SERBIA:UN indictment calls crimes "truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history", writes Dan McLaughlin
Last night's capture of Radovan Karadzic ends an extraordinary decade on the run, and promises a trial for war crimes and genocide that could deliver long-awaited justice for the victims of his alleged atrocities.
The worst crimes on his United Nations indictment are the 43-month siege of Sarajevo in which some 10,000 civilians were killed, and the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the 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 a million non-Serbs were driven from their homes in 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 programme of terror that left the international community both 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 United Nations, peacemaking efforts exasperated foreign negotiators.
He was a close ally of late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, 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.
Karadzic's family found themselves outcasts in communist post-war Yugoslavia, and they moved to the northwestern Montenegrin town of Niksic near the Bosnian border.
In 1964 Karadzic went to Sarajevo to study medicine and later served a year in prison for fraud, although he claimed that his conviction was due to his anti-communist activities.
It was not until 1990 that 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 well advanced by the time the March 1992 referendum on Bosnian independence - boycotted by Serbs - gave him the 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 Montenegro.
He evaded numerous Nato and later European Union peacekeeping force raids to catch him despite a €5 million-dollar (€3.9 million euro) reward that the US State Department offered for information leading to his arrest.
With Nato-led peacekeepers under orders to arrest him on sight, associates said he sometimes traveled in ambulances with flashing lights to zip through NATO checkpoints undetected to spend time with his wife, Ljiljana Zelen-Karadzic; daughter, Sonja; and son, Aleksandar Sasa, in Pale, the wartime Bosnian-Serb capital.
His wife surprised the public in July 2005 when she appealed to her husband to come out of hiding and surrender "for the sake of your family". Within a week, his son said publicly that he believed everyone responsible for war crimes must face justice, "even if it is my own father".
Mr Karadzic reportedly also visited his sick mother in Montenegro and in 2002 went to Budva on the republic's Adriatic coast.
Those in his inner circle even claimed that a disguised Karadzic once sneaked into Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital his troops shelled relentlessly for three years, and had coffee with his friends in a downtown cafe.
It was not immediately clear where he was captured. His destination seems certain, however: the UN court that accuses him of crimes at Srebrenica that his indictment calls "truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history".
Factfile: Radovan Karadzic
Karadzic was born on June 19th, 1945 in a tiny hamlet in the mountains of Montenegro and raised in poverty by parents who despised the communist rule of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito. His father was a Serb nationalist fighter wounded by Tito's partisans at the close of the second World War.
He became a professional psychiatrist specialising in neurosis and depression and an amateur poet whose works had a fantastical, morbid tinge. His soft, smiling face and shaggy mane of grey hair gave him a deceptive credibility at first as Bosnian Serb leader. But the world soon changed its opinion.
On the eve of war in 1992, Karadzic warned against plans to declare Bosnia a sovereign state. It would lead the country into hell and perhaps "make the Muslim people disappear, because the Muslims cannot defend themselves if there is war", he said.
He was indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in July 1995 for authorising the shooting of civilians during the 43-month siege of Sarajevo. He was indicted for genocide a second time four months later for orchestrating the slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim men after Mladic's forces seized the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.
In 1997, two years after NATO intervention ended the war, he lost power, went underground and became the quarry in a lengthy manhunt.
To this day, loyalists see him as saviour and a hero hounded by foreign powers blind
to mortal dangers Serbdom faced at the hands of Bosnia's Muslims. His face is printed on calendars and T-shirts.
His books sell in church bookshops.
There were regular reported "sightings" of Karadzic over the years, none confirmed. He was supposedly seen in April 2005 lunching with his wife, undisguised, and allegedly attended his mother's funeral in Niksic, Montenegro disguised as a priest a month later.
Excerpts from the 1995 UN war crimes tribunal indictment charging Radovan Karadzic and his wartime military commander, Ratko Mladic, with genocide
"Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, individually and in concert with others, planned, instigated, ordered or otherwise aided and abetted in the planning, preparation or execution of unlawful attacks against the civilian population and individual civilians with weapons such as mortars, rockets and artillery."
"They are criminally responsible for the unlawful confinement, murder, rape, sexual assault, torture, beating, robbery and inhumane treatment of civilians