Why is Radovan Karadzic on trial? Surely the Bosnian Serb leader should be ensconced in a comfortable think-tank somewhere, pontificating on the subject he knows best: bamboozling Western diplomats.

It’s a serious question. Until summer 1995, when he was finally indicted for war crimes, Radovan Karadzic was Our Friend. Had he manoeuvred a little more sharply and realised a little earlier that the game was up, he probably still would be.

During the early 1990s I covered the UN Bosnian peace talks in Geneva for The Times. They were a nauseating spectacle. Karadzic, like his boss and paymaster Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian President, was treated like a visiting statesman instead of a war criminal.

In Washington, London and Paris, teams of analysts pondered Karadzic’s every utterance in the vain hope that peace was around the corner. The Serbian poet, psychiatrist and Balkan warlord loved every minute of it, holding court, waving maps and issuing gnomic utterances. Who wouldn’t? We journalists, too, were part of the spectacle, building towers of analysis on hints and whispers.

True, these negotiations took place before the horrors of Srebrenica in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb militiamen tortured, machinegunned and then bulldozed up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys into mass graves. Karadzic is charged with genocide at Srebrenica. He is also charged with persecution, murder and extermination in a host of lesser-known towns and cities, such as Banja Luka, Visegrad and Zvornik.

Arguably, the Srebrenica massacre is unique only in the numbers of victims. Similar levels of cruelty and horror marked the Bosnian war from its outset in spring 1992. By that summer the Bosnian Serbs had set up a network of concentration camps. All of this was known. The Bosnian Serbs even let television crews into the camps.

I reported from Banja Luka for The Times in autumn 1992. The terror in the ancient Ottoman city was almost tangible as Serb militiamen organised the ethnic cleansing of Muslim and Catholic residents, before blowing up the city’s 16 ancient mosques. In Visegrad the river was choked with corpses of the murdered.

War criminal or statesman and peacemaker? It’s all a question of timing, it seems. So stop sulking in your cell, Radovan, and stand in the dock. Tell us who offered you what in exchange for peace and how you strung them along. You’ll get your revenge and we will doubtless have our cynical suspicions confirmed.

Complicity with Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide by Adam LeBor is published by Yale University Press

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