Eurasia Press & News
(Reuters) – War crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic arrived in the Netherlands on Wednesday to face trial at The Hague on charges of genocide for his actions in the 1992-95 Bosnia war.
Here are some key facts about Karadzic:
* Karadzic was born on June 19, 1945 in a 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 World War Two.
* He became a professional psychiatrist specializing in neurosis and depression and an amateur poet whose works had a fantastical, morbid tinge.
* On the eve of war in 1992, Karadzic warned against plans to declare Bosnia a sovereign state, saying it would perhaps “make the Muslim people disappear, because the Muslims cannot defend themselves if there is war”.
* He was indicted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague in July 1995 for authorizing 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 U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.
* Serbia announced on July 21 that Karadzic had been arrested. Serbian officials said he had been living for several years under an assumed name in Belgrade, posing as an alternative healer, and showed photographs of him unrecognizable behind long hair, thick glasses and a beard. He had been on the run since 1997, two years after NATO intervention ended the war, when he lost power and went underground.
