Radovan Karadžić (Serbian Cyrillic: Радован Караџић, pronounced [râdovaːn kâradʒitɕ]; born 19 June 1945) is a Bosnian Serb former politician who served as the president of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War. He was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Trained as a psychiatrist, he co-founded the Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina and served as the first president of Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996. He was a fugitive from 1996 until July 2008, after having been indicted for war crimes by the ICTY. The indictment concluded there were reasonable grounds for believing he committed war crimes, including genocide against Bosniak and Croat civilians during the Bosnian War (1992–1995). While a fugitive, he worked at a private clinic in Belgrade, specializing in alternative medicine and psychology, under an alias. He was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 and brought before Belgrade's War Crimes Court a few days later. Extradited to the Netherlands, he was placed in the custody of the ICTY in the United Nations Detention Unit of Scheveningen, where he was charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is sometimes referred to by the Western media as the "Butcher of Bosnia", a sobriquet also applied to former Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) General Ratko Mladić. In 2016, he was found guilty of the genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, 10 of the 11 charges in total, and sentenced to 40 years' imprisonment. In 2019, an appeal he had filed against his conviction was rejected, and the sentence was increased to life imprisonment. He is serving his sentence in a British prison, HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight.
Early life and education Radovan Karadžić was born to a Serb family on 19 June 1945 in the village of Petnjica in Montenegro, Yugoslavia, near Šavnik. Karadžić's father, Vuko (1912–1987), was a cobbler from Petnjica. His mother, Jovanka (née Jakić; 1922–2005), was a peasant girl from Pljevlja. She married Karadžić's father in 1943, aged twenty. Karadžić claims to be a descendant of the Serbian linguistic reformer Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864), although as of 2014 this claim had not been confirmed. His father had been a Chetnik – i.e. a member of the right-wing army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia's government-in-exile during World War II – and was imprisoned by the post-war communist regime for much of his son's childhood. Karadžić moved to Sarajevo in 1960 to study psychiatry at the Sarajevo University School of Medicine. In spite of the fact that his father fought in a war, Karadžić himself held no military-orientated ambitions. It is widely believed that he never served his then-obligatory one-year long military service within the Yugoslav People's Army, as such claim was given by Stjepan Kljujić, who was a Croat-member of the Bosnian rotating presidency. Karadžić studied neurotic disorders and depression at Næstved Hospital in Denmark in 1970 and during 1974 and 1975 he underwent further medical training at Columbia University in New York. After his return to Yugoslavia, he worked in the Koševo Hospital in Sarajevo. He was also a poet, influenced by Serbian writer Dobrica Ćosić, who encouraged him to go into politics. During his spell as an ecologist, he declared that "Bolshevism is bad, but nationalism is even worse".
Financial misdeeds
Soon after graduation, Karadžić started working in a treatment centre at the psychiatric clinic of the main Sarajevo hospital, Koševo. According to testimony, he often boosted his income by issuing false medical and psychological evaluations to healthcare workers who wanted early retirement or to criminals who tried to avoid punishment by pleading insanity. In 1983, Karadžić started working at a hospital in the Belgrade suburb of Voždovac. With his partner Momčilo Krajišnik, then manager of a mining enterprise Energoinvest, he managed to gain a loan from an agricultural-development fund, and they used it to build themselves houses in Pale, a Serb town above Sarajevo turned into a ski resort by the government. On 1 November 1984, the two men were arrested for fraud and spent 11 months in detention before their friend Nikola Koljević managed to bail them out. Due to a lack of evidence, Karadžić was released and his trial was brought to a halt. The trial was revived, however, and on 26 September 1985 Karadžić was sentenced to three years in prison for embezzlement and fraud. As he had already spent a year in detention, Karadžić did not serve the remaining sentence in prison.
Political life
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