Jessica Stern’s denial of evil
My War Criminal: Personal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide has caused a stir in Bosnia-Herzegovina and especially among the Bosnian community in the United States. Jessica Stern, who has previously written on the psychology of terrorists, attempts to get inside the mind of convicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who has been convicted of orchestrating the genocide of Bosnian Muslims during the Yugoslavian wars (1991-2001). The recent excerpt in the New York Times — an excerpt which Stern, bizarrely, has disavowed — turns out to be representative of not only Stern’s methodology in interviewing Karadzic, but also the seductive spell under which she has fallen.
