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Radovan Karadzic's last lair wasn't a cave or a safe house; no secret bolt-holes or special security details shielded him. Instead, the former Bosnian Serb leader, one of the world's most wanted men, was hiding in plain view amid the drab, anonymous housing blocks of New Belgrade, a suburb of the Serbian capital. He was nabbed not by NATO, whose forces had spent 12 years in a vain and sometimes desultory search for him, but by the security forces of Serbia - the country whose designs for grandeur he had so ardently tried to further...
...first based himself in the rugged mountains near the border of his native Montenegro. In the years since then, prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia often complained that NATO and its associated intelligence services weren't trying hard enough to find Karadzic and his Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladic. Certainly no one has admitted to having had any inkling of Karadzic's final disguise: as a self-styled "spiritual researcher" named Dragan David Dabic...
...even among Serb nationalists, the Bosnian war is receding into history, relegated to Serbia's long catalogue of mythic losses. Aleksandar Vucic, the secretary-general of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party, said the arrest marked "a horrible day for Serbia." But the spontaneous demonstrations in Belgrade against Karadzic's arrest didn't approach the intensity of February's street violence over Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence...
Belgrade, meanwhile, is awash with speculation about why it was Karadzic who got arrested and not Mladic. Serb security sources have indicated that it was by trailing individuals thought to be linked to Mladic that they happened upon Karadzic. (Rasim Ljajic, president of the National Council for Cooperation with the Hague Tribunal, denied reports that Western intelligence services had offered the telling tip. "We didn't need anyone's help in this matter," he says...
When I worked as a reporter in besieged Sarajevo in 1994 and 1995, I sometimes fantasized (as many who experienced Serb shell and sniper fire did) about the eventual arrest of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. I imagined him in handcuffs, decked out in his camouflage military attire or in one of his trademark double-breasted suits, his silver plume of well-coiffed hair a reminder of the lifestyle he maintained even after he choked off water supplies to his former home city...