The war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, has finally been captured.

 

Karadzic, who, like Slobodan Milosevic, former president of Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, another Serbian war criminal who died while on trial at The Hague, supported Milosevic and Serbia's illegal invasions of the sovereign republics of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the genocide and crimes against humanity that Serbs perpetrated to convert a mythical Greater Serbia into reality.  The final result: Serbia was defeated and was reduced to a shadow of its former delusional self: a small, land-locked country with an appalling recent history.

 

From The Guardian: "Europe's most wanted man, the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, was living and working freely in the Serbian capital before his arrest, officials said today.

"Heavily disguised with a long white beard and white hair, Karadzic, who was wanted for genocide and other war crimes, was seized as he travelled near Belgrade, said Rsim Ljajic, the Serbian minister for relations with the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

"Ljajic denied Serbian officials had known where Karadzic was and said the arrest was "at a time of their choosing". No one was injured during the operation. There have been unconfirmed reports that the arrest took place on a bus.

"The minister said Karadzic was found by members of a team who had been trailing people believed to be helping General Ratko Mladic, Karadzic's former military commander, who is also wanted over allegations of war crimes.

"Karadzic, who spent 12 years on the run, has been indicted for the Srebrenica massacre and the Sarajevo siege, among other war crimes.

"The Serbian war crimes prosecutor said a judge had ordered Karadzic's transfer to the UN war crimes court in The Hague. Karadzic has three days to appeal against any decision to extradite him to the Netherlands. Karadzic's lawyer, Sveta Vujacic, said he would appeal.

"Among the 37 detainees Karadzic is likely to encounter in The Hague is Momcilo Krajisnik, a former speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament when Karadzic was president. He is appealing against a 27-year sentence for mass murder and persecution.

"He also will meet former enemies such as Rasim Delic, a Bosnian Muslim general on trial for murder, cruel treatment and rape of Bosnian Serbs and Croats.

"Serbian nationalists reacted angrily to the arrest. Tomislav Nikolic, the Radical party leader, said they would use "all democratic means" to oust the newly formed Serbian government by the end of the year. Karadzic was not a war criminal, but a "Serbian myth and a legend", he said.

"The arrest came on the eve of a European foreign ministers' meeting about Serbia's ties with the EU, which has made action against Karadzic and Mladic a condition of membership. It came days after the formation of a pro-western coalition government in Serbia that has pledged to pursue EU accession.

"In the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, there were celebrations in the street when the news broke, and cars drove through the city centre honking their horns.

" 'He deserves a lifetime in prison for the atrocities he committed with the help of Serbia and Montenegro,' said Sabaheta Fejzic, a Srebrenica survivor.

"Karadzic faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity inflicted on Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat and other non-Serb civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-95 war, when he was president of the breakaway Republika Srpska.

"The charges include the murder of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, after the supposedly UN-protected enclave fell to Bosnian Serb forces. The former psychiatrist and aspiring poet is also charged with running death camps for non-Serbs, and the shelling and sniping on civilians in Sarajevo, in a siege that lasted more than three years."

Karadzic, the antithesis of the banality of evil, was a Serbian fanatic and sociopath, who believed, like Stalin, that one death was a tragedy, a miliion, a statistic, and chalked up his statistics in service to a Greater Serbia.

If Ratko Mladic is captured and placed on trial at The Hague like Radovan Karadzic, perhaps the countless thousands of Muslims, Croats, and other non-Serbs who were tortured and killed can finally rest in peace.