Rachel Browning’s Legal Blog

Details continue to emerge regarding the secret life of Radovan Karadžić, the former President of Republika Srpska, who was finally captured and arrested this week, after evading international authorities for over a decade.  Karadžić, who remains a kind of folk hero to some ethnic serbs, reportedly managed to remain hidden for so long by donning elaborate disguises and assuming an entirely new life.  While his hide-outs included remote monasteries and mountain caves in Eastern Bosnia, he also “hid in the open” by shaving his head and assuming the persona of “Dr.  Dragan David Dabic,” an alternative medicine salesman with his own business and website.  His surprising capture and the revelations of his bizarre existence over the past thirteen years begin yet another chapter in the long aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s.  He will eventually be brought to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) where he will face numerous charges including genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity.

Having spent my final semester of law school interning for the ICTY, I’m aware of the tedious and complicated nature of the crimes for which most defendants have been charged, and of the overwhelming task prosecutors and defense attorneys alike have of analyzing each element of these types of international crime.  This makes the announcement by Karadžić today, that he will defend himself against the charges alleged, laughable, yet predictable.  He’s of course, taking a cue from former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who defended himself, and managed to drag out his own proceedings for years, until he died in 2006 while his trial was still underway.  Karadžić’s arrest, therefore, is particularly significant, as prosecutors hope to bring the alleged “mastermind” of these atrocities to justice, granting a sense of closure to the many victims eluded by Milosevic’s untimely death.  

Karadžić was initially charged in 1995 with genocide, complicity in genocide, extermination, murder, willful killing, persecutions, deportation, inhumane acts, and other crimes committed against Bosnian Muslim, Bosnian Croat and other non-Serb civilians in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war.  In particular, he is charged with genocide for the murder of almost 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995, an event that stands out as the worst human massacre in Europe since the Jewish Holocaust. The indictment alleges that Radovan Karadžić and forces under his command killed non-Serbs during and after attacks on towns throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina and rounded up thousands of non-Serbs, transferring them to detention facilities set up by the Bosnian Serb authorities where detainees were killed, tortured, mistreated, and sexually assaulted.  Finally, the indictment charges Karadžić with responsibility for the shelling and sniping of civilians in Sarajevo which resulted in the killing and wounding of thousands, including many women and children.  For a full text of the indictment, go here.