It was only a matter of time before a shaven and shorn Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader living in disguise for the past 13 years as alternative healer Dragan Dabic, was brought to trial in the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Netherlands. Facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity inflicted on Bosniak Muslims, Croats and other non-Serb civilians during the Bosnian wars of 1992-95, it is not difficult to imagine how the ensuing drama will shape up.

On trial will be History itself, the horror inflicted to ethnically cleanse the region and facilitate the creation of a Greater Serbia, killing around 200,000 and making at least a million people homeless. The tribunal prosecutors will try to nail the mastermind of the Bosnian horrors, eager to make up for the opportunity lost when the former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, died mid-trial in 2006. The new pro-Western Boris Tadic-led coalition government will bargain hard for a European Union membership, having delivered their pound of flesh through Karadzic’s capture. And on the streets of Serbia and in the hearts of Serbians, Karadzic will forever remain a hero — a man of refined tastes, a professional psychiatrist, a dabbler in music and literature who had the gumption to take up Serbia’s cause. Of course, there will not always be 10,000 people organizing pro-Karadzic rallies and clashing with the police.

That paradox, present in Karadzic’s person, is at the heart of the moral problem that confronts the trial of most war criminals, accused as they are of usually aiding and abetting, almost never personally committing, grisly massacres on unprecedented scales. Though universally condemned, a lack of political resolve to bring them to justice often allows them a free run — many Nazi leaders led public lives, often without a change in name in post-war Germany; Karadzic lived in disguise under an assumed name in Belgrade, but frequently visited his family, something that those on the hunt possibly could not have been unaware of.

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