Jay Surdukowski, a young lawyer at Sulloway & Hollis in Concord, knows the behind-the-scenes details of the genocide case against Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who was returned to The Hague yesterday to stand trial after 12 years at large.

He also knows about Karadzic's literary taste and style.

Surdukowski spent two summers working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia when he was in law school, where he helped build the case against Karadzic. And he published a lengthy and award-winning law review article about the leader's nationalist poetry. In the article, Surdukowski argues that Karadzic's poems, which have been published widely in Eastern Europe, should be used in the genocide case against him.

"It's when you take the poetry and you combine it with poetic actions," Surdukowski said. "I think it is part of the mental element of what it is to destroy a people."

Karadzic was indicted by the tribunal in 1995 and charged with genocide and crimes against humanity. As the president of the Bosnian Serb republic in the 1990s, he is the alleged architect of the Srebrenica Massacre, which killed more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys, and accused of managing the lengthy Siege of Sarajevo, which claimed thousands of lives.

But since his indictment, the flamboyant psychiatrist and politician had gone underground. Last week, it became clear that he had been living openly in Serbia under an assumed name. He had dramatically changed his appearance - donning a thick, white beard and a series of ponytails. And

he had been practicing alternative medicine, even publishing in journals. Experts on his case said they would not have recognized him if they'd seen him on the street.

Karadzic also continued publishing poems and other literature, which were popular among sympathetic Serbian nationalists in the region.

Surdukowski said that when he first proposed his article to the Michigan Journal of International Law, one of the nation's top-ranked law reviews, he encountered some pushback. But the article - "Is Poetry a War Crime?" - was ultimately accepted and won an award for scholarly writing at the University of Michigan Law School, where Surdukowski was a student.

Since Karadzic's arrest, the article has attained new acclaim. A blog on the website of The New Yorker cited Surdukowski's argument. And editors from Harper's have contacted Surdukowski about publishing excerpts in its Readings section. Nearly 150 people have downloaded the article in the past week - an unusual number for an academic piece on an esoteric subject. A project to translate it in Bosnia is under way.

Literary consensus seems to be that, although Karadzic's poems have achieved popularity among his political allies, they are not high art.

"They are kind of violent. They are kind of banal. They're not that interesting," Surdukowski said. "They have this sort of surrealist appreciation of violence."

Surdukowski said he has enjoyed his newfound celebrity, but he is more excited about Karadzic's arrest and pending trial than he is about the emerging interest in his scholarship.

"The attention is some small consolation, seeing that for all eternity my name will be linked on Google to one of the most infamous accused war criminals of all time," he joked.

During his two summers at the tribunal, Surdukowski worked on the case of Jovinka Stanisic, one of Karadzic's allies, and on the case of Naser Oric, a Muslim leader on the opposite side of the Bosnian conflict. But the many war crimes cases there were interconnected, and Surdukowski recalls reading transcripts of conversations where Karadzic asked about arms shipments and made other military and strategic plans. The arrest closes an important chapter in the region's history, Surdukowski said.

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