It was a hunt for Nazi war criminals that brought Tucsonan Sol Littman face to face with a recently captured Bosnian Serb leader accused of genocide.
In what Littman called an ironic and curious meeting, he met Radovan Karadzic nearly 20 years ago as Littman tried to gain information on the whereabouts of Croats accused of war crimes during WWII.
As the director of Canada's Simon Wiesenthal Center, Littman was hoping Karad-zic could help him find Croats who had fled in the wake of the war and settled in the United States and Canada.
Karadzic was sharing his poetry and psychoanalysis of his fractured homeland as part of an international tour.
The pair met for about two hours, Littman said.
Calm and polite, Karadzic attributed much of the heightened tension in his country to repressed feelings of guilt felt by Croats, who had not coped with committing war crimes.
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"I was quite impressed with him," said Littman, who began spending winters in Tucson 15 years ago before moving from Canada permanently. "It never occurred to me that he would be the alleged author of terrible war crimes."
Karadzic is accused of helping to orchestrate a war that led to the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats and non-Serb civilians.
It's not surprising that it took so long to find Karadzic, as many wanted for war crimes, elude capture by keeping a low profile, said Littman, a visiting scholar with the University of Arizona's Center for Judaic Studies.
"First, I hope he gets a fair trial," Littman said. "And if he committed those crimes, I hope he pays for them."
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