Radovan Karadžić

Radovan Karadžić (Serbian Cyrillic: Радован Караџић, pronounced [râdovaːn kâradʒitɕ]; born 19 June 1945) is a Bosnian Serb former politician who served as the president of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War. He was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Trained as a psychiatrist, he co-founded the Serb Democratic Party in Bosnia and Herzegovina and served as the first president of Republika Srpska from 1992 to 1996. He was a fugitive from 1996 until July 2008, after having been indicted for war crimes by the ICTY. The indictment concluded there were reasonable grounds for believing he committed war crimes, including genocide against Bosniak and Croat civilians during the Bosnian War (1992–1995). While a fugitive, he worked at a private clinic in Belgrade, specializing in alternative medicine and psychology, under an alias.

He was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 and brought before Belgrade's War Crimes Court a few days later. Extradited to the Netherlands, he was placed in the custody of the ICTY in the United Nations Detention Unit of Scheveningen, where he was charged with 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is sometimes referred to by the Western media as the "Butcher of Bosnia", a sobriquet also applied to former Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) General Ratko Mladić. In 2016, he was found guilty of the genocide in Srebrenica, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, 10 of the 11 charges in total, and sentenced to 40 years' imprisonment. In 2019, an appeal he had filed against his conviction was rejected, and the sentence was increased to life imprisonment. He is serving his sentence in a British prison, HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight.