There was something simultaneously ironic and horrific about Radovan Karadžić’s choice of disguise in his years in hiding – an energy healer with a monastic demeanour, the bun on his head reminiscent of a yogi. This was the same man who only a few years before had openly called for the “removal” of an entire human group, ordered and authorised murder on a mass scale and caused hundreds of thousands of people to become permanently displaced; his politics made Bosnia-Herzegovina a country of separateness, and in turn, of spiritual and economic paralysis. His incarnations showed us the extent of human gullibility and the meaning of bad faith; not only do we believe in, and are deceived by, invisible cures, we are prepared to cling fervently – and lethally – to invisible separations that, given enough time and enough death, have become real.

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The reactions to Karadžić’s sentencing from the three national sides are therefore predictable. Some Serbs are outraged that he was found guilty at all, and the Republika Srpska media are depicting him as a moral victor and a misunderstood hero; photos on news websites there are almost exclusively of a smiling, positive, defiant Karadžić. There are appeals to Europe in light of the current “Islamic threat”, and how the “Christians” in the Balkans foresaw the terror that is now looming over Europe, and tried to prevent it by battling against Muslims (a fallacy, since most of Bosnia’s Muslims were secular in the early 1990s).

The Croats seem relatively satisfied with the sentence. And the Bosniaks are disappointed at its moral failure – 40 years is a sentence for a civilian case murder, whereas a life sentence would express the impossibility of enumerating the weight and consequences of Karadžić’s crimes. It is as if with every event relating to the Bosnian war the country has an opportunity to gasp for a breath that might heal it, for the possibility of justice, however symbolic; but it inhales, yet again, the same stale air.

The nationalists reach for their flags and the school curriculums remain divided along ethnic lines

This is the most sinister consequence of Karadžić’s actions – that death, murder and justice are politicised to the extent that it has become irrelevant to feel compassion for those people who died in the war, and for the sorry state that Bosnia-Herzegovina is in, 20 years on. The nationalists reach for their flags, the school curriculums remain divided along ethnic lines, and the history books print the same facts presented from drastically different angles. In ethnically mixed towns, children attend school in morning and afternoon shifts that are separated by one-hour breaks, lest they should run into one another.

Milorad Dodik, the president of Republika Srpska, recently inaugurated a new student residence in Pale – the very area from which Karadžić and Ratko Mladić bombed Sarajevo during the siege – and named it “Radovan Karadžić”, as a particular honour. To quote Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, one of the most powerful accounts of human cruelty and war, “so it goes”.

What was once a civic, secular, multi-ethnic and tolerant country in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with a realistic prospect of coexistence, growth and development, has become a myopic, nationalist fragmentation that is continually paralysed by its ethnic diversity and corruption. Bosnia-Herzegovina remains enchanted by the nationalists’ mantras, nurturing an acute sense of victimhood and the sentiment of being dealt a bad hand of justice. The healer in The Hague has gifted us terms such as genocide, war crimes, deportation, murder, attacks, to work with and conjure up something that might propel us forward, into the future.