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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Paul Lewis

Retracing the hunt for Karadzic

The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been arrested. Who do you turn to?

Newspapers often worry about their ability to compete with the blogosphere on breaking news, but during historical moments like this it is the old media that leads the way in terms of depth and analysis.

All the big titles can rely on heavyweight correspondents who met and wrote about Karadzic in the mid-1990s - and witnessed first-hand the brutal atrocities he was responsible for.

Maggie O'Kane, who filed some of the most memorable reports from the Sarajevo siege, has produced this video interactive charting the search for Karadzic. You can click on many of his suspected hideouts and trace O'Kane's search.

The Observer's Ed Vulliamy is another name synonymous with the breathtaking reportage that emerged from Bosnia. He revisited the region a few months ago in search of Karadzic and recounted his personal encounters with the warlord along the way. Expect more from him today.

Marcus Tanner, in today's Independent, recalls numerous encounters with Karadzic, including mistaking him for "a rather dotty-looking school teacher parading in front of an ethnic map of Bosnia and pointing at various counties with a cane".

The New York Times' John Burns pens an interesting portrait of Karadzic's self-image. His analysis, too, relies on his personal meetings with the former Bosnian Serb leader, including "one night in the late spring of 1992, [when,] brandishing a Cuban cigar and downing successive glasses of French Cognac, Mr. Karadzic admonished a reporter from The New York Times".

Hear the BBC's Jeremy Bowen's encounter with Karadzic here. One step ahead of the UK's public broadcaster is the PBS series Frontline's report on "the world's most wanted man".

For all the advantages big media has, you'll be hard stretched to find a more comprehensive resource charting the past four years of the search for Karadzic - including links to many of the above - than Finding Karadzic, an apparently anonymous blog.

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