Radovan Karadžić

Radovan Karadžić (1945- ), leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the former Yugoslavian republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, self-styled President of the Serb Republic (1992-1996). Karadžić was born in Petnijca, a village near Savnik in the mountains of Montenegro, at that time part of Yugoslavia. At age 15 Karadžić and his family moved to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He graduated in psychiatry from the University of Sarajevo. Karadžić worked in local hospitals, served as the psychiatrist for Red Star Belgrade football team, wrote children's poetry books, and composed Serbian folk music.

In the early 1990s the republics of Yugoslavia moved towards multi-party elections dominated by nationalist parties. Karadžić founded and became president of the Serbian Democratic Party. After winning its proportionate share of the multinational electorate (44 per cent Slavic Muslim; 31 per cent Serb; 17 per cent Croat) in the November 1990 elections, the party participated in a tri-national Bosnian government, under President Alija Izetbegović, leader of a Muslim political party. As Yugoslavia moved towards dissolution during the following year, Karadžić warned that if Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence, Bosnian Serbs would secede and seek union with Serbia. In April 1992 civil war erupted after the republic's electorate voted for independence. By December 1992, Serbs had seized about 70 per cent of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Karadžić was acting as president of the self-proclaimed “Serb Republic”.

Karadžić was among those accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity because of his involvement in atrocities committed against civilian Muslims and Croats, particularly in the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996 and in the establishment of a network of concentration camps in the north-west of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Karadžić harshly attacked the terms of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord which ended the war, but accepted it under considerable Serbian pressure. In the face of international efforts to drive him from power and bring him before the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, he formally resigned from his presidency in June 1996, though retaining substantial political power. In 1997 Karadžić’s allies lost power to moderates at various levels within the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic, culminating in December with elections which deprived his front organization of power in the republic. Nevertheless, Karadžić remained at large.

In August 2000 a US court ordered him in absentia, to pay US$745 million compensation to Bosnian Muslim women who had been raped and tortured in Bosnian Serb “rape camps”. The arrest and extradition to The Hague of the former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević in June 2001 left Karadžić and the military commander of the Bosnian Serbs, Ratko Mladić, as the two most prominent names on the Tribunal’s wanted list. Even so, they remained beyond the reach of their pursuers. However, the election of a new, reformist government in Serbia in 2008, with ambitions to join the European Union, seemed to have left Karadžić exposed, and in July 2008 he was arrested by Serbian security officers in Belgrade. It emerged that he had established a new career as a New Age healer, operating with a false identity. He was transferred to The Hague to face trial at the end of the month.