Profile: Radovan Karadzic, Bosnian war mastermind with many faces

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been convicted with 40 years of imprisonment at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague on Thursday.

From a small village in Montenegro to wartime leader of the Bosnian Serbs, to years in disguise, to prison in The Hague, Radovan Karadzic is a man with several faces.

Now 70-year-old Karadzic was born on June 19, 1945, in Petnjica, a village in northwestern Montenegro, part of the Savnik municipality. His father was a member of the Chetniks, the Serbs who during World War II fought both the Nazis and former Yugoslav leader Tito's Partisans.

In 1960 Karadzic moved to Sarajevo to continue his education at the high school of medical studies and later at the medical school of the Sarajevo University, with psychiatry as specialization. In Sarajevo he also met his wife, Ljiljana, a doctor. And in addition, as a student he started to write poetry and continued to do so.

After Karadzic graduated, he began working, mostly in the fields of psychiatry in hospitals and clinics. Amid the growing tensions in former Yugoslavia his political career started, first as member of the Green Party and in 1990 he co-founded the Serbian Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SDS), a response to the rise of ethnic nationalism.

The party aimed at unifying the Bosnian Serb community. Karadzic became president of the party in July 1990 and after Bosnia and Herzegovina gained recognition as an independent state in 1992, he became president of the self-declared Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, later renamed to Republika Srpska.

With the support of then Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic, Karadzic started, as supreme commander of the armed forces, a campaign to take control of parts of Bosnia and to fight against the Bosniaks and Croats in Bosnia.

"This war is the continuation of World War II," he said in an interview with Pogledi, a Serbia-based magazine devoted to politics and history, on Dec. 11, 1992.

"The same criminals from the same criminal hordes are, once again, exterminating the same Serb families in the very same villages; and they are all lined up under the same banner, using exactly the same fascist rhetoric," he said.

Karadzic led the Bosnian Serbs from the beginning until the end of the bloody, vicious and bitter inter-ethnic Bosnian War, during which crimes were committed on a large scale.

Karadzic was seen as the mastermind behind the conflicts.

On July 25 and again on Nov. 16, 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague, indicted Karadzic, jointly with Mladic, for genocide, crimes against humanity and other atrocities.

By the end of 1995 the war ended with the Dayton Accords, the peace agreement that split Bosnia and Herzegovina into two autonomous sections, a Croat-Bosniak entity and a Serb entity, the Republika Srpska.

The accords included that no one indicted for war crimes could participate in the next elections and as the West threatened with sanctions against Republika Srpska, Karadzic was forced to step down as president of the SDS.

In 1997 Karadzic went into hiding and his ability to evade capture made him even more popular among some nationalist Serbs. How could he hide for so long? Because of loyal friends in Serbia or did he receive protection from the United States as part of a deal with Dayton's chief architect, U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke?

At the start of his trial, Karadzic said that Holbrooke, who has always denied the existence of a deal, had promised him immunity from prosecution in exchange for quitting the political scene.

Since 1999 Karadzic had been in disguise, as an energy healer, using the fake name D.D. David, or Dragan Dabic, or Dr. Dragan David Dabic. He lectured in front of hundreds of people in Belgrade on alternative medicines and spirituality, contributed to a health magazine and he even had his own website.

With a long grey beard, his hair in a ponytail and thick glasses it was difficult to recognize Dabic as Karadzic and on the other hand nobody seemed curious about the background of Dabic. Despite his status as wanted war crimes suspect he could live at large for thirteen years.

On July 21, 2008, after growing international pressure on the Serbian authorities this period came to an end with his arrest in Belgrade. He was transferred into ICTY custody in The Hague on July 30, appeared in court for the first time on July 31 that year and his trial started on Oct. 26, 2009.

Karadzic claimed there was a conspiracy against him and he refused to enter a plea and therefore the court entered a plea of not guilty on his behalf to all 11 charges. Later he filed a motion to challenge the legal validity and legitimacy of the Tribunal. The prosecution accused him of deliberately delaying the trial as he boycotted the initial hearings.

Karadzic had a team of legal counselors with him, but he did his defense mainly by himself.

On Oct. 16, 2012 he started his case by reading out his opening statement, sitting down quietly in his blue suit with blue and white striped tie.

"Good morning, I am a psychiatrist, a literary man. Instead of being accused I should be rewarded for the good things I did," Karadzic said.

"I stopped our army many times when we were close to victory, looking for peace," Karadzic added. "I accepted four out of five peace proposals. In addition, I personally supervised humanitarian aid. Everybody who knows me knows I am not an autocrat, I am not aggressive, I am not intolerant. On the contrary, I am a mild man, a tolerant man with great capacity to understand others."

Karadzic advocated he was against the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina in a Serb, Muslim and Croat part and that he was "pushed into a corner" by other parties.

"All the time we defended ourselves," he said. "We had control over 60 percent of Bosnia. I knew it would be crazy to get more."

"I trusted the international community and often attacked our officers," Karadzic said regarding allegedly committed war crimes by the Bosnian Serb Army.

"I tended to believe the rumors, the lies and the propaganda, although I knew their families were killed. I tended to accuse them, mostly not correct. The truth is on our side," he said.

Two years later, by the end of September 2014, the closing arguments started in The Hague.

"Hundreds of witnesses and pieces of evidence confirmed the policy of ethnic cleansing, in which Karadzic was a driving force," prosecutor Alan Tieger told the court.

The prosecution called for life in prison for Karadzic.

According to the prosecutor, Karadzic even has "bragged about all the steps that he took to forcibly expel non-Serbs from Bosnia in order to establish an ethnically pure Serbian state".

Karadzic denied the ethnic cleansing.

"There is no example of a case like that," he said. "I only care for the truth, and the truth will set me free of all responsibility, except the moral responsibility, because I feel sad for everyone." Endit