Karadzic came to power in the early 1990s, as Yugoslavia succumbed to the shattering forces of intense nationalism. After Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence, Karadzic led Serbs in Bosnia to declare their own republic, allied with Serbia and independent from Bosnia. As the president of the Republika Srpska, and with the aid of Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian government in Belgrade, Karadzic and his notorious military general, Ratko Mladic, carried out a brutal war against Bosnia’s Muslims, besieging Sarajevo for three years and perpetrating the worst war crimes in Europe since World War II. Some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica alone were massacred in the space of a few days in July 1995. The grim excavation, identification and reburial of the dead continues to this day. The term “ethnic cleansing” had gained currency by then as a way to describe these murders as well as other, more nuanced forms of genocide. Many Muslim women in Bosnia, for instance, were confined in camps, repeatedly raped until impregnated, held until they were visibly pregnant and then released.

In July and November 1995, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or I.C.T.Y., indicted Karadzic and Mladic for genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws of war. International sanctions successfully forced Milosevic to cut off military aid to the Bosnian Serbs. The war wound down, and Karadzic began to lose power. In 2000, after NATO bombed Belgrade during the Kosovo war, Milosevic was overthrown and captured and then, in 2001, sent to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. He died in 2006 before there was a verdict. Karadzic, along with Mladic, managed to evade Milosevic’s fate by dropping out of view.

On the streets of Belgrade, Karadzic rumors flew. Some said he was living the rugged life of a guerrilla hero in the mountains. Others believed he was in exile in Eastern Europe or South America. So most Balkan watchers were honestly stunned when Dabic was arrested last summer on a city bus, tooling around Belgrade like any other regular Slobodan. With a haircut and a shave, the Multi-Zap Zapping radiestician instantly disappeared, and there, soon enough in the papers for all to see, were the confident eyes, the clear jawline and the telltale bouffant of Radovan Karadzic.

During Karadzic’s years underground, Serbs never really came to a stable national consensus about the man’s politics or his war. The reformist leader Zoran Djindjic, who was elected prime minister in 2000 after Milosevic’s fall, was gunned down in 2003 by nationalist forces aligned with the Karadzic wing of Balkan politics. And Boris Tadic, the reformer who became president in 2004, actually placed second, to a nationalist candidate, in the first round of the 2008 election. He retained his office only after winning a runoff with 50.5 percent of the vote. Tadic’s hold on power is complicated by two widespread and contradictory beliefs: that his government knew of Karadzic’s whereabouts and betrayed him for a pat on the head from the European Union; and that Karadzic successfully hid in plain view from an inept government. These days, the nationalist arguments have been subsumed into the newest quarrels about Tadic’s eagerness to join the European Union. Every week at Republic Square in Belgrade, Karadzic’s supporters unfurl their banners and make angry speeches about how Tadic’s dream will turn them all into serfs for, say, Fiat.

For many Serbs, Karadzic is a paradoxical figure. They can speak eloquently of his heroism and in the same breath condemn his war crimes. As the Serbian author Jasmina Tesanovic wrote last summer on the American Web site Boing Boing, Serbia itself was a lot like the bipolar Dabic-Karadzic personality — a fictitious and benevolent present built upon the denial of a bloody past. “Since the fall of Milosevic,” she wrote, “the city of Belgrade has led a double existence.”