When Vildana Selimbegovic published a list of the 14,385 people who were killed during the siege of Sarajevo, there was one entry in the sea of names that stood out.

Mrs Selimbegovic, 45, now editor of the country’s leading news magazine, lost her husband, Feris, during the long and horrific bombing of her city in the 1990s. His name and date of birth now sit alongside the thousands of others killed in the massacre masterminded by Radovan Karadzic.

Yet when Dr Karadzic was finally captured this week, Mrs Selimbegovic was in no mood to toast his arrest. “There were some celebrations on the streets when the news broke but it was mainly people who are barely old enough to even remember the war. My 20-year-old son went, but I stayed at home,” she said.

An organised event planned for the next day was cancelled after only a dozen people turned up. Most Sarajevans, living in the lingering aftermath of Dr Karadzic’s brutality, are unable to rejoice.

“Karadzic has left a shattered, war-torn country and his legacy lives on. After almost 13 years of international administration there is no economic hope in sight, nor there is any chance of bridging the gap between the ethnic groups. Bosnia is a failed state by all parameters,” Mrs Selimbegovic said.

Twelve years after the war ended with more than 100,000 victims – including the 8,000 men and boys executed in Srebrenica – Bosnia and Herzegovina is now run as an international protectorate and divided along ethnic lines into two entities.

The atmosphere in both the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Bosnian Serb Republic has become one of apathy and despair amid severe economic hardship and political paralysis caused by corruption and ethnic tensions.

Unemployment is estimated to be more than 40 per cent and there is virtually no foreign investment or industry. Systemic corruption is rife.

Sarajevo, once hailed as the European Jerusalem for the beauty of its Christian churches, Muslim mosques and Jewish synagogues, still bears the scars inflicted by Dr Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, now the UN war crimes tribunal’s most-wanted fugitive. Despite years of international reconstruction effort the streets are riddled with craters. Nihad Hadzic, 56, fought in the defence of Sarajevo and managed to keep his two sons, now aged 23 and 25, alive by hiding them in the cellar of their home. He used to work in a car factory but is struggling to make ends meet working as a cab driver, while both his sons are unemployed despite having completed university.

“I am sorry I didn’t put them on the humanitarian convoys to some foreign country. At least they would have had some kind of future, while like this it turns out I have sentenced them to live in this prison-like environment. Of course I am happy that Karadzic will be put behind bars, but what good does it do us after this years living in misery?” Mr Hadzic said.

Smajla Ibrahimovic, 23, a student from a village near Srebrenica, lost most of her male family members, including her father and both grandfathers, in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 – the worst single atrocity in Europe since the Second World War.

She said: “My first reaction was that of fear when I heard that that man was simply walking freely in the centre of Belgrade and leading a normal life. All he had to do is grow hair and a beard. I don’t see what punishment, after all these years, could make up for the things we suffered.”

In the Serb Republic, which was founded and almost entirely “ethnically cleansed” by Dr Karadzic, its first president, he is still hailed as a national hero. A businessman from Pale, where Dr Karadzic lived before and during the war, told The Times: “He fought for his people but they are trying to pin all sorts of things on him now. If it wasn’t for Karadzic and Mladic, the Serb population would have been decimated at the hands of the Muslims and the Croats.”

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