Karadžić, Radovan

Karadžić, Radovan (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 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 Sarajevo's football team, wrote children's poetry books, and composed Serbian folk music. It is believed that Karadžić, like other migrants from the mountains, had trouble finding acceptance in Sarajevo's ethnically mixed society—a circumstance some analysts believe contributed to the deliberate destruction of Sarajevo and other urban areas by mostly rural Serbs during the civil war that began in 1992.

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 in 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 internationally of committing war crimes and “crimes against humanity” because of the atrocities committed against civilian Muslims and Croats. He denied the legitimacy of the proceedings against him. Karadžić harshly attacked the terms of the 1995 Dayton peace accord which ended the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian War, but accepted it under considerable Serbian pressure. In the face of international efforts to drive him from power and bring him before the United Nations war crimes 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. However, reported NATO plans to abduct him and bring him to trial came to nothing. 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”. In January 2001, Biljana Plavsic, a former Bosnian Serb president and ally of Karadžić surrendered herself to the UN tribunal, and she was followed in March by Blagoje Simic, a former mayor of Samac. The arrest and extradition to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague of Slobodan Milošević in June 2001 increased the international pressure on the Bosnian Serb government to arrest war criminals in their jurisdiction, yet as of April 2002, Karadžić remained at large.