Mugabe, Bashir and Karadzic: my two-week tour of top tyrants

A couple of Tuesdays ago, I had a minor run-in with Mugabe in Egypt, following the armed robbery that was the Zimbabwean election. His bodyguards jostled me clear. "Bloody idiots!" Mugabe yelled at us.

Minutes earlier, I'd spotted Omar al-Bashir of Sudan in the Leaders' enclosure at the African Union summit. We weren't meant to be in there.

I ran up to the Sudanese president, asking whether Zimbabwe was proving a handy distraction - redirecting the spotlight from Darfur. He chose to ignore me.

The following Monday, I was off to The Hague to see Bashir indicted on three counts of genocide.

And exactly one week on from that, late-night breaking news on the radio: Karadzic captured!

My mobile rang. "Better get packing," my foreign editor told me. "You're on the first flight." No rest for the wicked then - in what was turning out to be my two-week tour of top tyrants.

Radovan Karadzic - who'd metamorphosed from bouffant-quiffed psychopath to Gandalf in his 13 years on the run - stands accused (in the indictment he shares with Mladic, his henchman) of "creating impossible conditions of life, involving persecution and terror tactics."

Words which could equally be applied to what's gone on in Darfur and Zimbabwe. Karadzic, caught. Bashir, indicted. Mugabe, probably pretty worried by now, I'd have thought.

We touch down in a grey Belgrade drizzle and drive straight to the cramped, smoke-filled office of Svetozar N Vujacic, lawyer to Karadzic. He'd been involved with the family, he told me, as we set up the camera, ever since Radovan's brother Luka ran down and killed a girl in a car crash three years ago.

He claimed to have been as surprised as anyone that Karadzic had been living as a new-age guru just down the road for the past couple of years.

Vujacic is a misty-eyed nationalist - and it wasn't long before his eyes were brimming with tears of indignation over his new client's capture. Representing him as a lawyer, he told me, was "like a surgeon being forced to operate on a friend."

"Yes," I observed, "you look pretty cut up yourself." It was lost in translation.

"Of course I'm upset," he went on. "Radovan is the greatest Serbian hero who ever lived." He told me that the man who'd invented the euphemism "ethnic cleansing", and who's accused by the Hague tribunal of "individual responsibility" for the worst war crimes in Europe since Hitler, was innocent.

"He committed no war crimes," he said. "He's proud of his record. He will defend himself and he will defend himself with truth."

He fixed me with a teary eye. "If it hadn't been for him, the Serbian people would have suffered an even worse genocide." A clue as to the likely truth-twisting tack the Balkans' most notorious neuro-psychiatrist may take when, like Milosevic before him, he's finally forced to confront his demons - and surviving victims of his alleged atrocities - in court.

We get an early morning tip off from Minja, our Serbian fixer. Well, OK, he read it in a tabloid, but it proved a very good source indeed. Buried deep in the paper, an address for a certain Dr Dragan David Dabic.

Flat 19, Block 267, Yuri Gagarin Street, New Belgrade. The least we could do was go and check it out. Amazingly, we were there two hours before the rest of the world's press turned up.

"Yup, that's him all right," said Mira the newsagent as she peered out of her kiosk and looked at the front-page pictures of one of her regular customers. "Such a nice man, so cultured. Unlike most of the people round here," she added.

The Madhouse bar just opposite was a noisy shrine to rabid Serb nationalism long before they found out the true identity of the "spiritual" man who, Darka the barmaid told me, had loved to sit and listen to gusle performances. (It's a rustic Balkan violiny-type thing that's not everyone's musical cup of tea.)

The bearded, top-knotted Dr Dabic had sat sipping red wine under photographic portraits of himself and his old mates Milosevic and Mladic.

How he must have chortled to himself as the Madhouse bon viveurs toasted their fugitive heroes and their forlorn dreams of a Greater Serbia.

Outside the Madhouse, a middle-aged lady, loaded with shopping, said: "I saw his hat blow off once as he ran for the bus over there."

That bus proved his undoing. Karadzic was nabbed as he sat on a Number 73, on his way into town. The lady pointed us towards Block 267. When we got there, the lights were on, but no one was home.

Luka, we learned, had been there all night clearing out his brother's effects. Crystal balls and stuff I imagine.

I climbed the six flights of stairs to Flat 19, hitting the light switch Radovan Karadzic must himself have hit hundreds of times as he made his way home from his conferences and alternative health seminars.

One neighbour told me that the "weird" tall man in black robes had always had a woman in tow. The Serbian tabloids are reporting today that his wife's not best pleased with this news.

Still, Dr Dragan Dabic - now clean shaven again, hair trimmed a bit and probably resembling once the old Radovan Karadzic the world better knows him as - has got bigger things to worry about than the revenge of what the Hague's top war crimes investigator called his "unattractive wife." (Being "in hiding from [his] womenfolk certainly had its benefits," he wrote.)

Karadzic and his lawyer appear resigned to the inevitability of his extradition. There are many who've waited a long time for this moment. The wives of the 8,000 Muslim men and boys killed at Srebrenica; those who survived the snipers of Sarajevo, where 10,000 died under the alleged direction of Karadzic.

The more optimistic are hailing the end of the Age of Impunity. And you can bet that Bashir and Mugabe will be watching this closely.

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