Karadzic's legacy hangs heavily over Bosnia

By Maja Zuvela and Daria Sito-Sucic

SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Genocide, siege and massacre are for many people in Bosnia more than just words on Radovan Karadzic's indictment. They represent years of suffering, dead friends and nightmares that will always haunt them.

"Karadzic took my life, he stole my youth, he stole everything," said Edna, a woman who was 19 when Bosnian Serbs started their 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb president during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, was taken to a United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Wednesday to face trial on two genocide charges. His lawyer says Karadzic is confident he can prove his innocence.

Karadzic fought to take Sarajevo as part of a plan to force Muslims and Croats from lands he wanted to link to Serbia.

Mortar bombs and grenades rained on Sarajevo daily, water and power were cut off, and people lived on scarce humanitarian aid. According to the latest figures, 14,300 people were killed in the siege, some shot by snipers while searching for food.

Edna, who declined to be identified by her full name, is handicapped. She was wounded by a shell two years into the war.

"There was a bridge you had to cross to go to get bread or water, our lifeline with the rest of the city," she said. "Each time one of us left home to get water or wood for heating, we parted as if it was the last time we'd see each other."

The war tore apart Bosnia's multicultural fabric, ethnicity and religion, cleaving through communities with a common language and many of the same customs. Hundreds of thousands of people became refugees, and blame Karadzic.

"Karadzic is responsible for making my family scatter throughout the world," said Slobodanka Dizdarevic, a Bosnian Serb who lived with her Muslim husband in Sarajevo.

"He is responsible for nightmares that still keep me awake. He is responsible for the fact that my grandsons are growing up far away and I am not able to hear their first words."

The hatred that was unleashed was blamed on populist demagogues, historical reasons and old rivalries, but is still hard to understand for those who survived it.

Mina, a 75-year old Bosnian Muslim high school teacher, spent a year with her husband in the Grbavica neighborhood, a part of Sarajevo where there were daily raids which could end in beatings and gang rapes.

"Bosnian Serb soldiers came every day, drunk, armed to the teeth. Each time they took something -- the car, the TV, whatever they liked," she said.

"We survived the summer of '92 on plums my husband picked at 4 a.m., when nobody could see. I made plum pies, plum jams. We ate plums for breakfast, lunch and dinner."

She remembers the humiliation she felt when she was forced to be part of a labor squad emptying garbage containers.