WATERLOO - The judge who read his indictment called the atrocities committed under former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic "truly scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history."

For 13 years he evaded capture, and for 13 years now Zulfeta Rizvic of Waterloo thought justice would never come.

But on Monday, Serbian security forces arrested Karadzic in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

He will face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity at a United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.

In July 1995, Serbian military carried out the genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the tiny mountain town of Srebrenica.

Later that year the judge called it "unimaginable savagery: thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson."

Some who survived Srebrenica now live in Waterloo, but they declined to speak to The Courier because the memories remain too painful.

Rizvic, who leads K.U.D. Kolo, Waterloo's Bosnian dance troupe, said she despises the smug confidence Karadzic, nicknamed the "Butcher of Bosnia," displayed for so many years after the war.

"He was so sure that he's never going to be caught; that he's never going to be in front of the judges, and he will never have to pay. I would like to see his face finally when he's in front of the court," she said.

Srdjan "Alex" Golub is one of a few dozen people in Waterloo of Serbian descent. A recent University of Northern Iowa graduate, he has a Serbian father and Croatian mother.

He applauded Karadzic's arrest as an important step toward closure for the victims of the war. But he hopes the Bosnian military leader Rasim Delic also faces his day in court. Delic was indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in 2005.

"I just hope everyone gets their turn," he said.

Golub said he sees a bias against Serbians in the Western world, because he never reads or hears of the crimes Bosnian Muslims committed against Serbians during the war.

"If you watch movies, they have all the mafia guys in Europe - it's (Serbian names) like Gordan, Dragan, Vladimir. They're all the snipers and all the bad guys," he said.

Golub said his family moved to Waterloo because of intense discrimination by Bosnian Muslims after the war. Nobody patronized his parents' restaurant in Sarajevo, and his father could not find a job. Authorities tried to make his family pay restaurant fees for two years before their restaurant even existed.

His Serbian uncles gained entrance to Australia, where many Serbians now live, shortly after the war because they spent four years in a prison camp, where they lost their teeth, suffered broken bones and were malnourished.

But Golub also acknowledged that the genocide carried out by Serbians as the worst violence of the war.

"It's not quite eye for an eye, it's an eye for eight eyes," he said.

Contact Jens Manuel Krogstad

at (319) 291-1580 or

jens.krogstad@wcfcourier.com.