The fog of war in Bosnia often made it difficult to distinguish between hero and villain. However, in the case of Radovan Karadzic, the psychiatrist, poet and musician with a silvery mane of hair who became notorious as the Bosnian Serb political leader, it was never in doubt.

Only his deluded Bosnian Serb devotees who used to clear the way for him in the streets of Pale, the capital of his unrecognised Bosnian Serb republic, saw him as a conquering hero.

To the rest of Bosnia and to the West he was a ruthless war leader and war criminal. After 13 years on the run, his capture as he sat on a Belgrade bus, his long white beard making him look for all the world like an Indian mystic, was a comic end to a grisly career.

With that other Balkans pimpernel General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander who is still free, Karadzic was allegedly responsible for planning and ordering some of the worst atrocities in Europe since the second world war. In the Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, he will face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. If found guilty he could spend the rest of his life in jail.

Karadzic was never at the front of military actions; he left that to Mladic, the professional soldier. However, in his heart, prosecutors believe, he wanted nothing less than the destruction of Bosnia’s entire Muslim community. In his search for an ethnically pure Serbian state in Bosnia he guided the Bosnian Serbs down a road to infamy, destruction and ultimately defeat.

It was a contradiction because Karadzic was not even a native Bosnian. He was born in neighbouring Montenegro a month after the end of the second world war. As a young man he moved to Sarajevo and spent the next 20 years working in the psychiatric clinic of a city hospital. He had some close Muslim friends. That was before he was infected with the virus of Serbian nationalism caught, some say, while he was working in Belgrade.

He emerged as a political force in Bosnia in 1990 when the Serbian Democratic party was formed to protect Bosnian Serbs against perceived persecution by the Muslim and Croat majority. His leadership of a bloody Serb revolt against Bosnian independence, which began in 1992, added the term “ethnic cleansing” to the language of war as his forces overran two thirds of Bosnian territory, terrorising, expelling and killing hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians.

In addition, tens of thousands of Muslim women were raped in an organised campaign in which sex crimes were used as weapons of war and which he never condemned. By the time the war was over it had cost an estimated 200,000 lives and created more than a million refugees.

The name Radovan means “to be merry” and despite his sinister actions he was capable of charm. A visit to his Pale headquarters, a converted ski chalet used for the 1984 Sarajevo winter Olympics, was an unreal experience. His daughter Sonja ran the grandly titled International Press Centre in the town, vetting journalists who wanted to interview her father. She detested the foreign press which she said misunderstood and demonised him.

Appearing from his office, a converted bedroom on an upper floor, Karadzic, a big man invariably wearing a crumpled double-breasted suit, did not seek to cover up the truth through evasion like so many politicians. He simply lied whenever it suited him.

Thus during the siege of Sarajevo he denied Bosnian Serb forces had any snipers, when they were shooting civilians in the streets every day. He blamed the merciless Serb bombardment of the city on the fact that the Muslims had big guns, too. He also vehemently denied that ethnic cleansing was taking place and for a while he tried to deny the existence of the Bosnian Serb concentration camps where torture and murder were commonplace, claiming this was Muslim propaganda. He could turn facts on their head without blinking.

When he was not drunk on nationalism or, just as often, wine, he was obsessed by his stature as a poet. In 1982 he had published a book of children’s poems, There’s a Miracle, of which he was extremely proud. An earlier poem, Sarajevo, presciently talked of the city burning like a “mound of incense”.

Some analysts believed Karadzic’s determination to destroy Sarajevo stemmed from his sense of rejection by a city that had never acclaimed or accepted him as an artist.

The news of his arrest spread like wildfire through the city. One woman who is relieved is Ramiza Gurdic, 51. Just a few days ago she commemorated the 13th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.

Gurdic is one of the “the damned” – the mothers of Srebrenica whose 8,000 husbands and sons were rounded up and killed by Bosnian Serb forces in a carefully coordinated series of mass executions and ambushes after they overran the town on July 11, 1995. It was after the massacre that both Mladic and Karadzic were indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity.

Three years ago Gurdic buried Mustafa, her 19-year-old son, after his body was recovered from a mass grave. He lies today in the cemetery near Srebrenica which is shaped like a teardrop and contains more than 2,000 graves of the victims. She searches still for her husband Junuz, 42, and another son Mehrudin, 18, who are still missing.

The hellish echoes and images of the slaughter reverberate still in her head. Nothing will bring her husband and sons back or ease the nightmares.

“After all these years I still go to bed with pain and wake up with sadness,” she says.

The arrest of Karadzic – soon to be followed by the capture of Mladic, she hopes – may help her move forward again.

Times Recommends

• Times Charity Appeal: SolarAid
• Is it Black Monday all over again for Dubai?
• Behind the scenes at the biggest deal