Serb leader Karadzic held after more than a decade on the run

RADOVAN Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect and one of the world's most wanted men, was arrested in Serbia last night after more than a decade in hiding.

Karadzic, 63, is accused of masterminding mass killings that the UN war crimes tribunal described as "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history".

He was arrested in a sweep by Serbian security forces, the office of president Boris Tadic confirmed. A spokesman said Karadzic has been taken before the investigative judge of Serbia's war crimes court.

The fugitive's wife, Ljiljana, speaking from her home in Karadzic's former stronghold, Pale, near Sarajevo said her daughter Sonja had called her before midnight.

"As the phone rang, I knew something was wrong. I'm shocked. Confused. At least now we know he is alive," she said, declining further comment.

Karadzic is accused of organising the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica and other atrocities during the Bosnian war.

He was indicted on genocide charges in 1995 by the tribunal, and topped its most-wanted list for more than a decade, allegedly resorting to elaborate disguises to elude authorities.

Serbia has been under heavy pressure from the European Union to turn over suspects to the international tribunal.

If Karadzic is extradited to the tribunal in The Hague, he would be the 44th Serb suspect sent for trial. The others include former president Slobodan Milosevic, who was ousted in 2000 and died in 2006 while on trial on war crimes charges.

"This is a very important day for the victims who have waited for this arrest for over a decade," Serge Brammertz, the tribunal's head prosecutor, said.

Karadzic has been a fugitive since he was indicted in July 1995. Charges against him include genocide, murder, inhumane acts, and other crimes committed during the 1992-95 war.

His indictment alleges that he, acting together with others, committed the crimes to secure control of areas of Bosnia which had been proclaimed part of the Serbian republic and significantly reducing its non-Serb population.

Karadzic's reported hideouts included Serbian Orthodox Church monasteries and mountain caves in remote eastern Bosnia. Some newspaper reports said he had at times disguised himself as a priest by shaving off his distinctive silver mane and donning a brown cassock.

Born on 19 June, 1945, to a poor family in rural Montenegro, Karadzic trained as a psychiatrist and moved to Sarajevo with his wife and two children in the 1960s. There he also treated members of a city soccer club.

The flamboyant Karadzic entered politics in 1989 as head of the Bosnian Serb Democratic Party.

As leader of Bosnia's Serbs, Karadzic hobnobbed with international negotiators and his interviews were top news items during the three and a half years of the Bosnian war, set off when a government dominated by Muslims and Croats declared independence from Yugoslavia in 1992.

But his life had changed by the time the war ended in late 1995 with an estimated 250,000 people dead and another 1.8 million driven from their homes. He was indicted twice by the UN tribunal on genocide charges stemming from his alleged crimes against Bosnia's Muslims and Croats.

Under the indictment, last amended in May 2000, the UN war crimes tribunal charged Karadzic with 15 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, violating the laws of war and other atrocities, all committed between 1992 and 1996.

BACKGROUND

THE Bosnian civil war was the most brutal chapter in the break-up of Yugoslavia. At the heart of the 1992-1995 conflict was whether Bosnia should stay in the Yugoslav Federation or become independent.

In 1991, following the collapse of communism, nationalists won the first multi-party elections and formed a coalition government despite having conflicting goals: Muslim nationalists wanted a centralised independent Bosnia, Serb nationalists wanted to remain in Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia, Croats wanted to join independent Croatian state.

On 29 February, 1992, the multi-ethnic republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, home to Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Slavs, passed a referendum for independence – but not all Bosnian Serbs agreed.

War broke out and Serbs assumed control of over half the republic. Ethnic cleansing was widespread in the newly-proclaimed Serb Republic but also occurred in Muslim and Croat-controlled areas.

By 1993 the conflict was extremely complex. Muslims and Serbs formed an alliance against Croats in Herzegovina, rival Muslim forces fought each other in north-west Bosnia, Croats and Serbs fought against Muslims in central Bosnia.

When the Dayton peace accord was signed in Paris it created two entities of roughly equal size, one for Bosnian Muslims and Croats, the other for Serbs.