The arrest of Radovan Karadzic
It was nearly 12 years ago, in September 1996, that I rang the bell outside 's house near Sarajevo and asked if he'd like to talk to the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.
He had already been by the international war crimes tribunal -- but I had interviewed him twice before in London.
The fiction in 1996 was that no one knew where he was. The reality was that within a couple of days of arriving in Sarajevo, I'd been handed a piece of paper with a scribbled map on it, showing the precise location of the house where he was living, in Pale, in the hills outside the Bosnian capital.
As I made my way to the house, I stopped several times along the way to ask directions. "Excuse me, is this the way to Radovan Karadzic's house?" Everyone was very kind and gave me directions, even the Ghanaian officers at the UN police post just a couple of hundred metres from the house.
The point of the story is this: then, and for most of the time since then, plenty of people knew where he was. What changed tonight was that, at last, someone who knew was prepared to tell the people who wanted to know.
Serbia -- and -- are very different countries from what they were in the mid-1990s. In Belgrade there is now a democratically elected pro-Western government, which is anxious to be accepted as a potential member of the European Union. One of the conditions imposed by Brussels was that Radovan Karadzic and his military chief, General , had to be handed over to the war crimes tribunal.
Now, it looks as if at least one of them will be.
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