Radovan Karadzic

Karadžić claims to be related to 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 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's father, Vuko (1912–1987), was a cobbler from Petnjica.

His mother, Jovanka ( Jakić; 1922–2005), was a peasant girl from Pljevlja.

She married Karadžić's father in 1943, aged twenty.

Radovan Karadžić (Радован Караџић, ; born 19 June 1945) is a Bosnian Serb politician who was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

He was the president of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War.

Radovan Karadžić was born to a Serb family on 19 June 1945 in the village of Petnjica in the People's Republic of Montenegro, Democratic Federal Yugoslavia, near Šavnik.

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 1-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".

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 over a year in detention, Karadžić did not serve the remaining sentence in prison.

Following encouragement from Dobrica Ćosić, later the first president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and Jovan Rašković, leader of the Croatian Serbs, Karadžić cofounded the Serb Democratic Party (Srpska Demokratska Stranka) in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1989.

The party aimed at unifying the Republic's Bosnian Serb community and joining Croatian Serbs in leading them in remaining as part of Yugoslavia in the event of secession by those two republics from the federation.

Throughout September 1991, the SDS began to establish various "Serb Autonomous Regions" throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina.

After the Bosnian parliament voted on sovereignty on 15 October 1991, a separate Serb Assembly was founded on 24 October 1991 in Banja Luka, to exclusively represent the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The following month, Bosnian Serbs held a referendum which resulted in an overwhelming vote in favour of staying in a federal state with Serbia and Montenegro, as part of Yugoslavia.

In December 1991, a top secret document, For the organisation and activity of the Serbian people in Bosnia-Herzegovina in extraordinary circumstances, was drawn up by the SDS leadership.

This was a centralised programme for the takeover of each municipality in the country, through the creation of shadow governments and para-governmental structures through various "crisis headquarters", and by preparing loyalist Serbs for the takeover in co-ordination with the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA).

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.

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 a fugitive from 1996 until July 2008, after having been indicted for war crimes by the ICTY.

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.

In 2021, it was announced that he would be transferred to a British prison.