Copyright CanWest Interactive, Inc. Jul 22, 2008
BELGRADE - Radovan Karadzic, who was arrested in Serbia yesterday, is widely seen as a murderous megalomaniac with a twisted view of history and his supposed destiny as a leader of the Bosnian Serbs.
Bosnian Croats and Muslims, against whom the Bosnian wartime president, 63, waged a barbaric campaign of ethnic cleansing in the early 1990s, have no doubt he is one of the monsters of the 20th century.
But for many Serbs he remains a hero of the 1992-95 war, which followed Bosnia's independence from the Yugoslav federation, a man who stood up to age-old enemies and great powers and carved out a separate Serb homeland.
Carla Del Ponte, the former chief UN war crimes prosecutor, repeatedly accused the Bosnian Serbs in their post-war statelet of Republika Srpska of obstructing efforts to apprehend him.
So powerful was his underground network of supporters and loyalists, foreign peacekeepers responsible for his arrest were accused for years of gingerly tiptoeing around his most likely haunts.
The worst crimes on his indictment are the 43-month siege of Sarajevo in which 12,000 civilians were killed, and the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July, 1995.
In the bitter war against Bosnia's Muslim-led government, he is said to have orchestrated the ethnic cleansing in which more than one million non-Serbs were driven from villages where they had lived for generations.
The expulsions were accompanied, according to international observers, by widespread killings and up to 20,000 rapes in a calculated program of terrorism that left the international community shocked and impotent to respond.
Mr. Karadzic, with his thick shock of grey hair, became a familiar sight to television viewers around the world in the 1990s, when his contempt for diplomacy and cynical manipulation of UN peacemaking efforts exasperated foreign negotiators.
He was a close ally of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, and the pair co-operated militarily and politically to confuse the Serbs' enemies, not just on the battlefields but also in the halls of diplomacy.
A psychiatrist by training, Mr. Karadzic also likes to write children's poetry, theatre plays and Serb folk music in his spare time, boosting his standing among nationalistic Serbs.
Born on June 19, 1945, in the poor Montenegrin village of Petnjica, he was five years old when he first met his father. The elder Karadzic had been jailed for his activities with the Chetniks, Serb royalists who fought both the Nazis and the communist partisans in the Second World War.
The Karadzic family found themselves outcasts in postwar communist Yugoslavia and moved to the northwestern Montenegrin town of Niksic, near the Bosnian border.
In 1964, the young Mr. Karadzic went to Sarajevo to study medicine and later served a year in prison for fraud, although he claimed that his conviction was because of his anticommunist activities.
It was not until 1990 he discovered his talent for politics and founded the nationalist Serb Democratic Party, which remains on the Bosnian Serb political scene to this day.
His plans for Bosnia's division were so well advanced by the March, 1992, referendum on Bosnian independence -- boycotted by Serbs -- that he had an excuse to unleash his military forces.
Despite dramatic initial success, he ran into trouble in 1993 when he defied his patron, Mr. Milosevic, and rejected a plan for a Bosnian settlement.
Mr. Milosevic sidelined him during negotiations that culminated in the Dayton peace accords of 1995, and he was banned from appearing in public in July, 1996.
After his fall from grace and his indictment by the UN war crimes court at The Hague, he is believed to have spent most of his time hiding in remote Serb villages along the borders between Bosnia and Serbia-Montenegro.
He evaded numerous NATO and later European Union peacekeeping force raids to catch him, despite a US$5-million reward the U. S State Department offered for information leading to his arrest.
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STILL AT LARGE
The arrest of Radovan Karadzic on two counts of genocide leaves two men on the run from the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Ratko Mladic, 65 -- Military leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war, twice indicted on genocide charges, for the 43-month siege of Sarajevo in which around 12,000 people were killed, and for the Srebrenica massacre, in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed.
Goran Hadzic, 49 -- Croatian Serb local official, indicted for planning the murder and deportations of hundreds of non-Serbs in the self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina in Croatia.
The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has indicted 161 people for war crimes in the territory of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Fifty-six people have been found guilty and sentenced, 10 have been acquitted and in 36 cases the charges were dropped or the accused died. Aside from the fugitives, the rest are in various stages of trial, in The Hague or in their countries.
Former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic died in March, 2006, before the tribunal could render a verdict on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.