Radovan Karadzic Leaves a Legacy of Cruelty

That he was also a common crook who served 11 months in prison for fraud in 1984 was not part of this carefully crafted public persona.

Throughout the war, Karadzic maintained this aura of a Bosnian Serb spiritual leader, who spoke in nationalist clichés and platitudes about the plight of his nation fighting for ethnic survival, a civilizational struggle between Serbs' Orthodox Christianity and Bosniaks' Islam.

He left the dirty work of putting this ideology of ethnic purity and supremacy into actual practice - genocide and ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks - to his military chief, Ratko Mladic.

But it was Karadzic's vision of Serbian Bosnia that Mladic and other army men implemented.

It was on Karadzic's orders that Sarajevo was besieged, that Srebrenica was overrun and all its Bosniak boys and men slaughtered, that the towns of Bratunac, Foca, Kljuc, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica and Zvornik and many, many more, were ethnically cleansed of non-Serbs.

As the war ended in 1995 with the Dayton Peace Accords that froze the conflict in place, de facto awarding Bosnian Serbs all territorial gains they had amassed through their campaign of terror and ethnic cleansing, Karadzic disappeared.

For 12 years he was in hiding from international justice, aided by a network of supporters in Montenegro, Serbia, Republika Srpska and likely elsewhere.

Karadzic's centrality to war crimes in Bosnia faded as the Tribunal took on other high-profile cases, the chief among them the case of Slobodan Milosevic.

By the time Karadzic's case hit the docket in The Hague, the immediacy and urgency of international justice were no longer there.

The Milosevic trial spectacularly failed with his death in custody in 2006. The farce that was the...

Continue reading on: