"Both during and after the war, before he vanished into silence, the Bosnian Serb chief lied blatantly and routinely. He would flatly deny that the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica even took place. As for those infamous camps in north-west Bosnia, according to him they were centres set up at the Muslims' request – sanctuaries, if you like, where kindly Serb soldiers went without in order to hand out food and clothing to weary Muslim refugees.

"But while mouthing these and other preposterous falsehoods, he was never efficient at keeping his big plans secret. Go for independence, he shouted all too revealingly at the Bosnian Muslim deputies, at a session of the Sarajevo parliament in 1991, and your people face extinction. You will go to hell, the same hell currently being visited on Croatia, he added. No lies or dissimulation there. "Don't forget the Serbs always have the extra bullet," he boasted, again quite accurately, in public, around the same time.

"I once asked Plavsic in the early stages of the war, why she, Karadzic and Koljevic were so bent on herding the Muslims out of their towns and into tiny, miserable, crowded enclaves. She got all convivial, confiding that the Bosnian Serbs were doing them a favour. 'They're basically orientals, so they like living on top of each other,' she chattered, as if she had said nothing untoward. How the bland and wily Milosevic would have cringed at such an indiscretion.

"They were all like that, the Bosnian Serb leaders, almost open about what they were up to....

"Karadzic's only available weapon in The Hague, presumably, will be to act on his threat to spill the beans on all the promises, pledges and dirty deals he once claimed that various important international actors at stages of the conflict had offered him. Well, now we shall see if that particular gun is loaded.

"What a prosaic ending to his career – arrest on a bus in Belgrade! It now seems clear that the highest circles in Serbia have known for years where these two men have been hiding out, and that Karadzic's arrest was a purely political decision, not the result of a sudden breakthrough in intelligence. Someone decided that the endless foot-dragging had to end.

"Europe beckons. The old chain protecting Serbia's remaining indictees, and whose links comprise church, army, business and politicians, has rusted and is snapping. Now Karadzic is in the bag, it begs the question of how much longer Mladic will remain at liberty.

"True, General Mladic, the man who pulled the trigger, the terminator-in-chief, remains out there. And perhaps it is also true, as some believe, that it was the clearly unbalanced Mladic who insisted on the total slaughter of the captured men and boys of Srebrenica during that fearful week in July 1995 when the enclave fell, unable otherwise to assuage the furies raging within him – not until he had seen real gore.

"So this will not be a tedious trial that drags on for years, as Milosevic's did, losing the attention of almost everyone except for court officials. It will be followed with passionate intensity; certainly in Bosnia, possibly, albeit with very different feelings, in Serbia. And if Karadzic is found guilty of the gravest charges, his imprisonment may bring a small measure of comfort to the relatives of the 100,000 or so dead Bosnian Muslims who died in the war."