Nutty professor who presided over slaughter

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Hardly anyone remembers Irma Hadzimuratovic now, but back in 1993 she had her moment of fame in the British media as the five-year-old Bosnian girl crippled by Serb shelling of Sarajevo. She was flown from the ruined city to Britain, where she died.

Irma was one of thousands of children crippled or killed in Sarajevo during the 1992 to 1995 siege of the Bosnian capital that Radovan Karadzic presided over.

I saw many more, far worse, in the hospital in Srebrenica in 1992. Because Mr Karadzic's forces wouldn't even let so much as a bar of soap into the town, teenage girls were dying in the hospital from basic infections. The heroic nurses there had to avoid shell and sniper fire to wash the bloody sheets in the freezing river.

To what degree Mr Karadzic, a former consultant psychiatrist, personally supervised the destruction of much of Sarajevo and the total expulsion of the Muslim population from eastern and northern Bosnia – killing 200,000 of them in the process – is a moot point. His military commander, Ratko Mladic, may have been responsible for the fine detail.

But he surely knew what was going on. He was no fool and from the vantage point of his HQ in Pale, just outside Sarajevo, he could inspect through binoculars the exquisite torture he was inflicting on the city that rejected him.

What fooled me – and many of his interlocutors – when I first met him as The Independent's correspondent in 1990 was a certain dotty affability. Mr Karadzic had the mien of a nutty professor, with his vast bouffant of hair, playful smiles and flapping arms. It was hard to take him, or his sidekicks – Biljana Plavsic, a stuffy ex- biology teacher, and Nikola Koljevic, a literature professor who often quoted Shakespeare – very seriously.

The Muslim intellectual establishment in Sarajevo felt the same way. They had smirked at the attempts of the provincial psychiatrist from south-east Bosnia to ingratiate himself with the élite with his gauche poems.

As they crouched in their cellars in 1992, or watched the National Library go up in flames, they had time to reflect on what a mistake they made in giving Mr Karadzic such a wide berth.

The mass slaughter of the Bosnian Muslims was a messy business but it was not spontaneous. In each town that the Serbs took over in the spring of 1992, officials from his Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) organised the process of local executions, based on lists that had obviously been prepared months before.

Who told the SDS in Zvornik, Bijeljina, Foca, Visegrad, Bratunac, Brcko and Kozarac to draw up those lists, and with what purpose? One suspects Mr Karadzic. But as the trial of Mr Milosevic has shown, getting the man in the dock is not enough.

Mr Milosevic's management style was to tell his underlings to "do what has to be done" rather than get involved in dreary – incriminating – details. Mr Karadzic may well have been the same, making the prosecution's task equally difficult.