Radovan as Saddam? Get Real.

What a high drama there was at the BBC and at ITN when the news of Radovan Karadzic’s arrest broke.

At once, it was action stations and all the old Yugoslavia hands were despatched to their former stamping grounds. There they were, a collection of grey-heads, opening their reports with the lines: “There were snipers firing over my head the last time I was in Sarajevo”, or “It’s been 15 years since I last stood here in Belgrade.” They even sent John Simpson - BBC royalty if ever there was. I half expected to see the Queen herself, wandering around and giving us her “reactions”.

Because it obviously cost a fortune for the stations, the story was pitched at maximum level, covering every radio bulletin and almost every TV news programme as well. Presenters adopted their gravest tone, talking against a background of vast pictures of Karadzic’s head.

Again and again we saw the same slow-motion footage of people being sniped at in Sarajevo, head-scarved women preying before graves in Srebrenica, teens kneeling in the grass in the infamous Scorpion video, and all amid dramatic sounding announcements that Karadzic’s capture was the equivalent to the capture of Saddam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden.

You’d almost have thought they come across Hitler, as the presenters struggled to outdo one another in their choice of superlatives. Everything was the “worst”, the “biggest” and the “gravest”.

Of course, the story was over in Britain before it began, for attention spans here are brief, and where were the appropriate background scenes of “rejoicing” (in Sarajevo) and “fury” (in Belgrade) to give it all a bit of substance to the viewers? The reporters looked disappointed. Those in Sarajevo explained that bad weather must have driven the scenes of jubilation indoors, while poor old Mr Simpson in Belgrade had to make do with staring at half a dozen Serbian Chetniks in the centre of Belgrade slurring a desultory song; as most of them were grinning, one not very efficiently as he had no teeth (they were all obviously drunk) they were not very effective as a symbol of Serbia’s “nationalist fury”.

I couldn’t help feeling that, as ever, TV can only do black and white and is not much good at shades of grey. The capture of Radovan Karadzic is certainly a major event, and it ought to have happened years ago. But the blanket comparisons drawn with Saddam or Osama, to me at any rate, seemed overblown.

The former Iraqi leader was a world player, for one thing. The iron-fisted ruler of one of the world’s largest petroleum states, his word was law in one of the most ancient lands in the world, the Mesopotamia of the Bible, with a population of tens of millions. As for Osama, he showed he was capable of blowing up large chunks of New York, while his network of supporters still strikes fear into the hearts of half the world’s governments.

I find it hard to place the Radovan that I remember, he of the rubbery face, floppy hair and weak smile, in the same league. As for the state of which he was once president, well, Pale is no Baghdad, and the Republika Srpska is no Iraq. A humble and unrecognised statelet, inhabiting much the same twilight zone as Transdniester, or Abkhazia, I doubt many people in Europe have even heard of it.

Likening Radovan to the steely, determined and fanatical Osama seems equally wide of the mark. I suppose it is just about possible that his supporters in London, concentrated in the Shepherds Bush area, could, if they really wanted to, just about get it together to attack one of the local Asian-owned sweet shops, or “storm” a newspaper kiosk. But more than that?

I only met Karadzic a few times, it has to be said, but I always felt he cut a faintly implausible figure, both as a leader of men and of a cause. It wasn’t just the nutty hairdo. It was more the wandering gaze, that fixed itself on the middle distance when he was speaking, and the limp, damp, handshake. There was a lack of conviction somewhere.

He always looked like someone who was trying out a role in an opportunistic fashion and who – if something better come along – would quite easily shrug off his present occupation and move on. Somehow it didn’t surprise me totally to learn that after slipping off the presidential sash that he had worn as head of state of his “entity” - word that in English evokes images of something conjured into life in a science lab – he had simply rebooted himself and emerged as a self-styled healer, treating credulous locals in flyblown towns in northern Serbia.

Somehow I would not have been surprised if he had been uncovered working as an archbishop in Greece, or as a car dealer in Chicago, or as a manager of an antiquarian bookshop in London, or as a circus hand in one of the remote “stans”. To each of those new roles I’m sure he would have brought the same fake, slightly fraudulent and unconvincing quality.

Of course I don’t blame our British TV stations for succumbing to hyperbole – or verbal inflation where Karadzic is concerned. July is a notoriously tricky month for the media. The Queen closes Parliament; she disappears into her Scottish castle and the MPs shuffle off on holiday. The media languishes, desperate for a little action. Karadzic arrived and hey presto, they seized the day. I just hope they don’t overdo it now, and so fall back into second gear if and when Ratko Mladic is handed over. Because if I were a Bosnian, that’s the event that would have me in the streets, for I still have a hunch that he, and not Karadzic was the really enthusiastic killer, the real psychopath.