As kind of a sex wizard.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  I hate this. This is.

• 1:02:13Robert Evans?

  It's, it's amazing stuff. So Radovan, just wait, Jamie, you're not, I, I can't hype this up enough, honestly. So in order to train up in the ways of Wu, in 2005, he shows up on the doorstep of Mina Minick, who is a well-known spiritual healer and self-proclaimed clairvoyant. She, despite the fact that she is a clairvoyant, she does not recognize him as the massively famous war criminal who's just shaved his head.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Oh, no, that's all part of the plan. It's all part of the plan.

• 1:02:45Robert Evans?

  On meeting him, she describes him as a long-bearded man with white hair who, quote, "looked like a monk who had done something wrong with a nun."

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  I guess that's one way to describe.

• 1:02:55Robert Evans?

  That is a great description. Sure. Why not?

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:02:59Robert Evans?

  So Radovan as Dragon claimed to be a former therapist who just returned from New York City after divorcing his wife, and she'd kept his credentials and diploma, so he didn't have them to show. But trust him, he had them. Like, he has diplomas and stuff. He just can't furnish them because of his bitch ex-wife, right? And Minick trusts him. Minick's like, sure, that makes sense, right?

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  She sounds awful, man. I'm so sorry. Come on in.

• 1:03:27Robert Evans?

  Given that Minick and everyone in the world of alternative healing in Belgrade were the standard kinds of cranks you'd expect, his utter lack of credentials and background were not remarked on by anyone in a significant manner. Per The Guardian, "Dabic was eager to learn the ways of a Balkan seer, including the use of a visak, a pendulum that is supposed to identify disturbances in the energy field around sick or troubled patients." This is kind of like dowsing, right? "Dabic soon acquired his own visak, and his career as a mystic healer blossomed. He adopted the unserved middle name of David and used it increasingly as a professional moniker. He also set up a website called PsyHelp Energy, which advertised the David Well-Being Program."

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  He just renamed himself David?

• 1:04:07Robert Evans?

  Well, Minick suggests the name David, right? And I'll tell you why. Because, and also, Minick lets Dabic stay in his apartment and like couch surf while he's training? This genocide guy?

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  This thing, it's just always the, I'm like, where's Luigi? Can we get Luigi in here? Like, how is this guy alive, much less rebranding as David? Like, this is, this is ridiculous.

• 1:04:32Robert Evans?

  Great question. So from Stern's book, he explained that Minick explained that King David was a seer and the first bioenergetics practitioner. "When he was very old, he used to recover his vital energy by laying down along with young girls, all naked, but it was completely clear and innocent," he said.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  He's back to the bumblebee shit. This, like, in this, this, in the context of his life, it makes the whole, like, the whole genocidal dictator thing seem like just a weird detour for him.

• 1:05:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is, it is for him a detour. And Minick is also a fucking amazing crank, because he's telling Stern, like, "Yeah, I told him to name himself to King David because he would lie down with naked girls to recharge his energy, but it was totally innocent." And then she writes, "He told me I would find this story in the Psalms, but I was unable to find it." That's because it's not in there. It's not in there, Jessica. That's just nonsense.

• 1:05:27Speaker 01

  Jessica.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  Jessica.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Jessica. She's nuzzying out. It sucks.

• 1:05:36Robert Evans?

  Over the years, Karajic became a noted Reiki practitioner and consulted in a private fertility clinic. At one point, Russia Today, before he's found out, Russia Today films a documentary about his miraculous healings at the office of a doctor that he worked at for, right? So he's like going to this doctor's office to do energy healings on actual sick people, and he like heals a sick kid, and he's in a doc, well, he's a wanted, one of those wanted men in the world.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't.

• 1:06:03Robert Evans?

  No one catches it. Yes. No one notices this.

• 1:06:10Robert Evans?

  And the only thing any of his fellow energy healers noted as odd about their new friend was that Dragon/Radovan always had at least five cell phones on him that rang constantly, and he would never take the calls. He would just like say, "I'll call you back," and like put them up, and they're like, "That's weird. Must just love cell phones."

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  He's like moving like, he's moving like Robert Durst.

• 1:06:33Robert Evans?

  The sketchiest man alive.

• 1:06:33Speaker 01

  Like, this is.

• 1:06:37Robert Evans?

  It's so funny. It's so funny.

• 1:06:42Robert Evans?

  Over the years, Radovan, except for the genocide, it's really funny, though. What he, that's with the second act, third act.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  And let's not forget the genocide. He just shaves his head, grows a beard. How many systems?

• 1:06:55Robert Evans?

  Gets a Santa beard.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  Needs, yeah, to literally cosplay as Santa and call yourself David.

• 1:07:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  And then, other than that, act as guilty as you fucking want.

• 1:07:07Robert Evans?

  The most sketchy man alive.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem like you even really making much of an effort. Yeah.

• 1:07:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He's barely hiding. Over the years, Radovan expanded his offerings to include acupuncture, homeopathy, and something he repeatedly refers to but never explains called quantum medicine. He also sold magical amulets. He partners up at one point with a.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  That's crazy. That's crazy. As somebody who, as somebody who loves, who gets acupuncture and loves it, my acupuncture doctor had to do so much schooling.

• 1:07:42Robert Evans?

  Maybe he did a genocide. No way to know.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  She did so much schooling and like.

• 1:07:46Robert Evans?

  How much blood is on her hands, Sophie? That's what I want to know. How much blood is on her hands?

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  She had to do so much schooling and so many student loans.

• 1:07:55Robert Evans?

  No. Yeah.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Like, this is so offensive.

• 1:07:57Robert Evans?

  She was leading a militia, Sophie. Wake up.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  No, David is a great acupuncturist.

• 1:08:03Speaker 02

  No, he isn't.

• 1:08:05Robert Evans?

  Better known for his other work. He also partnered up with a sex therapist named Savo Bojovic, with whom he worked on several different.

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  I'm scared. I'm scared. I'm scared.

• 1:08:17Robert Evans?

  It's not going where you think.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Does everyone have their behind the bastards bingo cards out? Because we just hit mysterious sex therapist.

• 1:08:26Robert Evans?

  It's black. We did it all.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  I'm scared.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:30Robert Evans?

  Political, like, white-collar criminal, political leader, medical crank, genocide committer, and fake doctor of every imaginable kind. Incredible.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Failed artist. Like, just, yeah.

• 1:08:43Robert Evans?

  He pitched a no-hitter in terms of bastards ball.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  In case, in case you're doing the bingo and you didn't get your space, Robert, no. Okay, now, now, everybody's got a bingo.

• 1:08:53Robert Evans?

  Now you're in there. Yeah.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Oh, and we, and you, you, you hit Grand Rapids today, too. Really.

• 1:08:58Robert Evans?

  We did. We already mentioned Grand Rapids. This is an Alzheimer already.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Wow. Oh, my God.

• 1:09:05Robert Evans?

  This, this, I gotta tell you about this sex therapist, because he works with Savo Bojovic on several inventions and theories to cure sexual dysfunction. And I found a New York Times article by a reporter who interviewed Savic after Radovan was caught. Because like, a couple of, a lot of these healers get interviewed, not just by Jessica Stern, but, and they're like, "Did you not notice, like, anything?" And they never did. But this article is incredible, because he's talking to all these cranks who were like partnered with a genocide guy and didn't know it. Here's one quote from that, when he's talking about the sex therapist. "He, the sex therapist, explained that his current work is a study of his nation's penises. Before he would discuss Dabic, he insisted on walking me and my interpreter through a scrapbook with some 2,000 Polaroid close-ups

• 1:09:48Robert Evans?

  of middle-aged, mainly Serbian penises. And look, we all have a book of middle-aged Serbian men's penises somewhere in the house, but you don't take it out immediately as soon as a journalist shows up. You make them earn it a little bit, right?"

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  I think maybe the only thing we can say for him here is he has a fantastic eye for credulous dipshits. Like, that's, like, can spot him from a mile away. He's like, "Oh, the guy with the 2,000 pictures of cocks in his house."

• 1:10:24Robert Evans?

  Middle-aged dicks. And every line in that New York Times article is funnier than the other, because immediately after that is, "Bojovic said he had recently proved that Serbian men can have active sex until the age of 102, and Serbian women until 84."

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Sir.

• 1:10:40Robert Evans?

  What?

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Okay. Sir, sexist, sir.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  Fuck you. Fuck you.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Fuck you. Sorry that, sorry that nobody wanted to see your old man dick.

• 1:10:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You know who, who else can continue having sex until the age of 102?

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

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• 1:10:56Robert Evans?

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• 1:15:44Robert Evans?

  We're back, and I have to continue reading from that amazing New York Times article, talking about this sex therapist who partnered with Radovan. He seemed especially interested in treating strong-blooded women who cannot live without sex. For them, he has invented a special device called an applicator, which can bring on a gentle orgasm and which can also be marketed. He insisted on telling me, despite my best efforts to stop him. Yeah. And this journalist was like, I don't want to know about this. I want to talk about the genocide guy. He's like, no, no, no. We are going through the sex stuff first.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  You can't really understand the orgasm torture machine if you don't look at all 2,000 penises first. You need to read the text.

• 1:16:26Robert Evans?

  Dragon slash Radovan worked with this guy to cure impotent men by putting his hands on their junk. Right? Because he has healing hands. To continue from that article, and this is the sex therapist again. "He put his hands close to my cheeks and I felt a terrible energy of warmth," Bojovic said. "Dabic's warm hands gave Bojovic an idea. He put some sluggish sperm on a microscope slide. I was holding the glass slide and he was putting his hands above and below," Bojovic said. "He kept them there for some time, and then I put the slide under the microscope, and I was nicely surprised to see the sperm really moving faster." So Bojovic and Dabic successfully repeat this slide experiment 10 times? "I had the intention of developing a method in which Dabic could heal our patients,

• 1:17:09Robert Evans?

  holding one hand under the testicles and one on the top of the testicles," Bojovic explained. That's what Radovan's doing? He's cupping old men's balls to use his magical powers to make their sperm lively? Amazing.

• 1:17:25Robert Evans?

  He's my favorite. I'm sorry. Not the genocide stuff, but that's great. Because when I heard he was doing sex therapy work, I was like, oh, he must have committed some horrible sex crimes. No, he's just cupping old men's balls to shoot energy into their sperm.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  I like, I think I kind of fully left my body at sluggish.

• 1:17:45Robert Evans?

  Just disassociate.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I think I kind of went somewhere else for a while. I don't know what. I think I'm back then. When you said sluggish sperm with like absolute like certainty of, like, what do you mean?

• 1:18:03Robert Evans?

  It's some of the funniest shit I've read in my life. That New York Times article should have won a Pulitzer. Like, it should win every Pulitzer every year. Keep giving it to that journalist. I couldn't be happier.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Like, what kind of damages do you even ask for having reported that?

• 1:18:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, like just give him a year's salary as an apology for making him talk to these people.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  My goodness. That's like, yeah, he's just sort of, it seems like he's been, like, he's receiving some sort of, I mean, obviously, he should not be loose, but it does feel like in some, in some way, he's serving a life sentence in this like fever dream.

• 1:18:48Robert Evans?

  Maybe. Yeah. I think he loves this. I think he's way happier doing this than being a dictator.

• 1:18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish he had found his passion for cupping old men's balls if he were younger. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you can do that. And he lived in New York City. Come on.

• 1:19:05Robert Evans?

  If he hadn't done a genocide, he would have just been on my podcast behind the guys who cup old men's balls for strange reasons.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  That's, that's behind the paywall. Yeah.

• 1:19:14Robert Evans?

  Launching in December, everybody. Yeah. So one of the things I find most interesting about this story is how easy it was for the most wanted man in all of Europe to hide in a fairly high-profile way, working closely with a whole community of people who would have seen him on TV constantly during the war years. And that New York Times investigation has a great theory as to why none of these weird energy healer freaks recognized the genocide guy in their midst. Quote, "The world of alternative medicine turns out to be a brilliant refuge for a man with something to hide. Every so-called healer I met in Belgrade seemed curious about just one thing, his own healing method, expressing the mildest interest in Visac technique or energy fields would set off hours of one-way conversation.

• 1:19:57Robert Evans?

  John Sick, the man who mastered energy fields, remembered Dabic as someone who was always asking after John Sick's work, but rarely spoke about himself. He would never sit down and eat with us," John Sick recalled. And so the theory is that none of them noticed this guy was the most famous dude in the country because they're all narcissist fucking woo weirdos who are only interested in their own grifts. And as long as he never talked about himself, they didn't ask.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, like, I mean, it is, like, he just had to find kind of a dozen credulous weirdos and you can kind of move through. Ah, man, I've really.

• 1:20:31Robert Evans?

  The perfect place to hide.

• 1:20:34Robert Evans?

  It's genius, really.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  As a, as a former woo dabbler, it's, it's, it's, it's a bad look. It's a bad look.

• 1:20:42Robert Evans?

  It's a bad look. It's a bad look.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  When, when, when the, when the Santa-looking motherfucker cupping your balls turns out to be

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  a genocide architect.

• 1:20:55Robert Evans?

  I'll say this, Jamie, if Hitler had escaped the war and lived in like peace in another country for like another 20 or 30 years and had decent health, which he wouldn't have, he was very sick by the end of the war anyway. But if he had, he would have done something like this. I think he would have become some sort of weird energy healer, some shit.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that genuinely, again, not to bring it back to fucking W, but you know, if you, if you serve, if you, if you outlive your war crimes, it seems like you kind of go to this like kind of creepy retirement. This creepy little side quest.

• 1:21:31Robert Evans?

  I think the one ethical use I could find for generative AI would be if we could identify the people who have like the genocide dictator thing, and you could create like a fake like army of fans that are just bots to encourage their side career so they never get into politics. Like, we might really avoid some horrors.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  Incredible. Can we just make like a shell Juilliard for mid?

• 1:21:54Robert Evans?

  Fake Juilliard for people who might do genocide.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, for mid genocide candidates.

• 1:22:01Robert Evans?

  I don't know. All right. That's it. Yeah. He also, I should note, held, hid very well even outside the confines of the energy healing subculture, purred The Guardian, quote, "He also started visiting his local bar, the Ludacucca Madhouse, a smoke-filled, rough-edged place that appealed to a shifting crowd of impoverished war veterans, Bosnian Serbs and Montenegrins. It served country wine, plum brandy, and pungent, undiluted nationalism. On the wood-paneled walls were pictures of the Serb modern nationalist pantheon, with pride of place reserved for Radovan Karadzic. On at least one occasion, he was persuaded to pick up a gusla, the single-stringed fiddle of the region, and perform an epic Serb ballad under a framed portrait of himself at the height of his power. Yet no one recognized him." Amazing. Amazing.

• 1:22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yes, but also you could say, you could say, you could say zero cultural impact, zero cultural impact.

• 1:22:57Robert Evans?

  Sure, sure. You could say that, or you could say, we all owe the writers of Superman an apology, because maybe Clark Kent could really successfully hide just by putting on glasses. Maybe it is that simple. It doesn't take, most people are not paying attention.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, you, you really do kind of forget, you know, how, how foolish a person can be.

• 1:23:16Robert Evans?

  We spend 90% of our days asleep, pretty much, right? Like, everyone's zooming through on autopilot. So Radovan slash Dragan was having a fine time as an energy healer in general kook.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  There's more?

• 1:23:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, oh, there's more. In mid 2007, one of his doctor friends introduced him to executives at Cali Vita, which despite its name and California-centric branding, is a Connecticut-based MLM that sells health supplements. He became their first sales representative in Belgrade and was for a time quite suc- He gets into the MLM, like, every bastard thing this guy did. It's amazing.

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  He, he became a Lululemon girl boss.

• 1:23:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's incredible stuff.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  This guy.

• 1:24:00Robert Evans?

  He did it all. He did it all. Unfortunately, that includes genocide, but he did it all.

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  He's on his second post-genocide pivot.

• 1:24:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah. On the evening of, and he would have pivoted further, I'm sure.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  What do they sell? What do they sell?

• 1:24:16Robert Evans?

  It's like supplements. They're selling supplements. It's like a lot of stock photos of California people and pills. Yeah. On the evening of July 18th, 2008, Dragan Dopic was forced to go on the run again. Pro-Western reformers had started winning elections in Serbia, and the people who'd protected him are not going to be in power anymore, or at least not enough of them, and they warn him, like, we can't keep hiding you in the Capitol. So, and, and these people were unaware that he had actually already been tracked down. And what, what, what finally blows his spot is not the fact that he's living a public life as a famous healer, it's that his younger brother, Luka, kills a lady with his car and like calls his brother on a trap, on a burner phone and is like, hey, I need advice. And people are like, why is the brother of the guy who did this genocide calling

• 1:25:01Robert Evans?

  this random energy healer who looks kind of like the guy who did the genocide, right? That's sort of how it comes together.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  David?

• 1:25:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So as he attempted to flee, he was taken into custody and brought to the Hague. And I'm not going to cover the blow-by-blow of the trial, but it brought a ton of evidence to light that made Radovan's guilt even clearer. He and his top general, Radko Mladic, were placed on trial for charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. And the resultant trial took years, but on March 24th, 2016, he was convicted of all of these things and sentenced to 40 years in prison. He is incarcerated today at a UK prison in the Isle of Wight. And that's the Radovan Karadzic story. It's finally over.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  My goodness.

• 1:25:46Robert Evans?

  An amazing amount of ground, though. It's, what a life.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  The, the, the dynamon of that story was so-

• 1:25:57Robert Evans?

  It's insane.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  I was not expecting-

• 1:26:00Speaker 01

  Had no right.

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  The, the penises of it all. Oh.

• 1:26:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:26:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I did not expect 2,000 middle-aged Serb penises to, to take a role in the part two of this episode.

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  That does sound like one of those, like Reddit, what would you do prompts.

• 1:26:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I don't know, folks, if you have 2,000 pictures of middle-aged Serbian men's penises, send them to our, our, our, our email, you know? I'll take a look.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Not, not all men who have album of 2,000 pictures of Serbian penises.

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  Please don't do that to Jamie. Please don't do that to me.

• 1:26:35Robert Evans?

  That's the sequel to a Serbian film, 2,000 Pictures of Serbian Penises?

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  Please, please, no, no dick pics. We've suffered enough.

• 1:26:44Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. Yeah, especially that Times reporter, my god.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Oh, my god.

• 1:26:49Robert Evans?

  To your local energy healer.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  I still have questions about Jessica. Like, this is just all, I, I mean, I, I am thrilled, I am thrilled. I do remember him, his sentencing. Now it's, but I, but I really feel like we kind of culturally skipped over the, but not just the genocide, but the MLM and the, and the 2,000 Serbian penises.

• 1:27:16Robert Evans?

  No, it's not in, no one who is involved in the US Defense and Intelligence wants to admit that the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, the CIA, MI6, fucking every agency that existed in the West got outsmarted by a guy who's like, primary pivot after getting done with a genocide was cupping old men's balls to make their sperm livelier. Like-

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 1:27:40Robert Evans?

  It's pretty embarrassing.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  It's literally like a Count Olaf gray disguise.

• 1:27:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  It's pretty ridiculous. I, yeah, and that, and that, the, that however many, like, millions, maybe billions of dollars that went into that search, the best they could come up with was like, a 2001 gorilla.

• 1:28:00Robert Evans?

  How could we have known he left the country? How could we have known the Serb went to Serbia?

• 1:28:07Speaker 01

  Who could have guessed?

• 1:28:08Robert Evans?

  Petraeus.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  Good, best of luck in the future, you fucking dipshit. God, well.

• 1:28:15Robert Evans?

  Funny stuff.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Good, you know, glad, glad he's rotting, hope, you know, and, and, but, Jesus Christ.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  My goodness, my goodness. Jamie, tell, tell the audience here about, about your new upcoming novel, The Tower.

• 1:28:30Speaker 01

  It's so hard to plug at the end of this fucking show.

• 1:28:33Speaker 02

  That's why I had you plug it up top, baby.

• 1:28:36Speaker 01

  It's true. You know, and listeners, just keep in mind, he did go, he did get sentenced in the Hague.

• 1:28:42Speaker 02

  Truman, Truman, Truman, Truman, the background was like, Auntie Jamie, talking about book, must listen.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  I mean, she's a great reader, our, our sweet Truman. You can preorder my first novel, The Tower. It comes out in June, but I'm gonna beg you to preorder it anyways. And it is about a, an architect who falls in love with her own blueprint and tries for years to, I guess I'll, I'll reveal an additional detail I didn't in the previous episode. She spends, uh, she's trying to get financing from this, um, this very wealthy New England, uh, like, family to, to have the building built. And the family's name is the Van Sullivan's, which I think is very funny.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  So you can preorder it, uh, now and come see the Buckle Cast on tour in October.

• 1:29:34Robert Evans?

  Buy it twice, you know? And, and also, you know, listeners, before we go, I just want you to spend a little bit of time each day directing some mental energy to the hope that when Andrew Tate and his brother go to prison in the UK, they're sent to the Isle of Wight and wind up getting their balls cupped by Radovan Karadzic. That's my dream for the Tates, is that he, he manages to convince them he can cure their sperm.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  That is manifestation for evil. I don't-

• 1:29:59Robert Evans?

  I'm working on it, baby. I wanted to happen.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Who told Robert about this secret? This sucks.

• 1:30:02Robert Evans?

  Manifest, baby. We can make this happen. This is doable. This is doable.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  All right, all right. Let's wrap it up.

• 1:30:11Robert Evans?

  We're done.

• 1:30:12Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:30:51Speaker 05

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 1:31:06Speaker 06

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 1:31:11Speaker 05

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  If anyone wanted to commit a murder, up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body. But no one will find it.

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  He acted friendly. He talked friendly. He sounded friendly. They all knew that I did the scary boogie stuff, and they said, maybe she'll find out where this girl is. I saw him violent. Backhanded her. Pow!

• 1:31:58Speaker 06

  Listen to The Devil's Quarry, Season Two, in the Bone Valley feed, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:32:13Speaker 06

  You broke me. You do not deserve happiness.

• 1:32:16Speaker 03

  I'm Andrea Gunning. On this season of Betrayal, Carl thought he was living a normal, drama-free life, until the messages started. Someone's not gonna make it out of this alive. Every piece of evidence pointed to the wrong guy. He was not going to stop unless we stopped him. Listen to Betrayal, Season Six, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From shocking betrayals to carefully planned murders, The Black Effect's new original podcast series, Bloodline Crimes, hosted by me, Morgan Wood, explores the darkest and bizarre cases where family became the most dangerous threat of all. Listen to The

• 1:33:01Speaker 03

  Black Effect's Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8th, from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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  Detectives said he had stalked her before she died. Years later, they said he remained the person they continued to focus on. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered Black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told, and to the questions that still remain. Listen to Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:33:43Speaker 06

  Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research, until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers now, only at blockers.fm.

• 1:34:16Speaker 07

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 1:34:20Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras.

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  It's real.

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  Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 1:34:40Speaker 07

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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