Radovan Karadžić

Radovan Karadžić's path from poet and psychiatrist to convicted war criminal is a dark chapter in European history. Born in Montenegro, he practiced psychiatry in Sarajevo and cultivated a reputation as a nationalist intellectual. As Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, he co-founded the Serb Democratic Party and became the political leader of Bosnian Serbs. During the brutal Bosnian War, he presided over the self-declared Republika Srpska, a regime responsible for a campaign of ethnic cleansing aimed at creating a purely Serb territory. Forces under his command besieged Sarajevo for nearly four years and carried out the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, where over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were killed. After the war, he evaded capture for over a decade, living in disguise under an alias and practicing alternative medicine in Belgrade. His 2008 arrest led to a landmark trial at the UN tribunal in The Hague, which found him guilty of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, sentencing him to life imprisonment.