Looking gaunt and downcast, Radovan Karadžić stood for the first time in the dock of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on July 31, 2008, to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes of war. Millions of residents of the former Yugoslavia had longed for that moment to come; he himself had fervently hoped it never would. His initial appearance at the Tribunal came more than a dozen years after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) and thirteen years after he was first indicted by the ICTY. He had spent the intervening years as one of the world’s most successful fugitives, making dramatic escapes, devising elaborate disguises, and taunting his accusers. A week before his first appearance in court, he had been arrested in Belgrade by police of the Republic of Serbia and flown to the Scheveningen Prison in The Hague, Netherlands.

To many outside the former Yugoslavia, Radovan Karadžić is better known by his deeds and appearance than by name. Few outside his native land can pronounce, let alone remember, his name, with its two diacriticals and unfamiliar combination of two consonants (Karadžić – CAR-ahd-jich, to a speaker of English). With his craggy facial features, roughly dimpled chin, and wavy, drooping hair, he epitomizes in physical appearance the image of the archetypal Balkan atavist: coarse, volatile, and weathered by life’s vicissitudes. To his circle of family, friends, and some fellow Serbs, he is a hero of mythical proportions, a valiant but persecuted champion of the Serb people against many adversaries. But to most of the global public, he is the “Butcher of Bosnia,” the architect and perpetrator of genocide and other atrocities that have been the worst and most destructive in Europe since the Second World War.