THE HAGUE: Once-feared Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic will Thursday stand before UN war crimes judges to learn if, 20 years on, they find him guilty of the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II.

The notorious political leader faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity arising out of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war in which 100,000 people perished and 2.2 million were forced from their homes.

Now 70, he will become the highest-profile politician to be judged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), after former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died in his prison cell in The Hague in 2006 while on trial.

Karadzic, as the leader of the breakaway Republika Srpska, is accused of taking part in a criminal scheme to "permanently remove Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat inhabitants from territories claimed" by the Bosnian Serbs through a campaign of ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate killings, persecutions and terror.

Karadzic's verdict "will for sure be one of the most important in the history of the tribunal," ICTY chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz told AFP.

It will focus a spotlight on "the responsibility of political leaders for the suffering of their own people," he said. A poet and a trained psychiatrist, Karadzic notably stands accused of two charges of genocide, including the 1995 massacre in the UN-protected enclave in Srebrenica where almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in cold blood before being dumped in mass graves.