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.
