WITH his rugged face and black leather jacket, Milovan “Cicko” Bjelica does not exude piety. But he shows great deference as he points to 4,000 names engraved on plaques on the walls of the Church of the Holy Martyr Saint Georgije, at Ravna Romanija, in the Bosnian Serb heartland east of Sarajevo.

The names, he explains, are those of Serb soldiers from the Romanija Corps who died during the siege of the Bosnian capital. “I knew maybe 2,000 of these soldiers personally,” said Mr Bjelica, former Chairman of the Assembly of Serb Sarajevo.

A name on another plaque is his own. It commemorates his role as founder of St Georgije’s, which was blessed by the Serb Orthodox Church in August last year. But Mr Bjelica, 45, is alleged to have done much more in post-war Bosnia than found a Church.

He was named in March by the US State Department and Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, the High Representative of the International Community in Bosnia, as one of two men central to the operation protecting Radovan Karadzic, the outlawed former leader of the Bosnian Serbs indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on 16 charges, including genocide and crimes against humanity.

Mr Bjelica was accused of having direct control of renegade Serb special security and intelligence units guarding Karadzic. He was sacked from his job, banned from international travel and had his bank assets frozen.

“All our people believe Radovan is a national hero,” he said. “Though I deny the charges laid against me, if I had my time again . . . I’d do exactly the same as I have done.”

There is no shortage of people in the Bosnian Serb territory, Republika Srpska, who share Mr Bjelica’s loyalties. An underground organisation known as the Preventiva, which includes intelligence officers, policeman, doctors, former soldiers and priests from an extremist wing of the Orthodox Church, has so far successfully exploited the divisions among Nato and the failure of international political will to arrest Karadzic.

Eight years after the end of a war in Bosnia that cost 200,000 lives, and despite the $5 million (£3 million) bounty on his head, Europe’s most wanted man remains at liberty in a 40km (25-mile) strip of territory in the east of the country.

The world’s attention long ago switched to the hunt for other evil men, first Osama bin Laden and now Saddam Hussein. Curiously, as Karadzic is not deemed an active threat to the West, there is not even a specific taskforce designated to capture the man considered an architect of “ethnic cleansing”.

“Karadzic is the head of a very large pernicious criminal organisation,” Lord Ashdown told The Times in his office high above Sarajevo’s Vrbanja Bridge. “Criminality funds him.”

For Lord Ashdown at least, Karadzic’s arrest remains a priority. “Karadzic remains for the Bosniaks a living proof of the failure of the Dayton agreement,” he said. “He also remains for investors — those who’d want to come to this country and put their money into it and reinflate the economy — a baleful and miserable curse that hangs over the Republika Srpska .”

Lord Ashdown launched Operation Balkan Vice in the spring, which targeted Karadzic’s protection ring by hitting the bank accounts of key players such as Mr Bjelica.

However the Karadzic network is widely believed to have penetrated the highest echelons of the republic’s political authorities. Karadzic is reported to retain close links with the leading authorities, including the President, the head of the National Assembly and the Interior Minister.

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