PROFILE: Karadzic: From psychiatry to poems to alleged war crimes

Oct 22, 2009, 16:16 GMT

The Hague/Belgrade ­ Radovan Karadzic has shown relentless flexibility and a skill for survival throughout his life.

He was once an obscure psychiatrist with a flare for poetry who took to the political stage after serving time in prison for embezzlement in the former Yugoslavia. By the time the former Bosnian Serb leader was apprehended in 2008, after more than a decade on the run as a war crimes suspect, he had reinvented himself as globetrotting alternative-healing guru 'Dr Dragan Dabic'.

On Monday, 64-year-old son of a guerilla fighter who had opposed Nazi occupiers and Communists will answer before a United Nations tribunal in The Hague to charges related to the worst wartime atrocities since World War II.

Karadzic, still a national hero in the eyes of many Serbs, is to account for his alleged involvement in mass killings, rape and deportations during the war in the Balkans in the 1990s. He has been indicted for orchestrating the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which Bosnian Serb forces killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

Karadzic was born and raised by his mother in a tiny mountain village of Savnik in Montenegro while his father served time as a political prisoner. He moved to Sarajevo in 1960 to study medicine and soon found his way to the graduate school of Columbia University in New York.

Karadzic published his first work of poetry at the age of 23. He later married Ljiljana Zelen, a psychoanalyst from a wealthy Serb family, with whom he had two children, Sonja and Aleksandar Sasa.

Karadzic's first encounter with the law came during his years as a psychiatrist. In 1984, he was accused of having used money of a Belgrade hospital where he worked, for his private cottage in the Bosnian village Pale, some 30 kilometres east of Sarajevo. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment, of which he served 11 months.

That same year, he published, an award-winning childrens book - Ima cuda, nema cuda (There are miracles, there are no miracles).

It was the break-up of the Yugoslav Republic in the late 1980s would prove to be a turning point in Karadzics life. In 1989, he moved from medicine to to politics, establishing the Serb National Party that aimed at uniting the ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and elsewhere.

When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in 1992, civil war erupted and Karadzic proclaimed himself president of the Bosnian Serb Republic.

In the years that followed, Karadzic allegedly launched a campaign to seize as much territory as possible, aided by then Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic and the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.

In the process, tens of thousands of Muslim and Croat civilians were massacred, raped and driven from their homes.

The man with the mane of unruly hair became a household name global as he rejected peace proposals, one after the other.

The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia holds both Karadzic and Mladic responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and the 1992-1995 siege and bombing of Sarajevo.

Along with Mladic ­ who remains at large ­ Karadzic is being held responsible for the Srebrenica massacre and is also alleged to have played a central role in the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo, that killed at least 10,000 and injured an estimated 56,000.

Severe pressure by the United States forced Karadzic to ultimately hand over political control to his deputies in 1996.

By that time, the first indictment against him had already been confirmed in The Hague.

But Karadzic set his escape plan in motion. Taking a new name, and altering his appearance - a long grey ponytail and thick facial hair - he spent the next 13 years eluding capture.

When authorities caught up with him - on a public bus in downtown Belgrade in July 2008 - it came to light that the now virtually unrecognizable Karadzic had been in the Serbian capital for at least five years. He had been earning a living as an alternative healer and moving around freely.