Celebrations into small hours on streets of war-battered city

Bosnians shout for joy but Karadzic's arrest cannot heal the scars of war, writes Peter Murtagh in Sarajevo.

Bosnians shout for joy but Karadzic's arrest cannot heal the scars of war, writes Peter Murtaghin Sarajevo.

NOT EVEN an unseasonal thunderstorm and cloudburst could dampen their celebrations.

When word came through that Radovan Karadzic had been arrested in Belgrade on foot of a warrant from the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, hundreds of Sarajevans took to the streets of their still battered and bruised city and celebrated into the small hours.

The thunder and rain came at about 11pm on Monday - about the same time that news filtered through that their erstwhile tormentor had been caught in the Serbian capital, Belgrade. Hundreds took to the streets of Sarajevo and converged on Freedom Square honking horns, cheering and shouting their joy until well after 3am.

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Karadzic, a Montenegro-born psychiatrist of humble origin, emerged as the self-styled "head of state" of Serbian-dominated areas in Bosnia as Yugoslavia imploded in the early 1990s. Together with Ratko Mladic, commander of the Bosnian Serb army, he inflicted unfathomable horrors on Sarajevo, as well many other parts of Bosnia and parts of Croatia.

Indicted for multiple war crimes, the pair evaded arrest for 13 years. While Mladic remains at large, Karadzic can expect shortly to be in The Hague.

"He should get the same as Saddam Hussein," Ernad Deni Comaga (21) said yesterday. An activist with Bosnia's Democratic Youth Movement, Comaga was happy at the turn of events: "It is like a little piece of freedom come back into Bosnia."

Irena Cetin was more circumspect, still bearing personal scars from the Serbian 43-month siege and shelling of Sarajevo during the 1992-1995 war. "There is no justice here," she said. "This will not change anything." Like many Sarajevans, her background is ethnically mixed - her mother was an orthodox Christian, her father a Roman Catholic. Karadzic, she said, was responsible for "everything that happened to me".

"I lost my father," she explained. "We went to find some trees [ during the siege]. I was with him when the grenade exploded. He was killed and so were others but I was the only one not hurt by it." That was in August 1993, and there is a tear now in her left eye. She turns away.

Analysts with the European Union Force in Bosnia are monitoring reaction but are hopeful there will not be any backlash in the semi-autonomous Republika Srpska, the Serbian-dominated self-governing part of Bosnia recognised under the Dayton agreement that ended the fighting in Bosnia.

"There's always a danger there could be a backlash from the right-wing chetnik [ extreme Serbian nationalist] element," said one analyst, "but on a scale of one to 10, I'd rate it around one or two."

The Bosnian Serbs have said they will secede if their republic's survival is threatened. "Karadzic is not Republika Srpska and Republika Srpska has not been created by Radovan Karadzic," said Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik.

"Republika Srpska was created based on a wish of the people."

Many Sarajevans look back on the war and remember that no one came to help them as they were being bombed from the hills above the city or picked off by Serb snipers. They have few expectations.

"Is this possible?" asked Minka, a pensioner, hurrying to the market yesterday. "I simply cannot believe it."

"Whatever lies behind his arrest is now unimportant," said Monja Matovic (24). "The arrest itself is significant for all of us who have been through the war and suffering." A flag draped around his shoulders, Ernad Deni Comaga looks to the future, to recreating the multi-ethnic Sarajevo that used to be.

"Justice will be done for all of us in Bosnia when all the people around the world, the people who left, who are in exile, come back here - Bosnian, Serb people and Croatia people - when they all come back home and live together without hate and violence."