Radovan Karadžić

Biography

Radovan Karadžić was born in 1945 in Petnjica, Montenegro, the son of a Chetnik who spent much of his son's childhood in communist prisons. He moved to Sarajevo in 1960 to study medicine and psychiatry, trained further in Denmark in 1970 and at Columbia University in 1974-1975, and worked as a psychiatrist at Sarajevo's Koševo hospital. He also published poetry. In 1985 he was convicted of embezzlement and fraud over a development-fund loan that he and a partner used to build houses in Pale.

In 1990 Karadžić co-founded the Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and from 1992 to 1996 he was president of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity, through the Bosnian War, including the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre.

Indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, he went into hiding in 1996 and spent years in Belgrade posing as an alternative-medicine practitioner under a false name. He was arrested there in July 2008 and sent to The Hague, where his trial opened in October 2009. In 2016 the tribunal convicted him on ten of eleven counts, including genocide at Srebrenica, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and sentenced him to 40 years; on appeal in 2019 the sentence was raised to life imprisonment. He is serving it in a British prison on the Isle of Wight.