Deceptive Karadzic shocked the West with total war

By Douglas Hamilton

BELGRADE (Reuters) - In the early spring of 1992, the floppy grey hair and lopsided smile had many people fooled.

Radovan Karadzic, the man now in custody on charges of orchestrating Europe's worst massacre since World War Two, looked like an ageing lounge singer.

If a trifle eccentric, he was charming, in a hardline sort of way. His talk seemed wild but he didn't look capable of directing mass slaughter.

By summer, as leader of the breakaway Serb Republic of Bosnia, Karadzic had cast aside politics and begun orchestrating a savage war against the Bosnian Muslims and Croats who declared Bosnia independent of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation.

His forces used every heavy weapon they could get their hands on, and there were plenty, with endless ammunition, courtesy of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army under the control of the late Serbian strongman, Slobodan Milosevic.

The streets of Sarajevo were empty in broad daylight. The fledgling army of Bosnian Muslims was completely outgunned.

The Serbs held the craggy heights that ring the mountain capital and fired into the city at will, with mortars, artillery and anti-aircraft cannon, hot barrels tilted downward over the forested slopes under deceptively tranquil blue skies.

Residents scurried like rats over exposed street crossings to avoid snipers' bullets. Many failed. The cemeteries filled to overflowing, with an estimated 11,000 dead.

The first battalion of a United Nations Protection Force of blue-helmeted peacekeepers charged up from the Adriatic coast in white armoured vehicles to take control of shattered Sarajevo airport, ankle deep in brass shell casings, and thousands more troops followed to secure the first of countless "ceasefires".

But within a year of the start of the 1992-95 war, UNPROFOR had become a symbol of hapless intervention, hamstrung by a Western policy of "even-handedness" which was exploited fully by Karadzic's dominant force.

STRANGLED CITY

Within weeks, Sarajevo had been encircled and had begun to run out of supplies. The darkened city was besieged for 43 months. It was heated by firewood in homemade tin stoves.

One egg cost $10. It took connections and lots of cash to get fuel, never mind medicines or makeup, which had vanished.

Bosnian Serb forces advanced over the country, "cleansing" ethnic rivals from the land they claimed. Villages burned, and refugees fled, sometimes pursued by a murderous rain of mortar shells through the forests and over remote mountain tracks.

Time and again, Karadzic would appear on television, justifying the actions of his troops, denying charges of brutality, even accusing the Muslims of blowing up their people in a ruthless ploy to attract international sympathy.