The man who failed to show up at his trial on war crimes charges in The Hague yesterday, has always been a shrewd manipulator of the press. I interviewed Radovan Karadzic properly only once, in London in 1992, when he was here to attend a 'peace conference' while his troops were waging war across Bosnia-Hercegovina.

Meeting me in his hotel room, he was solicitous and polite, charming to a fault. The Serbs were much misunderstood, he said, and always had been. They were the victims in the war that had just broken out.

The history of Serb suffering is well documented. But Karadzic's line was baloney, designed to confuse and sow doubt while his troops did their work of 'ethnic cleansing', and now he is on trial at the war crimes court in The Hague.

The media spinning of his trial continues, nevertheless and the way the media of the country's rival halves tells the story of the trial shows much about Karadzic's success in dividing the country.

In Sarajevo, seat of power of the Muslim-Croat federation, Karadzic's no-show before the judges yesterday was big news this morning, covered by state-run television and the newspapers.

A report in top-selling Sarajevo daily, Dnevni Avaz, splashed on his refusal to appear before the court and showed contrasting pictures, one of protests outside the court by widows of some of the 8,000 men and boys killed at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces in 1995, and another of a group of men drinking beer in a Belgrade bar decorated with pictures of Karadzic and his military sidekick General Ratko Mladic.

The article was openly hostile to Karadzic. "The coward did not have courage to face the judges" the headline said.

In Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb-run half of Bosnia, Bosnian Serb media gave limited coverage of the trial, state-run television producing a five minute report featuring the bare news plus a few interviews with Bosnian Serbs insisting their former leader is not guilty.

News of the release on Tuesday of another former Bosnian Serb leader, Biljana Plavsic, presented as a former Bosnian Serb leader who had sacrificed herself for the existence of the Bosnian Serb's 'Republika Srpska', ran for up to an hour.

In Sarajevo, Sociologist Mirsad Abazovic told my colleague that the way the country's media does its reporting of events big and small is cementing a divide fomented during the 1992-95 war.

"The information ordinary people receive discourages them from giving any thought to conflicting facts and from questioning the popular view," Abazovic said.

After Karadzic's arrest last year, the Bosnian Serb media splashed on the sensational life of "Dragan Dabic", the bizarre mystic healer character Karadzic used as an alias while on the run, rather than on the crimes of which Karadzic stands accused, veteran reporter Nidzara Ahmetasevic added.

In Belgrade, reports on the trial made it only onto most newspapers' inside pages.

Reporting like this will, of course, do little to reconcile the different views of history held in Bosnia-Hercegovina.

In this blog, journalists of global news wire AFP blog about the news they report and the challenges they face covering events from Baghdad to Beijing, the White House to Darfur. Peter Cunliffe-Jones is AFP online news editor.