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Bill Schiller was the Star's European Bureau chief when he interviewed Radovan Karadzic in January 1994.
It was a beautiful afternoon the day I met Radovan Karadzic. The sun was shining. The snow sparkled.
And the air was filled with the sound of Bosnian Serb artillery pounding the city of Sarajevo down in the valley below.
It was January 1994 and Karadzic's Bosnian Serb forces had had the city surrounded for 20 months.
I had actually passed smiling skiers on the road up to Karadzic's chalet-like office in the Serb-held enclave of Pale (pronounced PAH-lay). They wore sunglasses and ski outfits and schussed by seemingly without a care in the world.
It was a surreal scene in the midst of a conflict. But Karadzic's forces had the upper hand then, and enough arrogance to enjoy some recreation.
Karadzic himself greeted me with caution – no smile – and a firm handshake. His signature bouffant grey mane was instantly recognizable around the world in those days.
So too were the televised images of his handiwork: the siege of Sarajevo, the pillaging and plundering of Muslim villages across Bosnia and the reintroduction of death camps into Europe for the first time since World War II.
The name Radovan means "to be merry," but Karadzic clearly wasn't.
He was big and pale and looked a little sleepy in his blue-grey suit. He'd put on weight as the war had progressed and though he was only 48 at the time, he looked older and unhealthy. It was only later that I learned he was on anti-depressants at the time.
Slightly more than 20 years before, he had been a talented young graduate of medical school who was pursuing further studies in psychiatry. He was also a published poet. He was passionate about poetry.
He seemed an unlikely candidate to lead a war.
I remember marvelling at the outsized sense of his own self-importance, how delusional he was and, because of that, how dangerous.
"I do not hate Muslims," he sought to assure me several times throughout the interview.
But he did, of course.
And he and his dreaded military commander Ratko Mladic – who remains at large today – were carefully plotting how to push as many Muslims out as they could and kill the rest.
He and Mladic are accused of slaughtering more than 8,000 in Srebrenica.
Karadzic agreed to our interview under pressure: NATO troops were threatening to bomb him unless he allowed 143 Canadian peacekeepers in the so-called UN safe haven of Srebrenica to rotate out and be replaced by Dutch peacekeepers.
The Serbs were refusing. No one knew why.
In the interview Karadzic gave me his personal "guarantee" that the Canadians would not be harmed and a rotation would occur soon.
Eventually, he kept his word.
But on other matters he lied, bald-faced.
"We do not intend to take Srebrenica by force," he told me. "Either it stays as a Muslim enclave within our (planned) republic or they exchange it with us for another area."
When he told me he had had "many friends" who were Muslims, I doubted it.
But the following day, I went down into the valley and crossed the front line into Sarajevo and interviewed a man named Dr. Ismet Ceric.
He was a Muslim, the director of Sarajevo's Kosevo Hospital Psychiatric Clinic, and for a very long time Radovan Karadzic's mentor.
In his office, Ceric drew down a slender book from his library to show me a collection of Karadzic's poems entitled, The Black Fairy Tale, and opened it to the title page.
There, inscribed in Karadzic's own hand were the words, "To my friend Cera and sons, from my heart, 7 May 1990, Radovan."
Karadzic adored Ceric's mother and bought her flowers on every Muslim holy day. When he was overseas, he would telephone her.
"She used to call him, 'my son,' " said Ceric.
But within two years of dedicating his slim volume of poetry to his old mentor, Karadzic was raining down shells on the hospital where he once worked, on the city in which he once lived, on the people he once regarded as his dearest friends.
Ceric and others believe the shocking transformation took place during a period in which Karadzic transferred from Sarajevo to work at Dr. Dragisa Misovic Hospital in Belgrade.
Some believe he might have come under the influence of Serbia's military intelligence then.
He definitely came back to the city a changed man, Ceric said.
Whether Karadzic was a pawn of more powerful forces, like the late Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, or whether he was the master of his own fate, isn't known.
On that snowy day above Sarajevo I tried to press Karadzic on his poetry, tried to make him go back to that time when he seemed a different man.
He waved his hand at it, not dismissively, but with vigour, as though sweeping away a ghost from the past.
