By CCHR International
The Mental Health Watchdog
March 25, 2016

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Former Bosnian Serb leader and psychiatrist Radovan Karadzic was convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity by a United Nations war crimes tribunal and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) joins Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in its hailing the landmark decision as “a momentous day for international justice, but also for those in Bosnia who lost husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters in a coordinated campaign of violence.” PHR, which is independent of CCHR, said, “It may have taken 20 years, but at last Karadzic—a psychiatrist-turned-demagogue,” is being “held responsible for his crimes.”[1]

The UN tribunal found Karadzic guilty of orchestrating Serb atrocities throughout Bosnia’s 1992-95 war that left 100,000 people dead.[2] He was also convicted of persecution, extermination, and murder.[3] CNN and other media detailed Karadzik’s history as not just a political leader but also a practicing psychiatrist who came to be nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia.”[4]

CCHR praised the tribunal for its persistence in ensuring that justice has finally been done and recognizing the criminality of “ethnic cleansing.” Karadzic’s conviction is seen as a positive step towards strengthening international law on the criminal responsibility of political leaders for atrocities committed by forces under their control.[5]

The New York Times reported, “The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Mr. Karadzic of genocide for the Srebrenica massacre, which aimed to kill ‘every able-bodied male’ in the town and systematically exterminate the Bosnian Muslim population there.”[6] When such human rights atrocities came to CCHR’s attention in the 1990s, CCHR’s chapter in France began extensive research into the ethnic cleansing being carried out. As The Chicago Sun Times pointedly stated on Thursday, March 24, 2016, the killing of more than 8,000 men and boys during Karadzik’s war was “the worst massacre in Europe since the Nazi era.”[7]

CCHR, which was formed in 1969, in part, because of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (now part of the International Bill of Rights), recognized this parallel between Nazi eugenics and Bosnian abuses. In the 1990s, it produced a widely distributed report called, “The Minds Behind Ethnic Cleansing,” which the French Psychiatric Association presented to a U.N. War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague in 1999. Christian Vasseur, General Secretary of the Association wrote CCHR on March 27, 1995, thanking it for the work on the “masterminds of ethnic cleansing. In all of the information gathered to date, we did not get the precise idea of ethnic cleansing being organized by the psychiatrists—we had the intuition. However, we have persevered in speaking out and informing [about] the participation of psychiatrists in ethnic cleansing, and the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia has just recently offered to hear us.”

What had not been generally known at the time was that both Jovan Raskovic, the founder of the Serb Democratic Party (SDP) party and Karadzic were psychiatrists that fueled hatred through racist propaganda. In fact, Raskovic admitted in an interview on television in 1992, “If I hadn’t created the emotional strain in the Serbian people, nothing would have happened.”[8] Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia’s strongman president was also a patient of Karadzic.

In September 1999, members of the Council of Europe signed a Resolution which recognized psychiatrists as the architects of the ethnic cleansing campaign. The Resolution encouraged and invited the Council members to “study the material that has been put together and researched by the French chapter of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights….”[9]

Included in the research were the similarities to the Nazi euthanasia program during World War II. It would be another decade before Prof. Frank Schneider, president of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, would publicly admit that under National Socialism, psychiatrists had forced patients to be “sterilized, arranged their deaths and even performed killings themselves. Patients were used as test subjects for unjustifiable research—research that left them traumatized or even dead.” Further, psychiatry “no longer felt it had an obligation to individuals; rather, in the name of supposed progress—the liberation of an entire society from the burden of providing welfare, improvements in the genetic makeup of an entire nation and, ultimately, humanity’s ‘deliverance from misery’—psychiatrists abused and killed vast numbers of people.”[10]

Upon Karadzik’s arrest in 2008, forensic psychiatrist Robert Kaplan from the Graduate School of Medicine, Wollongong University, Australia, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, confirmed what CCHR’s research had earlier found. He stated that Karadzik “used his training to plan terror tactics for ethnic cleansing” and “as a genocidal murderer, Karadzik is an extreme but not uncommon example of clinicide—the phenomenon of doctors who kill.” “The evidence points” he said, to a man whose profession as a doctor played “a significant part in his genocidal role.”[11]

Karadzic practiced as a psychiatrist at Kosovo Hospital until he became the president of the Republika Srpska, an administrative agency in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1992, taking some of his nurses and doctors with him. He received his medical degree in 1971 and qualified for psychiatry. As Kaplan detailed, “Karadzic surprised everyone when he emerged as [former President of Serbia] 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.”[12]

CCHR hopes that any international law developing from the trial regarding politically-ordered ethnic cleansing will be extended to domestic law about mental health policy.  U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s deputy spokesman, Fanhan Haq, told reporters that the judgment “sends a strong signal to all who are in positions of responsibility that they will be held accountable for their actions….”[13] With the ethnic cleansing policies emanating from psychiatric thinking, and hundreds of individuals with “mental disorders” already being legally approved for euthanasia in The Netherlands,[14] from a human rights perspective, there needs to be greater scrutiny of policies that harm in the name of “mental health care.”

CCHR also called for greater global implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also part of the International Bill of Rights [15] so that there is prosecution for violations of Article 5: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”[16]

References:

[1] “PHR Welcomes Guilty Verdict Against Radovan Karadzic, Key Figure in Bosnia’s Genocide ,” Physicians for Human Rights, 24 Mar. 2016, http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/press/press-releases/phr-welcomes-guilty-verdict-against-radovan-karadzic-key-figure-in-bosnias-genocide.html.

[2] “Radovan Karadzic convicted of genocide, gets 40 years,” The Chicago Sun, 24 March 2016, http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/radovan-karadzic-criminally-responsible-for-bosnia-war-crimes/

[3] “Radovan Karadzic convicted of genocide, gets 40 years,” The Chicago Sun, 24 March 2016, http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/radovan-karadzic-criminally-responsible-for-bosnia-war-crimes/; “Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb, Gets 40 Years Over Genocide and War Crimes,” The New York Times, 24 Mar. 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/world/europe/radovan-karadzic-verdict.html?_r=0.

[4] “Radovan Karadzic: From psychiatrist to ‘Butcher of Bosnia’,” CNN, 24 Mar. 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/16/world/europe/radovan-karadzic-profile/.

[5] ‘Butcher of Bosnia’ Radovan Karadzic sentenced to 40 years in 1995 genocide,” Fox News, 24 Mar. 2016, http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/24/un-court-handing-down-verdicts-in-radovan-karadzic-trial.html.

[6] “Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb, Gets 40 Years Over Genocide and War Crimes,” The New York Times, 24 Mar. 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/world/europe/radovan-karadzic-verdict.html?_r=0.

[7] “Radovan Karadzic convicted of genocide, gets 40 years,” The Chicago Sun, 24 March 2016, http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/radovan-karadzic-criminally-responsible-for-bosnia-war-crimes/.

[8] Cees J. Hamelick, Media and Conflict Escalating Evil, (Routelege, New York, 2016), p. 26, https://books.google.com/books?id=phzvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT38&lpg=PT38&dq=If+I+hadn%E2%80%99t+created+
the+emotional+strain+in+the+Serbian+people,+nothing+would+have+happened&
source=bl&ots=CiwazLB_NM&sig=NKfIszH7mqUKejEEDCOVKl3bGMY&hl=en&sa=
X&ved=0ahUKEwjKwNbagNrLAhUB62MKHYlRD7kQ6AEINDAE#v=onepage&q=
If%20I%20hadn%E2%80%99t%20created%20the%20emotional%20strain%20in%
20the%20Serbian%20people%2C%20nothing%20would%20have%20happened&f=false;  Dale C. Tatum, Genocide at the Dawn of the 21^st Century: Rwanda,  Bosnia, Kosovo, and Darfur, (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2010), p. 80, https://books.google.com/books?id=8b_HAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=If+I+hadn%E2%80%99t+created+
the+emotional+strain+in+the+Serbian+people,+nothing+would+have+happened&
source=bl&ots=khTjTkmxJW&sig=uhhfnOUkEtXYKgyUHD3tnt8l0lU&hl=en&sa=
X&ved=0ahUKEwjKwNbagNrLAhUB62MKHYlRD7kQ6AEINzAF#v=onepage&q=
If%20I%20hadn%E2%80%99t%20created%20the%20emotional%20strain%20in
%20the%20Serbian%20people%2C%20nothing%20would%20have%20happened&f=false.

[9] “Human suffering and degradation Following Ethnic Cleansing,” Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, doc 8493 rev. 1 Sept. 1999, http://www.assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/X2H-Xref-ViewHTML.asp?FileID=8785&lang=EN.

[10] Professor Frank Schneider, “Psychiatry under National Socialism – Remembrance and Responsibility,” DGPPN, 2010, http://www.dgppn.de/english-version/history/psychiatry-under-national-socialism/speech-professor-schneider.html.

[11] Robert Kaplan, MD, “When saving lives morphs into torture and killing,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 July 2014, http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/when-saving-lives-morphs-into-torture-and-killing/2008/07/23/1216492536680.html?page=fullpage.

[12] Robert Kaplan, MD, “When saving lives morphs into torture and killing,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 July 2014, http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/when-saving-lives-morphs-into-torture-and-killing/2008/07/23/1216492536680.html?page=fullpage.

[13] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/ap/article-3507441/UN-court-handing-verdicts-Radovan-Karadzic-trial.html#ixzz43qaajWRa.

[14] “Number of Dutch killed by euthanasia rises by 13 per cent,” The Telegraph (UK), 24 Sept. 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/netherlands/10330823/Number-of-Dutch-killed-by-euthanasia-rises-by-13-per-cent.html.

[15] http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/FactSheet2Rev.1en.pdf.

[16] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.