Karadzic and Bosnian Serb wartime military leader Ratko Mladic are charged with genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Neither the trial chamber nor the prosecution mentioned last week's arrest of Mladic in Serbia, nor did Karadzic. Yesterday, the Prosecutor's Office said it was considering the possibility of filing a motion for joining the cases against Karadzic and Mladic.

In 1995, a joint indictment charged the two men with war crimes in Bosnia, including a siege of Sarajevo during which thousands of people were killed. Later that year, they were also charged with genocide in Srebrenica. The cases were separated in July 2008, after Karadzic's arrest and transfer to The Hague, so that the Karadzic trial could begin.

So far, the prosecution has presented more than one-third of evidence and about 70 witnesses, planning to finish their arguments by the end of spring 2012.

A former president of the Ilidza municipal executive committee, Radimir Kazunovic, began testifying today, describing communication within the Bosnian Serb political hierarchy, from Karadzic to his subordinates.

Since the trial began on 26 October 2009, more than 70 prosecution witnesses described the years of siege and terror in Sarajevo, including several members of the UN whom Bosnian Serb troops had taken hostages, expert witnesses, UN military commanders during the Bosnian war, and the international mediators who had tried to negotiate a peaceful outcome in Bosnia.

Karadzic has no counsel. Over the past 18 months, he has resorted to every procedural possibility to stall the trial.

He is accused as the architect of the policy of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and one of the main participants in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at forcibly and permanently removing Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs from large parts of Bosnia.

Karadzic is charged with ethnic cleansing which in some parts of Bosnia had the extent of genocide, including Srebrenica, where thousands of Muslim men were killed in July 1995, the siege of Sarajevo, and the taking of UN members as hostages.

Mladic is charged with the same crimes.