The strange case of Dr. Dabic

25/07/2008

Psychiatrist, poet, suspected war criminal and lately an "alternative medicine" guru, Radovan Karadzic juggled identities with apparent ease. The common denominator, bloggers suggest, was a lust for the limelight.

By Balkanblogs for Southeast European Times -- 25/07/08

War crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic lived a public life as Dr. Dragan David Dabic, a former psychiatrist and a one-time poet. [File]

With the arrest of war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic dominating the news this week, Serbian bloggers have been mesmerised by his capacity for self-reinvention. The man accused of overseeing some of the bloodiest atrocities in recent European history turned out to be living openly in Belgrade in the guise of a health and spirituality expert.

At B92 blogs, Milan Cirkovic titles a post "Dr. Dabic, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Quantum Energy".

"Now when even the British congratulate you on eccentricity and plot twists, that really is something," he writes. "We are envied by Terry Gilliam and the rest of the Monty Python team, for something that bizarre wouldn't even dawn on them."

"Like Peter Sellers, who was able to impersonate Mandrake, President Muffley and the mad Nazi Dr. Strangelove, so also our 'hero' was simultaneously able to be the poet Karadzic, a bloody war criminal and a spiritual healer Dabic -- and who knows what else the investigation will uncover. His 'research' aspect is particularly fascinating," Cirkovic adds.

Adam Weisphaut asserts that "swindlers and quacks are everywhere, and this alone isn't a phenomenon." What's more unusual, he adds, is that during the war years such "pseudo-practices" were encouraged as support for state policies.

"When one thinks it over, all those quacks, turbo orthodox believers, anti-globalisation activists and national workers were one and the same group, so it isn't strange that they were all embodied in Dr. Dabic. He's just a logical cog in the wheel," he writes.

Bill Piton looks at the case from another angle. "There is something else, a pathological need to be at the centre of attention," he suggests. "He would have died if he hadn't made himself of some consequence."

Nsarski, finally, plumbs the philosophical depths. "Joking aside, interesting questions arise," he writes. "First, if a man accused of war crimes manages to pose as a quantum energy healer, could a quantum energy healer become a war criminal under the right circumstances of quantum history and sociology? Second: is there a quantum healer hiding in the depths of a paramilitary troop leader's soul, and the other way around? And third: I just finished reading Dawkins's book The God Delusion and blanked out. Is there any light at the end of the tunnel?"

For Karadzic, though, the tunnel leads to The Hague tribunal, where he will have to discard his aliases and face justice.