Radovan Karadzic was the leader of Republika Srpska, a territory comprised of Bosnian Serbs, during the Yugoslavian Conflicts of the early nineties. Dubbed the “Butcher of Bosnia”, he was a Montenegrin psychiatrist and poet before he became a politician. Nearly a year ago, Dr. Karadzic was sentenced to forty years of imprisonment for his involvement in the war, after a ten-year trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Switzerland.

 

This photograph – snapped by Dutch journalist Rob Siebelink in 1997 during a six hour long interview at his home – shows him tenderly holding his grandson in his arms. The surrounding hand-embroidered shapes, alternately violent and absurd, suggest that he cannot unchain himself from his reckless political life, even during private and loving family moments. They also serve as contrasting elements of his personality, paralleling the double-sided reality of war.

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