The Two-Bit Villain the World Somehow Feared

Sarajevo, a cosmopolitan city until the early 1990s, when Radovan Karadzic had his army shooting at it from a mountain village where it seemed everyone was drunk and armed at 9 in the morning:

There was the pphhhfftt of sniper bullets, cigarette smoke hanging in rooms like a fog, the smell of formaldehyde so thick in the morgue that it lingered on the tip of the tongue.

Shells hit your building, walls would blow out, you'd get the feel of electricity in your mouth. I was reporting at the hospital one day in the summer of 1993, and there was a whoosh and a plume of smoke down the hill. "A shell! A shell!" A car came screeching up to the emergency room entrance. A man jumped out, weeping, a girl with a bloody chest in his arms. I walked in the unlit room -- there was no electricity, running water or anesthesia -- and here comes an old man on a stretcher, blood pouring out of his ear and lots of red splattered across his chest.

This was when they were turning the soccer field into a cemetery. This was when gasoline cost about $75 a gallon. This was when shells rained down and blew holes in people, and the army in the hills turned an urbane city into a paranoid killzone.

This was the world as wrought by Karadzic, a man who seemed airlifted in from the 19th century; he never seemed fully present in the 20th. He was entirely unimpressive. He was a psychiatrist and terrible poet who wore his hair in an Elvis pompadour. He had eyes, brown, where the lights seemed to be on, but the lights were nothing more than a 40-watt bulb.

The Son of Vuk was 48 years old. He terrified people in the valley below and had world leaders dancing on a string. He mocked them all. Anyone remember the "Carrington-Cutileiro Plan"? The "Vance-Owen Peace Plan"? Neither does anyone else, because European leaders kept thinking Karadzic was a man of his word. He had darker ideas.

Good times and plum brandy and shooting Muslims. This was the high life up in the village, Pale (pronounced pah-lay). Eventually, the four-year war he helped lead killed at least 100,000, perhaps 10,000 of those in Sarajevo.

His nadir came this week, more than a decade after his dreams of an ethnically cleansed section of Bosnia fell to pieces, more than a decade after going into hiding.

Police and war crimes prosecutors discovered him living in a working-class section of the Serbian capital of Belgrade. He was living under the false identity of "Dragan Dabic." In a recent photo prosecutors displayed yesterday, he was dressed all in black. The greasy pompadour was gone, replaced by cascading white hair in a ponytail, a frothy white beard and those same sad-sack brown eyes. He looked like Walt Whitman on a bender. He was running an alternative medicine clinic and writing for a magazine named Healthy Life.

Now he's in jail, apparently to be taken to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague, where he faces indictments for genocide and crimes against humanity. People who knew "Dr. Dabic" said, in initial reports, they had no idea of his real identity.

This is believable because even when he was in power, he didn't seem like much.

He was the son of a radical Serb nationalist who had been often been in jail. He had been in jail as well, convicted of fraud. He was a psychiatrist with a modest practice in Sarajevo. He drummed up a political party as Yugoslavia began to disintegrate. He talked incessantly -- he was a one-note politician -- of an imaginary Muslim horde about to overrun the Orthodox Serb faithful.