Radovan Karadzic never imagined that he would one day be arrested for war crimes when, in spring 1992, he issued a darkly prophetic warning to Alija Izetbegovic, Bosnia's first president.

“Do not think that you will not lead Bosnia-Herzegovina into hell, and do not think that you will not perhaps lead the Muslim people into annihilation, if there is war,” he warned Izetbegovic, who was seeking to lead Bosnia towards independence from the Serb-dominated rump of former Yugoslavia.

Bosnia did descend into hell, in more than three years of war that had been long prepared by Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in the Serbian capital Belgrade, and by Dr Karadzic himself at his headquarters in Pale, the mountain village overlooking Sarajevo.

Under the eyes of the world’s media Dr Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb leadership oversaw the destruction of Sarajevo, a once cosmopolitan, sophisticated European capital. Ringed by Serb snipers and artillery, it was turned into a giant shooting gallery in pursuit of the maniacal dream of an ethnically-pure ‘Greater Serbia’.

Outside the capital, in tiny villages and Ottoman-era cities such as Visegrad, Foca and Banja Luka, Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats were killed and deported en masse as their Serb neighbours turned on them with unimaginable ferocity.

Ironically, Radovan Karadzic, architect of Serbian ethnic cleansing, was not born either in Bosnia or Serbia but in Savnik, Montenegro, in June 1945.

He moved to Sarajevo after qualifying as a psychiatrist and was attached to Sarajevo’s football team. He also treated private patients. When one young couple went to see him for advice on their troubled marriage he advised the husband to beat his wife more often.

With his bouffant hair and hyperbolic manner, Karadzic, like many Balkan leaders, also fancied himself as a poet. Four volumes of his mordant verses were published, gloomy harbingers of the wars to come:

I hear misfortune walking

Vacant entourages passing through the city

Units of armed white poplars

Marching through the skies

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