Catch me if you can

Will Osama and Saddam ever be found? If they fare as well as the Bosnian Serb mass murderers Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, perhaps not. In July the desperate duo celebrated eight years on the run from indictments by The Hague Tribunal, and the smart money has them at large a while longer. Mladic seems to have vanished, but the hunt for Karadzic goes on. It goes without saying that no one is quite sure where the bouffant-haired psychiatrist and cod poet is, but best guesses have him roving the remoter parts of Republika Srpska (the Serbian bit of Bosnia) and Montenegro.

The hunt drags on under the aegis of Carla del Ponte, The Hague’s Swiss-born chief prosecutor, and a junta of liberal lawyers and bureaucrats that makes a colander look watertight, backed by teams of clucking politicians. Karadzic, however, is protected by a network of ultra-nationalist peasants, gangsters and Orthodox clergy, which acts like a black hole for information: ‘Everything comes in, and nothing comes out,’ says one veteran Balkan watcher.