It was like something out of The Odessa File: Former Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, wanted for 13 years for some of the most heinous war crimes ever perpetrated, was captured this week while quietly practicing holistic medicine under an assumed name in Belgrade.

He is now scheduled to be taken to The Hague, where he will face charges of genocide against European Muslims during the dark days of the Baltic “ethnic cleansing” campaigns of the ’90s. Let us hope justice fares better with him than it did with the late, unlamented Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslavian president who died in custody in March 2006 while awaiting trial before the international tribunal in The Hague.

Karadzic, a psychiatrist who carried his own satchel of mental pathologies along with him, had come to power in the Yugoslav state of Bosnia with the approval of Milosevic and the support of a large nationalistic Bosnian Serb population. Warren Zimmerman, the last American ambassador to what was then Yugoslavia, later called him “the Heinrich Himmler of the Balkans,” and wrote, “After about a year of seeing Karadzic, I came to believe that he was mad.”

Karadzic is accused of ordering and overseeing the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, turning that beautiful jewel box of a city — site of the 1984 Winter Olympics — into a charnel house of death and destruction. He is also charged with responsibility for the 1995 Srebrenica Massacre, in which almost 8,000 unarmed Muslim Serbs were executed in that town after United Nations peacekeepers were intimidated into abandoning the city, taking more than 10,000 Muslim women and children with them. Leaving the adult men behind was the price the Dutch U.N. force commander had to pay for saving the women and children. Serb commander Ratko Mladic had assured his U.N. counterpart that his forces wanted only to “interrogate” the Muslim men.

Karadzic had eluded law enforcement authorities since then, hidden apparently by a network of nationalistic Serbians who moved him from place to place ahead of international detectives. He finally settled in Belgrade with the help of this underground network, growing a bushy white beard and moustache and working at a holistic medical center.

There is plenty of evidence to link Karadzic to the Bosnian Serb political effort during its hellish campaign of ethnic cleansing; whether prosecutors can link him directly to the Srebrenica atrocity remains to be seen. There is videotape showing him in the mountains above Sarajevo during that siege; he’s shown inviting visiting Russian dignitaries to pour automatic weapons fire down on the suffering city.

With the arrest of Karadzic, Ratko Mladic remains the only major suspected war criminal of the Balkan conflict still at large. Experts say Karadzic’s capture improves the odds of getting Mladic, the reasoning apparently being that genocidal loyalty runs only so deep and Karadzic might be persuaded to drop a dime on his former military aide in an effort to make a deal.

This would not disturb us overmuch. Evidence indicates that Mladic was the actual triggerman in many of the atrocities committed at Karadzic’s behest; we would not mind the international court letting Karadzic live, if the life was long enough, and unpleasant enough.