The Karadzic Farce

It was a long time in the making but the Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic has been convicted of genocide and sentenced to 40 years in prison but the 13 year hunt for the architect of the wars ethnic cleansing that led to the death of over 100,000 people was a farce.

Knowing defeat for his Bosnian Serbs was looming, Karadzic fled to the city of Srpska, 11 miles away from where Karadzic bought such horror and where 64,000 NATO troops were operating and where he lived for two years before the manhunt become too close for comfort and he fled.
NATO received word that the fleeing Karadzic’s car would be passing along a certain road and planned to use a concussion grenade to halt him but it could only work if the car was going less than 20 mph and the plan the best brains in NATO came up with was to get a soldier dressed in a monkey suit to leap out in front of it.
The idea was that the sight of a gorilla in central Bosnia would so confuse the driver that they would automatically slow to get a good look at it then they would storm the car and capture Karadzic.
Karadzic never showed up that day leaving a monkey suited soldier kicking his heels by the side of the road but we pick him up in Serbia where he next went into hiding and turned his hand to writing. While lying low, he managed to write several volumes of poetry, a novel, and a children’s book which won a a literary prize.
By the mid-2000s, Karadzic had moved on to Belgrade where he renting an apartment, changed his name to 'Dragan Dabic', grew long hair and a long beard.
Karadzic's apartment was directly opposite that of an Interpol employee of Interpol who was involved in the search for their neighbour and later explained during his two year stay there, they would often chat whilst passing in the hallway.
Under his Dragan Dabic guise, Karadzic retrained as a spiritual faith healer and opened a clinic, treated patients, attended medicine conventions, and gave lectures on faith healing. He even had a weekly column in a Serbian health magazine.
In 2008, the former warlords brother Luka accidentally used an old sim card which flagged up Karadzic's position and he was arrested boarding a bus to flee to a new hideout.
Nearly eight years after he was captured, the International Criminal Tribunal passed judgement on the monster who had once been the world’s most wanted man.
Darkly surreal and absurdly comic that one of the most hunted men on the planet managed to defy everyone by growing his hair and changing his name and even more alarming that managed to evade everyone while staying in plain sight and writing novels and a magazine column.