The man with the long white hair, thick beard and spectacles went by the name of Dragan Dabic and had seemingly no trouble peddling his skills as a traditional healer. The disguise worked well enough to allow him to live and work in Belgrade and even his neighbors insisted that they had no idea that behind this façade was Radovan Karadzic, one time leader of the Bosnian Serbs and war crimes suspect.But Radovan Karadzic's time ran out.Serbian officials announced that Karadzic had been arrested, questioned, had his identity established and was then handed the indictment from the International Criminal Court.Western leaders welcomed the arrest and many quickly noted it was proof the newly-elected government of President Boris Tadic was committed to cooperating with the international tribunal and to getting Serbia into the European Union.Speaking with VOA from Belgrade, James Lyon, the senior Balkan analyst for the International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based risk assessment organization, said there is no doubt that President Tadic and his party are committed to Europe, but he says there are doubts they could have engineered the arrest. "The difficulty is that they hadn't yet been in power long enough to establish control of any sort over the police or over the secret police. Let's keep in mind they just appointed a director of the secret police four days before this happened, that was certainly not enough time to go in and get the ball rolling," said Lyon.The question remains, who decided it was time to give Karadzic up. Balkan analyst Svetozar Rajak at the London School of Economics says while the government may not have had time to organize the operation, some individuals could have. "We know that the outgoing head of the intelligence services, Mr. Bilatovic was praised in the past even by Carla del Ponte [former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] as cooperating with western intelligence services in pursuing and trying to apprehend both Karadzic and [Ratko] Mladic," said Rajak.Rajak says it is also quite certain that a number of people in the intelligence apparatus must have known Karadzic was hiding in their midst."For him to evade so long as one of the most wanted fugitives in the world, you require a very complex and expert intelligence operation and it's very costly and requires a good organization and so forth," added Rajak.Questions about who knew, for how long and who gave him up, will linger. But, says James Lyon, the Serbian government should still be congratulated."I think what's important to say is that Serbia got him. That's the first and most important thing," he said. "How they did, why they did it is not important."
The Serbian government has said it is preparing to extradite Karadzic to The Hague. He faces charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his part in the Bosnian war of the 1990s. He and his one-time military commander, Ratko Mladic are specifically linked to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed and to the nearly four-year-long siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, in which it is estimated that more than 10,000 people were killed.Mladic remains at large and James Lyon says there must be continued pressure for his arrest.
"Over the years Serbia has always said, there are no war crime indictees in Serbia and yet they keep coughing them up in fits and starts, depending on political expediency," said Lyon. " So, it's very clear - Ratko Mladic is in Serbia, he can be arrested by the Serbian authorities, provided there's the political will. We need to say, let's get it over with. There are only two more left."The second and last fugitive wanted by the international tribunal is Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic.The EU has set the handover of all war crimes suspects as a key condition for any future Serbian membership in the European Union.
Radovan Karadzic's foes and supporters alike are marveling at what appeared to be his complete metamorphosis during more than a dozen years in hiding as he tried to escape arrest on accusations of war crimes. As Serbs grappled with the repercussions of his capture and his place as a symbol of crimes carried out in their name, they were also left to sort out the two lives of a single man.
The fatigues-wearing leader of the Bosnian Serbs was unrecognizable in a guise that was part guru and part Santa Claus. He was hiding behind an enormous beard, white ponytailed hair topped with an odd black tuft, living a new life so at odds with his myth as to deflect suspicion.
The former psychiatrist worked for years in a clinic in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, practicing alternative medicine, under the name Dragan Dabic. He even lectured on videotape at local community centers, leading an open and active life that would appear to be an extraordinary risk for one of the world's most wanted men.
"For an older person, he had very many interests," said Maja Djelic, 28, a Belgrade resident who, like Karadzic, wrote for the magazine Healthy Life. She said they also met for coffee and conversations, about acupuncture and the Internet, at a café called Biblioteka in central Belgrade. Karadzic, she recalled, was very interested in improving his Web site.
"He said, when being introduced, 'My name is Dr. Dabic, but call me David,"' she said, adding that the two had met last November. During an interview Tuesday, Djelic referred to him as Dr. David, not Karadzic.
"He was really friendly and really open and had a way of speaking with people," Djelic said. She said that he did not speak with a Bosnian accent and seemed like a valuable member of the small alternative-medicine community here, not someone who could have been the force behind the notorious Srebrenica massacre and the deadly siege of Sarajevo.
"I still don't believe it's the same person," she said, although the editor in chief of the magazine confirmed in interviews with numerous news outlets that Karadzic, under his assumed identity, had written for Healthy Life.
Despite the apparent completeness of his disguise, it was not publicly known whether, as war crimes prosecutors have often alleged, the Serbian government had long known Karadzic's location and was waiting only for a convenient moment to apprehend him.
The arrest - nearly 13 years to the day after his indictment in connection with the massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica - seemed aimed at strengthening Serbian ties to the European Union. A condition for Serbia's EU membership remains the capture of Karadzic's wartime ally, General Ratko Mladic, who is also being sought for trial in The Hague on genocide charges.
As for Karadzic, Dejan Anastasijevic, a reporter who specialized in war crimes and followed his case closely for Vreme, a political weekly in Belgrade, said that judging by the photograph at the news conference he would not have recognized Karadzic, even if he had walked right by him. "Maybe if I sat opposite at the table and spoke to him for a while," he said. "If I passed him on the street, I don't think I would have looked twice."
A wartime friend of Karadzic's who did not want to be identified, to avoid the attention of prosecutors, said the change in Karadzic had been so complete, "you could only recognize him if you know him by the sound of his voice." Yet, in the end, it was not enough to keep Karadzic out of the grasp of the authorities here.
The friend said he believed that the arrest had been the result of a tip-off but also that recently Karadzic had "made a mistake in communication," though he declined to elaborate further.
To become a new person, officials said, Karadzic used false documents and false identities. Most recently he lived in New Belgrade, a working-class neighborhood of the capital that is known as a stronghold of Serbia's far-right Radical Party.
"How convincing his false identity was, we can tell you that he has been freely walking in the city," Serbia's war crimes prosecutor, Vladimir Vukcevic, said Tuesday. "Even the people he rented a flat from were unaware of who he was."
Last week EU peacekeepers, with the support of the local police, raided the Sarajevo apartment of Ljiljana Karadzic, the former politician's wife. They seized documents and materials as clues for their search. In recent weeks, homes of other known supporters of Karadzic were also searched.
On Monday, police officers began to follow Karadzic for several hours from midafternoon until the evening. Then they swooped.
The exact location of Karadzic's arrest was not disclosed, but government officials said he was apprehended by the Serbian secret police "as he traveled from one location to the other" not far from Belgrade.
Graham Bowley reported from New York. Marlise Simons contributed reporting from The Hague and Dan Bilefsky from Belgrade.
It was the unmistakable tones of the traditional gusle that first drew Radovan Karadzic into the Madhouse.
In his assumed identity as the bearded New Age healer Dragan Dabic, he became a regular at the little pub on the high-rise estate where he was soon giving virtuoso performances on the lute-like instrument, playing beneath a portrait of himself hung above the bar. One night he even played a folk song about “brother Radovan” hiding in his cave without betraying his real identity.
The performances were part of an extraordinary double life that included four fake grandchildren and a devoted woman companion.
The disguise was finally dropped yesterday when Dr Karadzic had a haircut and shave and announced that he would defend himself in The Hague, where he faces eleven charges of war crimes, including two of genocide. Although he plans to appeal against extradition tomorrow, sources at the tribunal expect him to arrive in the Netherlands early next week.
Serbia is in a frenzy of speculation about whether his fellow fugitive, the former General Ratko Mladic, will be arrested soon in response to a clear change of political direction from the two-week-old pro-EU Government that wants to put the country’s war-scarred past behind it.
Dr Karadzic spent the final year of his freedom living alone in an anonymous third-floor flat on an estate of dozens of identical multi-storey blocks in New Belgrade. He decorated the rented apartment with pictures of four fictional grandsons wearing LA Lakers T-shirts, to support his cover story of a family in the US, and was seen regularly at alternative health events with a mysterious brunette known only as Mila.
“She followed him to every lecture and behaved just like his wife,” said Tanja Jovanovic, who helped to organise some of the events. “We just knew her as Mila. If there was no space for her in the car , he would say that there was no way he would travel without her.”
Dr Karadzic’s wife Ljiljana and their children have been banned for several years from leaving Bosnia under measures meant to choke off his support network.
It became clear yesterday that Dr Karadzic had high-level help to evade justice for 13 years after the atrocities of the Balkans wars, when he led the Bosnian Serbs. He obtained a passport in 1998 in the name of a real person who died in 1993 and used it to travel at least twice to Russia for courses on alternative medicine.
In the Madhouse pub just around the corner from his flat, where he enjoyed Serbian red wine and plum brandy, the owner Tomas Kovijanic was proudly turning down cash offers for the gusle played by Dr Karadzic on raucous nights of nationalist folksinging. “How can I sell a Stradivarius?” Mr Kovijanic, 54, said.
“One night he was passing by the pub and he heard this gusle. He came in and stayed all night until sunrise. He drank sljivovica [plum brandy]. Then whenever he wanted to play gusle he came here.”
Mr Kovijanic said that “Dr Dabic” did not talk much about himself, except that he lived alone and was practising alternative medecine. Even though a photograph of Dr Karadzic adorns the bar, no one suspected the truth, the owner said.
“One night while they were playing gusles, he made a speech to the young people here. He said, ‘My children, listen to me. You are the future of Serbia. Please take good care of the gusle and keep alive the traditional epic poetry of our country, and make sure it gets communicated to the next generation. This is the only thing that can save Serbia’.”
Raso Vucinic, 26, a student politician who is a councillor for the nationalist Radical Party, said he could not believe that he had shared folksinging sessions with his hero.
“If I knew, I would have asked if I could have hidden him in my village in Montenegro,” Mr Vucinic said. “Everyone is sure that Radovan Karadzic is innocent and he was just defending the Serbian people. We live for the day when he is coming back to sit in this bar to drink red wine and play the Serbian gusle.”
One night, Mr Vucinic said, Dr Karadzic was playing the stringed instrument when someone suggested a modern folk song about the fugitive. He played along, accompanied by lyrics about “Brother Radovan” hiding in his cave, without giving away his real identity.
A woman in a nearby shop said: “He was always buying large quantities of low-fat yoghurt and lots of bottled water, as well as the daily newspaper. One day a little girl asked him if he was Santa Claus. He just smiled and patted her on the head.”
Jovana Vitas, 35, who lives in the flat opposite Dr Karadzic’s, said that he had moved in about a year ago. “He was always carrying a bundle — lots of newspapers and water bottles — and he was a bit clumsy, always dropping things,” said Ms Vitas, a teacher and writer. “He seemed nice and polite and compared to the rest of the people in the building he seemed more educated.”
Rumours were rife yesterday about how Dr Karadzic finally came to be captured on the No 73 bus, with one suggestion that the key information came from Mr Mladic, who is still at large. Serb security sources dismissed the theory that the arrest was part of a deal to allow Mr Mladic to remain on the run until The Hague tribunal was wound up in 2010 or 2011.
Dr Karadzic’s decision to defend himself raised the spectre of a drawn-out trial resembling that of his mentor, the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who died in his cell in 2006 before a verdict could be reached.
For 11 years Europe’s most wanted man has evaded capture, moving from one mountain hideout to another.
SAS and Nato troops have repeatedly found that the loyalty of those Bosnian Serbs shielding Radovan Karadzic have thwarted their attempts to arrest him.
Ever since he went into hiding in 1996 after being forced to stand down as leader of the Bosnian Serbs, he has been protected by a guard of 80 armed men who were ruthless in their determination to keep him safe.
They were so successful that the psychiatrist, poet and war crimes suspect was able regularly to visit his wife with no danger of being caught. He even managed to publish a book, Miraculous Chronicles of the Night, a novel set in 1980s Yugoslavia while on the run.
Moving across the snow covered Vucevo mountain from freezing cabin to churches, there were regular sightings. Sometimes he was spotted brazenly driving a bright orange military Jeep, walking with his wife or setting up a camp in the village of Rudo. In 1999 a Serbian film director who secured an interview with him recalled how he appeared relaxed as he sat drinking wine, welcoming visitors and flicking from one television channel to another or using his computer.
At the turn of the Millennium, his mother said he had gone back to his people, and admitted she would rather shoot him than see him handed over to the Hague.
In an interview with The Times, shortly before he went into hiding, he remained bullish and arrogant.
"If The Hague was a real judicial body I would be ready to go there to testify or do so on television, but it is a political body that has been created to blame the Serbs.”
Born in a stable in Savnik, Montenegro in 1945, Karadzic quickly learned the values of Serbian nationalism during his early years with his poor family. His father, Vuk, was a member of the Chetniks, the remnants of the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, who was wounded in the Second World War in battles against Nazi occupiers and Tito partisans.
His mother, Jovanka, said she brought up her son to be loyal to his family. She said he was a hard worker who helped in the home.
In 1960 he moved to Sarajevo and studied medicine to become a psychologist at a city hospital.
It was while in the city that he met his wife, Ljiljana, and, in the early 1970’s began writing poetry. It was then that he fell under the spell of Dobrica Cosic, a Serb nationalist writer who encouraged him to pursue his fervent belief in a greater Serbia by becoming a politician.
Sentenced in 1985 to three years imprisonment for embezzlement and fraud, a sentence he served only briefly, he continued to work as a psychiatrist until embarking on his political career just before the war in Bosnia began.
After a brief spell with the Green Party, he played an important role in setting up the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), created in 1990 in an attempt to halt the rise of the Croat parties in Bosnia.
Nearly two years later, as Bosnia-Hercegovina was recognised as an independent state, he declared himself the leader of the new Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, with Sarajevo as its capital. The move triggered one of the bloodiest wars in modern Europe.
His masterplan to “ethnically cleanse” the Muslims of Bosnia saw him set up the Omarska detention camp. One survivor of that camp, Rezak Hukanovic, described in his book, The Tenth Circle of Hell the torments suffered by the inmates of that camp: “Thirst, hunger, gang rapes, exhaustion, skulls shattered, sexual organs torn out, stomachs ripped open by the soldier assassins of Radovan Karadzic.”
As the leader of the SDS and President of the Bosnian Serb Administration during the war, Karadzic was in a superior position to the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, a fellow indictee, and every member of the wartime Bosnian Serb Government. It was for that reason that he became the UN’s most wanted war crimes suspect.
Among the 16 counts on Karadzic’s indictment for genocide and crimes against humanity are the massacre of at least 6,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in July 1995, the shelling of Sarajevo, and the use of 284 UN peacekeepers as human shields in May and June 1995.
In July 1996 he stepped down as president of the SDS as the West stepped up pressure against the republic of Bosnia and Hercegovina, renamed the Republika Srpska.
Radovan Karadzic never imagined that he would one day be arrested for war crimes when, in spring 1992, he issued a darkly prophetic warning to Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia's first president.
“Do not think that you will not lead Bosnia-Herzegovina into hell, and do not think that you will not perhaps lead the Muslim people into annihilation, if there is war,” he warned Izetbegovic, who was seeking to lead Bosnia towards independence from the Serb-dominated rump of former Yugoslavia.
Bosnia did descend into hell, in more than three years of war that had been long prepared by Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in the Serbian capital Belgrade, and by Dr Karadzic himself at his headquarters in Pale, the mountain village overlooking Sarajevo.
Under the eyes of the world’s media Dr Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb leadership oversaw the destruction of Sarajevo, a once cosmopolitan, sophisticated European capital. Ringed by Serb snipers and artillery, it was turned into a giant shooting gallery in pursuit of the maniacal dream of an ethnically-pure ‘Greater Serbia’.
Outside the capital, in tiny villages and Ottoman-era cities such as Visegrad, Foca and Banja Luka, Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats were killed and deported en masse as their Serb neighbours turned on them with unimaginable ferocity.
Ironically, Radovan Karadzic, architect of Serbian ethnic cleansing, was not born either in Bosnia or Serbia but in Savnik, Montenegro, in June 1945.
He moved to Sarajevo after qualifying as a psychiatrist and was attached to Sarajevo’s football team. He also treated private patients. When one young couple went to see him for advice on their troubled marriage he advised the husband to beat his wife more often.
With his bouffant hair and hyperbolic manner, Karadzic, like many Balkan leaders, also fancied himself as a poet. Four volumes of his mordant verses were published, gloomy harbingers of the wars to come:
I hear misfortune walking
Vacant entourages passing through the city
Units of armed white poplars
Marching through the skies
Despite his literary pretensions, Karadzic was not accepted by Sarajevo's cultural elite, who looked down on the immigrants from the mountains of Montenegro. For this he would wreak a terrible revenge.
Loud, disheveled, an inveterate gambler, the Bosnian Serb leader saw himself as a statesman who would reshape Balkan history in his own dark and brutal vision. Like his mentor Milosevic, Karadzic loved nothing more than the attentions of the world’s statesman, as he traveled between Pale and five star hotels in Geneva.
There he was feted as a power-broker while he drew up maps of Sarajevo. The city, he proclaimed, would be partitioned into Serb and Muslim sections, divided by a wall like a modern-day Berlin, where checkpoints would control access. It is a mark of the poverty of the international community’s response to the Yugoslav wars that such schemes could be seriously considered.
Unlike Milosevic, who cynically exploited Serbian nationalism and the fears of the Serbs that they would be stranded outside the motherland after the break-up of Yugoslavia, Karadzic actually believed in the Greater Serbia project that aimed to unite the Serbs of Serbia proper into one state with their brethren in Bosnia and Croatia.
In this he drew on the traditions of Serbian nationalism that reached back to the nineteenth century, and which were revived in the Second World War by the royalist ‘Chetnik’ guerillas, who also fought a civil war with Tito’s multi-national Communist partisans. Karadzic's own father was a Chetnik.
The signing of the November 1995 Dayton peace accords, that brought peace to Bosnia, marked the end of Karadzic’s role.
Indicted in July 1995 by the UN war crimes tribunal, he went on the run. Supported by a network that stretched from Bosnia to Belgrade, he lived underground for years, surrounded by bodyguards, mocking the west’s efforts to capture him. He even wrote a play, ‘Situation’, which mocked the west’s efforts to arrest him, and which was staged in Belgrade.
Secure in his hide-outs Karadzic could look back on the war years with satisfaction. For the Dayton accords were also, arguably, his greatest triumph. The ethnically-pure statelet of the Bosnian Serb Republic over which he presided was institutionalised in the agreement which divided Bosnia into two parts: a Croat-Muslim Federation, and Bosnian Serb equivalent.
In Bosnian cities such as Banja Luka, the epicentre of ethnic cleansing in the early 1990s, he is still regarded with awe and reverence. Stall-holders run a thriving trade in key-rings and T-shirts emblazoned with his image, and that of his military commander General Ratko Mladic.
Radovan Karadzic is no longer with his supporters, and it is likely to be many years, if ever, before he sees Banja Luka again. But Mladic, also charged with genocide for the Srebrenica massacre, remains at large, possibly in Serbia proper. Only when he too is captured can, Serbia, the former Yugoslavia, indeed all of Europe begin to close the darkest chapter in their modern history.
Adam LeBor is the author of ‘Complicity With Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide’.
1918 Austria-Hungary collapses. Bosnia-Herzegovina becomes part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
1941 Bosnia annexed by Hitler, and becomes part of the Croatian state, a puppet regime to the Nazi leader. Radovan Karadzic's father, Vuk, fights with the remnants of the royal army against the Nazis and also against Tito's Communist partisans.
1945 Liberation from Nazis. Bosnia becomes part of the Yugoslav Socialist Federation, a Communist state led by Tito.
1991 Soviet Union collapses. Nationalists win multi-party elections and form a government in Yugoslavia. Immediate divisions become clear, as Serb nationalists demand that Yugoslavia is led by Belgrade, Croatian nationalists call for independent state while Bosnian Muslims call for independent Bosnia.
1992 In a referendum, Bosnia votes for independence from former Yugoslavia. Bosnian Serb nationalists declare war, take control of more than 50 per cent of the country, and set about driving out Muslim and Croat ethnic groups
1992 Dr Karadzic's Bosnian Serb forces place Muslim-majority city of Sarajevo under siege. For 22 months Serb artillery and snipers rain fire on Sarajevo from hills surrounding the city, and 12,000 people killed with numerous atrocities reported.
1993 As full-scale civil war erupts. UN safe havens for Bosnian Muslim civilians created including Sarajevo, Srebrenica and Gorazde.
1995 Bosnian Serb forces overrun safe-haven of Srebrenica, led by General Ratko Mladic. 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys separated from their families and massacred.
1995 Nato launches air-strikes on Serb positions. Dayton peace accord signed, carving Bosnia up into distinct entities: one for Bosnian Muslims and Croats and one for Serbs.
1996 Last known sighting of Dr Karadzic, in the eastern Bosnian town of Han Pijesak.
1999 Following reports of atrocities and ethnic cleansing, Nato bombs Yugoslavia in Operation Allied Force, from March 24 to June 10, 1999. It is only the second major combat operation in Nato's history.
August 2001 Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic found guilty of genocide over Srebrenica massacres. Sentenced for 46 years.
December 2001 Amid growing international pressure, the SDS - the main Serbian nationalist party - votes to expel Dr Karadzic and all other war crimes suspects. His whereabouts are not known.
2006 International Court of Justice in The Hague begins hearings in genocide case brought by Bosnia against Serbia.
2007 Court rules that Srebrenica massacre in 1995 constituted genocide but that Serbia as a whole does not have direct responsibility.
June 2008 Stojan Zupljanin, former Bosnian Serb police chief, arrested and handed over to The Hague for war crimes trial.
July 2008 Dr Karadzic arrested in Belgrade after being found disguised as a New Age doctor.
