The Bosnian Serb wartime president, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity over his role in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, was captured by Serbia's security service on Monday after more than a decade in hiding.
On Tuesday afternoon more than 100 Serb nationalists including members of the far-right Obraz group, rallied on a central square, hurling chairs from a nearby cafe and firecrackers at riot police who tried to disperse the gathering.
The violence abated after Serbian Radical Party Secretary General Alexander Vucic addressed the protesters, urging them to show restraint. He thanked them for their "love of Serbia, the Serb people, Radovan Karadzic, and their willingness to fight for Serbia."
The former leader, now 63, had been practicing alternative medicine at a Belgrade clinic and writing as an "expert in quantum energy" for the local magazine Healthy Life under the pseudonym Dragan Dabic. A judge ruled on Tuesday that he can be handed over to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, but Karadzic's lawyer said he intends to appeal against the ruling.
The capture, which came two weeks after Serbian President Boris Tadic's pro-Western government came to power, has been welcomed by the European Union, the United States and the United Nations.
However the response from Russia, which has called for the Hague Tribunal to be closed down, has been more guarded.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko told reporters on Tuesday: "The arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, is an exclusively internal affair of Serbia. We hope the investigation and trial of Karadzic will be impartial."
"We place particular emphasis on this, as the Hague Tribunal has repeatedly shown a biased approach. Cases of acquittals and releases of several Bosnian Muslims and Kosovo Albanians, notably [former Kosovo prime minister] Ramush Haradinaj, whose involvement in war crimes is without doubt, are well known", the spokesman said.
