It appears that the apprehension of former Bosnian Serb leader, Rodovan Karadzic, who was arrested for war crimes yesterday, was due more to ego and the love of costumes than to great police work. Years of searching for the architect of the ethnic cleansing which took the lives of thousands, did not locate him. It was his apparently insatiable need for notoriety that kept him in front of cameras, speaking at conferences, and writing in health and wellness journals under the pseudonym, “Dr. David.”
Having traded a military uniform for the uniform of a new age healer, he presented himself as an expert in alternative medicine. But either because he slipped up and exposed his original identity, or because the current government had enough of his public posturing and gave him up to authorities, as some have suggested, it was his need for the spotlight which dragged him down.
I wonder how much the love of uniforms and the need for that spotlight drives other violent leaders. I wonder if, rather than trying to apprehend them we offered them some other ego-boosting venue; they would be just as happy….
Of course the world has some very dangerous characters in it and they must be caught. But I wonder if playing to their sense of grandiosity, and even providing a stage of our choosing, instead of theirs, should not be one of the tools at our disposal. The pen may or may not be mightier than the sword, but in this case at least, ego sure was.