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WHEN SAVING LIVES MORPHS INTO TORTURE AND KILLING
Robert Kaplan
Sydney Morning Herald
July 23 2008
Australia
The arrest of the psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic raises a profound
question: was Karadzic merely a doctor who ran a genocide, or did his
profession as a doctor play a significant part in his genocidal role?
The evidence points incontrovertibly to the latter: Karadzic practised
as a psychiatrist at Kosovo Hospital until he became the president of
the Republika Srpska in 1992, taking some of his nurses and doctors
with him; he used his training to plan terror tactics for ethnic
cleansing; he never renounced his profession.
What do we know about this man who so brutally perverted his
medical oath to save lives? Karadzic, comimg from peasant origins
in Montenegro, lived in multi-ethnic Sarajevo from the age of 15,
mixing with Muslims, Croats and Bosniaks. He received his medical
degree in 1971 and qualified for psychiatry.
Karadzic saw himself as something of an artist, a view shared by few
others, performing as a troubadour, writing children's stories and folk
songs. He published poetry rife with prophetic, if not apocalyptic,
visions; among the charmless titles were The Morning Hand Grenade
and Let's Go Down To The Town And Kill Some Scum. He was jailed for
fraud but used his contacts to get his job back.
As the shadows of war loomed over the fragmenting Yugoslav Republic,
Karadzic surprised everyone when he emerged as Slobodan Milosovic's
proxy, using extreme nationalist rhetoric of a kind not heard in
Europe since the Nazis. A new term entered the lexicon: "ethnic
cleansing". Karadzic, a central figure in the destruction, conducted
the siege of Sarajevo, shelling the hospital where he had worked,
killing colleagues and patients.
In 1995, Karadzic was indicted by an international war crimes
tribunal, making him the first doctor so indicted since the Nuremberg
doctors trial in 1946. In 1993, the American Psychiatric Association
passed a motion condemning Karadzic for "brutal and inhumane actions
... because, by membership and training, Dr Karadzic claims membership
in our profession".
What was Karadzic the psychiatrist like? His colleagues said
he provoked psychotic patients and his work was ordinary. When a
psychopathic patient with a knife rampaged through the ward, Karadzic
retreated to his room, leaving a nurse to disarm the patient. He
constantly regaled colleagues with grandiose plans; for example,
he would write the definitive textbook on depression.
Karadzic's capacity for gross denial was pervasive. Following the
killing of 68 civilians by a mortar shell at Markale marketplace
on February 5, 1994, Karadzic said the corpses had been blown up by
Muslim forces to gain sympathy.
>>From his career as a psychiatrist to his apocalyptic reign
as genocidal leader, he displayed an extraordinary degree of
reckless opportunism in which the instincts of an extreme gambler
were unchallenged by restraint or fear of the consequences. Warren
Zimmerman, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, described Karadzic
as obsessed with violence, regarding him as mad.
As a genocidal murderer, Karadzic is an extreme but not
uncommon example of clinicide, the phenomenon of doctors who
kill. Clinicide includes serial killing, treatment killing and
political killing. Doctors murder more than any other professional
group; they kill their partners, relatives, patients or victims in
service of the state or an ideology. It is likely that the power over
life or death attracts them to the profession in the first place. Dr
Jean-Paul Marat, the bloodthirsty political serial killer behind the
French Revolution, was a dermatological and ophthalmic specialist. He
was followed by Turkish doctors who organised the Armenian genocide,
Nazi doctors who ran death camps and Japanese doctors who carried
out biological warfare.
Since 1945, the role of doctors in terrorism, torture, genocide and
abuse of prisoners is a growth industry. From communist Eastern Europe
to rightist regimes in South America, the list is extensive; each
new phase of insurrection, state repression or clash with opposing
forces invariably produces doctors engaged in serious human rights
abuses. Examples include Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, Dr Hastings
Banda of Malawi, Dr Wouter Basson of South Africa and, cult-status
notwithstanding, Dr Che Guevara.
Karadzic's trajectory shows uncanny resonances with that of
Hitler. Both came from a rural background to spend their early
youth in multi-ethnic cosmopolitan surroundings, Hitler in Vienna,
Karadzic in Sarajevo. Like Hitler, Karadzic suffered from psychosomatic
illness. During his early years in Vienna, Hitler mixed with people
of all backgrounds, including Jews, his murderous racism coming to
the fore only in 1919. Hitler regarded himself as an artist. While
able to qualify as a psychiatrist, Karadzic had a similar grandiose
and romantic vision of himself, despite evidence that he was never
more than an indifferent poet.
If nothing else, Karadzic shows that clinicide, from the killing
fields of Srebrenica to the growing epidemic of geriatric murder in
nursing homes, can no longer be ignored.
Robert Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist at the Graduate School of
Medicine, Wollongong University. His book Medical Murder: An Analysis
Of The Disturbing Phenomenon Of Doctors Who Kill is due for publication
in February.
Robert Kaplan
Sydney Morning Herald
July 23 2008
Australia
The arrest of the psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic raises a profound
question: was Karadzic merely a doctor who ran a genocide, or did his
profession as a doctor play a significant part in his genocidal role?
The evidence points incontrovertibly to the latter: Karadzic practised
as a psychiatrist at Kosovo Hospital until he became the president of
the Republika Srpska in 1992, taking some of his nurses and doctors
with him; he used his training to plan terror tactics for ethnic
cleansing; he never renounced his profession.
What do we know about this man who so brutally perverted his
medical oath to save lives? Karadzic, comimg from peasant origins
in Montenegro, lived in multi-ethnic Sarajevo from the age of 15,
mixing with Muslims, Croats and Bosniaks. He received his medical
degree in 1971 and qualified for psychiatry.
Karadzic saw himself as something of an artist, a view shared by few
others, performing as a troubadour, writing children's stories and folk
songs. He published poetry rife with prophetic, if not apocalyptic,
visions; among the charmless titles were The Morning Hand Grenade
and Let's Go Down To The Town And Kill Some Scum. He was jailed for
fraud but used his contacts to get his job back.
As the shadows of war loomed over the fragmenting Yugoslav Republic,
Karadzic surprised everyone when he emerged as Slobodan Milosovic's
proxy, using extreme nationalist rhetoric of a kind not heard in
Europe since the Nazis. A new term entered the lexicon: "ethnic
cleansing". Karadzic, a central figure in the destruction, conducted
the siege of Sarajevo, shelling the hospital where he had worked,
killing colleagues and patients.
In 1995, Karadzic was indicted by an international war crimes
tribunal, making him the first doctor so indicted since the Nuremberg
doctors trial in 1946. In 1993, the American Psychiatric Association
passed a motion condemning Karadzic for "brutal and inhumane actions
... because, by membership and training, Dr Karadzic claims membership
in our profession".
What was Karadzic the psychiatrist like? His colleagues said
he provoked psychotic patients and his work was ordinary. When a
psychopathic patient with a knife rampaged through the ward, Karadzic
retreated to his room, leaving a nurse to disarm the patient. He
constantly regaled colleagues with grandiose plans; for example,
he would write the definitive textbook on depression.
Karadzic's capacity for gross denial was pervasive. Following the
killing of 68 civilians by a mortar shell at Markale marketplace
on February 5, 1994, Karadzic said the corpses had been blown up by
Muslim forces to gain sympathy.
>>From his career as a psychiatrist to his apocalyptic reign
as genocidal leader, he displayed an extraordinary degree of
reckless opportunism in which the instincts of an extreme gambler
were unchallenged by restraint or fear of the consequences. Warren
Zimmerman, the last US ambassador to Yugoslavia, described Karadzic
as obsessed with violence, regarding him as mad.
As a genocidal murderer, Karadzic is an extreme but not
uncommon example of clinicide, the phenomenon of doctors who
kill. Clinicide includes serial killing, treatment killing and
political killing. Doctors murder more than any other professional
group; they kill their partners, relatives, patients or victims in
service of the state or an ideology. It is likely that the power over
life or death attracts them to the profession in the first place. Dr
Jean-Paul Marat, the bloodthirsty political serial killer behind the
French Revolution, was a dermatological and ophthalmic specialist. He
was followed by Turkish doctors who organised the Armenian genocide,
Nazi doctors who ran death camps and Japanese doctors who carried
out biological warfare.
Since 1945, the role of doctors in terrorism, torture, genocide and
abuse of prisoners is a growth industry. From communist Eastern Europe
to rightist regimes in South America, the list is extensive; each
new phase of insurrection, state repression or clash with opposing
forces invariably produces doctors engaged in serious human rights
abuses. Examples include Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, Dr Hastings
Banda of Malawi, Dr Wouter Basson of South Africa and, cult-status
notwithstanding, Dr Che Guevara.
Karadzic's trajectory shows uncanny resonances with that of
Hitler. Both came from a rural background to spend their early
youth in multi-ethnic cosmopolitan surroundings, Hitler in Vienna,
Karadzic in Sarajevo. Like Hitler, Karadzic suffered from psychosomatic
illness. During his early years in Vienna, Hitler mixed with people
of all backgrounds, including Jews, his murderous racism coming to
the fore only in 1919. Hitler regarded himself as an artist. While
able to qualify as a psychiatrist, Karadzic had a similar grandiose
and romantic vision of himself, despite evidence that he was never
more than an indifferent poet.
If nothing else, Karadzic shows that clinicide, from the killing
fields of Srebrenica to the growing epidemic of geriatric murder in
nursing homes, can no longer be ignored.
Robert Kaplan is a forensic psychiatrist at the Graduate School of
Medicine, Wollongong University. His book Medical Murder: An Analysis
Of The Disturbing Phenomenon Of Doctors Who Kill is due for publication
in February.