BELGRADE, SERBIA — Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused architect of a campaign of ethnic mass murder and a war crimes fugitive for more than a decade, was captured Monday by Serbian security forces, officials said.
Indicted on multiple charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, Karadzic for years eluded NATO forces and myriad investigators seeking to bring him to justice. He served as president of the self-declared Bosnian Serb Republic and came to symbolize the repression of an entire population of Bosnian Muslims.
Karadzic, now 63, is accused, among other crimes, of overseeing the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, the largest atrocity in post-World War II Europe.
The regime he led is accused of enacting a policy that came to be known as ethnic cleansing -- driving Muslim civilians from their homes, torching the land, killing and raping those who resisted. An estimated 200,000 people on all sides of the conflict died.
In addition to genocide, Karadzic faces charges of extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts and other crimes against Muslim, Croat and other non-Serb Bosnian civilians. The indictment alleges that men acting under his orders set up detention camps where women were imprisoned and raped, men beaten and starved.
He was indicted by the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1995, as the three-year Bosnian war came to an end, and quickly dropped from public sight. With his arrest, he is likely to be dispatched to the court in The Hague within days.
Serbia gave protection to Karadzic while the war's mastermind, Slobodan Milosevic, ruled in Belgrade, the capital. But the country is moving closer to the West and has been under pressure to cooperate with the tribunal in the Netherlands. It was the office of Serbia's pro-West president, Boris Tadic, eager to curry European favor, that announced Karadzic's arrest.
"We all thought this was impossible," Natasa Kandic, a prominent human rights activist who documented many of the war's atrocities, said late Monday.
"This is a historic day," said Richard Holbrooke, the American diplomat who brokered the so-called Dayton accords that ended the war.
Karadzic, a psychiatrist by profession easily recognizable by his mop of gray-streaked hair, was a hero to many Serbs who believed he was fighting to defend them from forces that would erode Serbian dominance.
Flamboyant and egotistical, he wrapped himself in the flag and Orthodox Christianity, stoking his people's prejudices and fears. A mythology grew up around him, fed by his ability to elude capture. There were numerous rumors of where and how he was hiding -- ensconced, perhaps, in a stone-walled monastery; dressed, people would say, as a monk or a woman.
Fears of a backlash from Serbian nationalists who revered Karadzic haunted those who might have arrested him long ago, including the thousands of troops from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who patrolled postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Late Monday and early today, as news of Karadzic's arrest spread, Serbian police in riot gear deployed in parts of Belgrade -- in main squares, outside the U.S. Embassy and at the courthouse where he was rumored to be detained.
Nationalists shouting slogans in support of Karadzic and hurling insults at police and Tadic cruised in cars through downtown. No violence was reported. Police arrested several protesters.
It was not clear, however, that the anger would rise to the level seen earlier this year when the ethnic Albanian province of Kosovo seceded from Serbia. Many Serbs regarded Karadzic as a remnant of their nation's former status as a pariah unable to gain full integration into Europe, and they were glad to be rid of him.
Reflecting the domestic sensitivity of the arrest, few details were released Monday on where and how Karadzic was found in Belgrade. He was "located and arrested," Tadic's office said, "in an operation by Serbian security forces." The Interior Ministry, dominated by old-regime holdouts, quickly issued a statement denying involvement.
In Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, where the worst of the fighting raged, people took to the streets in celebration late Monday and early today. Many saw a long overdue justice in the detention of Karadzic.
Under Karadzic's explicit direction, from the nearby mountain village of Pale, Sarajevo was repeatedly shelled and targeted by Serbian snipers. A vibrant, ethnically diverse city that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, it became a devastated ruin, a shadow of itself that has only recently begun to recover.
In The Hague, where Karadzic topped the most-wanted list, the tribunal praised the arrest as a milestone in international law.
