{"id":40568,"date":"2020-01-16T19:36:58","date_gmt":"2020-01-17T00:36:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/?p=40568"},"modified":"2020-01-17T22:11:41","modified_gmt":"2020-01-18T03:11:41","slug":"jessica-stern-radovan-karadzic-new-york-times-opinion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/2020\/01\/16\/jessica-stern-radovan-karadzic-new-york-times-opinion\/","title":{"rendered":"Stern Describes Time Spent With Radovan Karadzic in <i>NYT<\/i> OpEd"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"\/pardeeschool\/files\/2020\/01\/19stern-1-superJumbo.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"\/pardeeschool\/files\/2020\/01\/19stern-1-superJumbo-1024x718.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1024\" height=\"718\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-40570 size-large\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In a harrowing and gripping personal account, a new OpEd by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/profile\/jessica-stern\/\">Jessica Stern<\/a> describes what 48 hours alone with the convicted war criminal,\u00a0<span>Radovan Karadzic felt like. The Opinion essay by Prof. Stern, who is a Research Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston\u00a0University, was\u00a0published <span class=\"balancedHeadline\">in\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/\">The New York Times<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>on January 16, 2020, under the headline<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/01\/16\/opinion\/sunday\/radovan-karadzic.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share\">Why Did I let a Convicted War Criminal Practice Energy Healing on Me?&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">I wrote My War Criminal because I think it\u2019s important for everyone to understand how a person becomes capable of overseeing a genocide \u2013 how he comes to power and how he succeeds. I am in no way condoning the monstrous actions of Radovan Karadzic, which I find repugnant.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Jessica Stern (@JessicaEStern) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/JessicaEStern\/status\/1218343025249857537?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">January 18, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>An excerpt from the essay:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"css-exrw3m evys1bk0\">&#8220;Mr. Karadzic looked straight at me. \u201cWould you like me to show you how it works?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-exrw3m evys1bk0\">I was startled, unsure how to respond. I thought: If I say no, he will have won. He would see that I was afraid of him and of his claim to mystical power. But saying yes meant exposing myself to his touch. Not just his touch, but his \u201chealing\u201d energy. He was still looking at me, indicting me with his gaze. It came to me that he wanted me to sense his power, maybe to frighten me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-exrw3m evys1bk0\">I reminded myself that although convicted of genocide, he has never been suspected of committing violent acts himself. I did not think he would strangle me. But I knew that the guard on duty, who was supposed to be monitoring us and keeping me safe, was sitting at a desk, idly flipping through the pages of a magazine.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-exrw3m evys1bk0\">By then I already knew, having spent many days watching him in court and some 10 hours speaking with him one-on-one, that whatever this man was, whatever evil he might have committed or supervised, he was also a believer in the divine. I told myself that I would be more or less safe with him, even if he came physically closer to me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-exrw3m evys1bk0\">\u201cYes,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n<p>. . . \u00a0 \u00a0. . .<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-exrw3m evys1bk0\">In that moment, and in the days afterward, I vowed never to tell anyone about this incident. But later, it seemed to me that so much was captured in this story: his belief in the mystical, his power to manipulate. Cat and mouse. Or maybe cat and snake.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Read full OpEd <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/01\/16\/opinion\/sunday\/radovan-karadzic.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/profile\/jessica-stern\/\">Prof. Jessica Stern<\/a> is a Research Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. She is the coauthor with J.M. Berger of\u00a0<em>ISIS: The State of Terror<\/em>; and the author of\u00a0<em>Denial: A Memoir of Terror<\/em>;\u00a0<em>Terror in the Name of God<\/em>:\u00a0<em>Why Religious Militants Kill<\/em>; and\u00a0<em>The Ultimate Terrorists<\/em>. She has held fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Erik Erikson Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation.\u00a0 She was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a National Fellow at Stanford University\u2019s Hoover Institution, and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. \u00a0Stern has nearly completed her training as an Advanced Academic Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis.\u00a0<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/profile\/jessica-stern\/\">Learn more about her here<\/a><span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a gripping but harrowing personal account this new OpEd in <I>The New York Times<\/I> by Prof. Jessica Stern describes what spending time with an evil convicted war criminal can feel like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14433,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8410,8432],"tags":[9059,8855,11496],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40568"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14433"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40568"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40636,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40568\/revisions\/40636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/pardeeschool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}