THE LAST of the 161 suspects indicted for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia will be brought before the international court in The Hague this afternoon on 14 charges, including persecution, extermination and torture.
Goran Hadzic (52) was extradited from Serbia on Friday and taken to the UN detention unit at Scheveningen jail, where former Bosnian Serb military commander Gen Ratko Mladic and his political leader Dr Radovan Karadzic are already held.
When he appears before the judges, Hadzic – whose arrest last Wednesday came less than two months after that of Mladic, and removes a major obstacle to Serbia’s accession to the EU – will be asked to enter a plea to each one of the charges against him.
It is open to Hadzic to boycott the tribunal, though that appears unlikely.
However he may – like Mladic – argue he is not ready to enter a plea on his first appearance. In that case, he will be given 30 days within which to consider his response.
If he still does not plead on his second appearance, the three-judge trial chamber will enter not-guilty pleas on his behalf, as happened with 69-year-old Mladic earlier this month.
An ethnic Serb politician born in Croatia, Hadzic once infamously described himself as “a messenger for Slobodan Milosevic”, the former Yugoslav president who died of heart failure while on trial in 2006 and the man regarded by prosecutors as most culpable for the bloodshed during the 1990s.
Hadzic rose through the ranks of the Serbian Democratic Party during the 1980s, until in 1992 he was named president of the so-called Republic of Serbian Krajina.
He was indicted by the tribunal in The Hague in 2004 for his alleged involvement in the forcible removal and murder of thousands of civilians from the Republic of Croatia between 1991 and 1993.
“Virtually the whole Croat and non-Serb population of this area was forcibly transferred, deported or killed,” according to the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz.
The indictment refers specifically to the massacre in the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991, in which some 264 people taken from Vukovar hospital – many of them patients and mostly Croats – were systematically slaughtered in one of the first recorded atrocities of the war.
He is also charged in connection with at least three other massacres – at Dalj, Erdut and Lovas.