ONE of the world's most wanted fugitives, Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade last month by the Serbian authorities after an alleged tip-off from a foreign intelligence service. Karadzic had been fugitive since 1995 after having been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Karadzic was born in 1945 in Petnjica, Republic of Montenegro. In 1989 he co-founded a political party called the "Serbian Democratic Party" (Srpska Demokratska Stranka - SDS) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose objective at the time was to convince Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia to remain part of Yugoslavia.

In a March 1992 referendum, Bosnia gained independence from Yugoslavia and in April was recognized by the United Nation as an independent state. Later that year, Karadzic became the first president of Republika Srpska, a breakaway state of Serbs in Bosnia. He was president until 1996.

In 1995, Karadzic was indicted by the International Criminal Court along with Col. Gen. Ratko Mladic (currently at large). He is accused of personal and command responsibility for numerous war crimes committed against non-Serbs in his role as supreme commander of the Bosnian Serb Armed Forces and president of the National Security Council of the Republika Srpska.

Among others, he is accused of ordering the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, the siege of Sarajevo, ordering that United Nations personnel be taken hostage in May-June 1995.

Until his capture, Karadzic lived under the false name of Dr. Dragan Dabic. He also obtained and used a false ID and practiced alternative medicine at a private medical clinic.

He has was extradited on July 30 to The Hague, and incarcerated in the International Criminal Court detention center in Scheveningen, one of the districts of The Hague.

Karadzic was captured just a few days before the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz was due to visit Serbia, just a few weeks after the formation of a new Serbian government, and a few months after the Belgrade government signed the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) treaty with the European Union.

The strangest thing is that the new government was formed between pro-European/democratic parties led by the Democratic Party that was the party of former (assassinated) prime minister of Serbia Dr. Zoran Djindjic and the Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalisticka Partija Srbije - SPS), the party of former President of Serbia and Yugoslavia Slobodan Milosevic.

According to political observers there are some pertinent questions that should be asked. These include:

1. Given that Karadzic's arrest took place after President Vojislav Kostunica was no longer in power in Serbia, was Kostunica protecting him all along?

2. Did the Democratic Party decide that it was now time to give Karadzic up since they formed a new coalition government with the Socialist Party of Serbia?

3. Did the Socialist Party of Serbia know the whereabouts of Karadzic, and used that information to arrest him in order to bring their party closer to the West?

Whether we get the answers to these questions or not, the international community will never allow Karadzic to walk free again.

- Ivan Simic is a Serbian journalist based in Belgrade.