'Do I look like a killer?' – Karadzic's charm offensive in Leeds as war raged

Radovan Karadzic is on trial for war crimes. Robert Holmes, who interviewed the Bosnian Serb leader in Leeds during the Siege of Sarajevo, watched him defend himself.

He's polite to a fault, his words punctuated with "Thank you", "If I may be of assistance" and "Can I draw your attention to…?" as he tweaks his spectacles and tries in vain to check the shock of white and grey hair tumbling over his forehead. He could be a rather eccentric Latin teacher or a grandfather with a keen desire to please.

The man, however, is Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader accused of the worst crimes committed in Europe since the Second World War. Arrested after more than a decade on the run, he first appeared before the United Nation's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague two years ago this week.

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Karadzic, now 65, is accused of masterminding the slaughter of thousands of Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian War of 1992-95. The former president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and supreme commander of its armed forces denies 11 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities during the conflict, which is thought to have cost the lives of up to 110,000 people, two-thirds of them Muslims (or Bosniaks).

Karadzic evaded arrest for more than a decade by living under the alias Dragan Dabic and working at a private clinic in Belgrade specialising in alternative medicine. A bushy grey beard and thick glasses transformed his appearance. He was more tramp than tyrant. Now dressed like a businessman, he appears before ICTY judges clean shaven,

sporting cuts from his flawed work with a razor.

Karadzic's trial started last October, but the wheel of justice turns slowly at the best of times, and the Serbian leader has exploited this to the full. Karadzic, a psychiatrist by profession and a long-winded poet by inclination, insisted he would represent himself in court. ICTY appointed counsel for him in an attempt to thwart what they saw as delaying tactics, but he continues to ask for more time to examine documents, question witnesses and prepare his defence.

Looking for sympathy, the man said to be responsible for turning Bosnia into a giant graveyard told judges that prosecutors had "buried him" under a million pages of documents. The prosecution plans to call 400 witnesses and the ICTY now estimates the proceedings against Karadzic, including a possible appeal, could run until 2014.

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I first saw Karadzic on July 18, 1992, when he visited Leeds with the aim of winning support from the many thousands of Serbian migrs living in West Yorkshire. He was feted like a hero at the now-defunct Serbian National Welfare Centre in Chapeltown, Leeds, a gathering place for the many Chetnik or Royalist Serbs who fled Tito's communist Yugoslavia at the end of the Second World War.

There were chants of "Serbia! Serbia!" as Karadzic spoke from a stage he shared with two other Bosnian Serb leaders, Momcilo Krajisnik and Biljana Plavsic. Karadzic's father was jailed by the Tito regime for fighting with the Chetniks during the war so the Bosnian Serb leader ticked the right boxes in the eyes of most of the 300-strong audience. Reports from Bosnia of Serbian atrocities were dismissed by many Serbs abroad as Muslim or Western propaganda against a people with a backs-to-the-wall mentality born of a painful and bloody history.

Three months (April 1992) earlier, the Bosnian Muslim leader in Sarajevo, Alija Izetbegovic, had declared independence and Karadzic had responded by announcing the foundation of a Serbian republic with Pale, a Serbian stronghold in the mountains south-east of the capital, as its headquarters. The Serbian siege of Sarajevo had begun in earnest when Karadzic appeared in Leeds. Karadzic told me: "There can be no winners in the war – all of us are losing. The time is now right to stop the fighting, sit down and start talking." As the Serb spoke of ceasefires and led a charm offensive in Leeds, shells from his soldiers were raining down on Sarajevo. The siege lasted another 42 months and cost 10,000 lives.

"Do I look like a killer?" Karadzic asked me, when I challenged him over the shelling of a Sarajevo bread queue. Muslims had accused the Serb of slaughtering schoolchildren. "Do I look like someone who could kill a child?" he asked me, with a smile and shake of his head.

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Listening to Karadzic in the flesh again at the Hague court last week, listening to his weasel words about his "just and holy" war in Bosnia, I was reminded of one psychiatrist's assessment of Harold Shipman. The serial killer doctor, the psychiatrist said, had a "defence mechanism against the incursion of reality".

Olga Mathias, the daughter of Serbian parents, was one of the audience to fall briefly under Karadzic's spell in Leeds. The business management consultant remembers a man "full of charm and charisma".

Now 51 and a mother of three, Mrs Mathias said: "Karadzic had a gift for flattery. He told me the new Serbian nation he was building needed eloquent and beautiful people like me! He was in full flight, put his hand on my knee and said: 'We need fresh blood and new ideas from Serbs living abroad'. And the next thing, Karadzic was offering me a job as Foreign Affairs Minister. I couldn't believe it. We'd met only a few minutes earlier and he was offering me a top job in his government."

Mrs Mathias, who lives in Leeds, said: "I wasn't tempted by the job offer! After all I've seen and read, I still find it difficult linking the charming man I met in the Serbian club with the man of evil portrayed in The Hague."

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Last week prosecution witness Husein Ali Abdel-Razek, a former UN peacekeeper in Bosnia, stopped short of calling Karadzic charming. But the former general in the Egyptian army said he found Bosnian Serb leaders "civilised and courteous" while serving as head of UN forces in Sarajevo between August 1992 and February 1993. There were plenty of "warm welcomes" and "nice words" but he told the court this was part of the "war game" played by all ethnic parties in Bosnia. "The truth on the ground was very different." The bodies did not lie.

"He should be given the Nobel prize for lying" said one Bosniak mother fighting for justice over the massacre in Srebrenica after she heard Karadzic in court dismiss reports of the Serbian slaughter of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in July 1995 as "false myths".

Karadzic's right-hand man, "Momo" Krajisnik, who was at the "recruitment drive" in Leeds, was found guilty by the ICTY in 2006 of crimes against humanity and jailed for 20 years. The man nicknamed "Mr No" because of his intransigence at peace negotiations was sent to Wakefield Prison. Biljana Plavsic, presented with flowers in Leeds, was jailed for 11 years by the ICTY in 2002. Plavsic had replaced Karadzic as president of the Serbian republic in 1996 when her leader bowed to Western pressure and quit public life.

Plavsic surrendered to the ICTY in 2001 and admitted crimes against humanity after prosecutors agreed to drop genocide charges. Last year she was released early from her Swedish jail and flown to Belgrade by a private plane owned by the Bosnian Serb government.

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Over 60 people from various ethnic groups in the former Yugoslavia have been convicted of war crimes by the ICTY and more than 40 are in different stages of proceedings before the tribunal.

The ICTY can point to legal successes but as one official in The Hague told me: "Many people in the former Yugoslavia are still in denial. They refuse to believe their people were guilty of such terrible crimes."

This is why there was a welcoming crowd in Belgrade for the freed Plavsic, once likened by Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic's wife, Mirjana, no shrinking violet herself, to the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Dressed in a fur coat, Plavsic, the 79-year-old apologist of ethnic cleansing, played the film star and blew a kiss to her admirers

gathered in the Serbian capital.

As the ICTY offical put it: "There's still much work to be done, winning the hearts and minds of people still blind to the truth."

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