The bombastic warlord associated more than anyone else with the Bosnian bloodbath and the pogroms of "ethnic cleansing" was, it transpires, all along the heroic Vaclav Havel of the Balkans.
It is almost 15 years since the end of the war in Bosnia that left 100,000 people dead, two-thirds of them Muslims mostly killed by Serbs. Karadzic was the Bosnian Serb political leader and military commander-in-chief. Cheated of justice, the victims, families have waited a long time to see Karadzic in the dock.
In a four-hour soliloquy behind bulletproof glass at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Monday, the 64-year-old for the first time laid out his version of what happened in the 1992-95 conflict. Predictably, he rubbished the charges against him.
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