Is it just me or does everyone wonder how corruptible they might be?

Dr Dragan Dabic looks like a cross between a chilled-out, new-age guru and Father Christmas.

In the alternative-medicine community of Belgrade, he is well known for his healing work with cancer patients and his calm, soothing manner.

He conducts public meditation workshops and writes a column for the magazine Healthy Life.

In his spare time, Dabic writes poetry, leading a local writers’ group, and recently published a book of poems.

Dabic wears his thick, white hair long with a kooky little topknot, apparently useful in attracting positive energy to the head of the wearer.

Thirteen years ago Dr Dragan Dabic was Radovan Karadzic, a warlord who allegedly drove 1.5 million Muslims and Croats from their homes and killed thousands more.

In 1995 Karadzic reportedly got tired of housing prisoners in his concentration camp at Srebrenica.

It is alleged he opened the gates, told the women and girls to run, and stood by and watched his soldiers slaughter 8000 men and boys, most of them found buried in mass graves with their wrists bound together.

The Bosnian civil war is obviously complicated. But, from what I understand, no one saw the alleged ethnic cleansing coming.

Serbs, Croats and Turks had lived side by side for centuries in Yugoslavia.

In 1990 Bosnia was a progressive, artistic, barely religious, culturally diverse melting pot.

Muslims who knew Karadzic before or after the civil war say they cannot connect the man they know with the infamous war criminal.

Karadzic grew up poor in the hills of Montenegro. His father was a political prisoner of the Tito regime. When he was 15 Radovan moved to the city and worked hard to study medicine.

At university he met and married Ljubljana and moved to an ethnically diverse neighbourhood where they enjoyed the friendships of Serbs, Muslims and Croats alike.

Some of his neighbours from the 1960s still live in the same building.

They remember the young doctor as kind and generous, a charming Bohemian who hung out with writers and poets, staying up all night to debate life literature and art.

Mostly, Karadzic’s poetry was ignored.

That includes “Take no pity let’s go kill that scum in the city”: a poem he later used as a slogan in his war.

Karadzic’s children’s poetry was popular. A book of published works, There are Miracles, is still a favourite in Serbian homes.

The young Karadzic eventually became a psychiatrist, studying in the US and working as the team psychologist for a Sarajevo soccer team.

He bought a construction company, gambled, raised two children and remained a high-profile poet in his groovy, ethnic neighbourhood.

Commentators claim everything to the late 1980s was part of Karadzic’s quest for glory: a craving for fame that was eventually satisfied by politics.

At first, Karadzic joined the Greens, but he did not last long.

A peasant boy at heart, he was raised to the tune of protest songs about ancient battles against the Turks (Muslims).

So which one is the real Radovan Karadzic?

Is it the groovy poet with a topknot and a gift for healing? Or is it the alleged killer who turned guns and shells on his former colleagues, neighbours, friends and patients?

Did power corrupt Radovan Karadzic? For his alleged victims and their families, it probably doesn’t matter.

The man is finally on his way to The Hague.