Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, accused of Europe’s worst genocide since the Holocaust, today claimed his people were only defending themselves against Islamic fundamentalists.
In his opening defence statement at the UN war crimes tribunal, Karadzic denied any intention to carry out ethnic cleansing and said the objective was to protect lives and property during the violent 1990s break-up of the former Yugoslavia.
The Serb “cause is just and holy,” Karadzic said as he began his two-day statement. “We have a good case. We have good evidence and proof.”
Karadzic (64), faces two counts of genocide and nine other counts of murder, extermination, persecution, forced deportation and the seizing of 200 UN hostages. He faces possible life imprisonment if convicted.
Prosecutors say he orchestrated a campaign to destroy the Muslim and Croat communities in eastern Bosnia to create an ethnically pure Serbian state.
It included the 44-month siege of the capital of Sarajevo and the torture and murder of hundreds of prisoners in inhuman detention camps. That violence culminated in the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and youths in one horrific week in July 1995 at Srebrenica, the worst bloodbath in Europe since the Second
World War.
Karadzic sought to trace the origin of Bosnia’s full-scale civil war to the Muslims’ rejection of all power-sharing proposals. A core group of Muslim leaders in Bosnia was “plotting and conniving,” Karadzic told the court in The Hague. “They wanted Islamic fundamentalism and they wanted it from 1991.”
Prosecutors are trying “to present me as a monster because they do not have any evidence” that I committed a crime, he said. “This indictment should not have been issued in the first place.”
Karadzic is the most important figure to be brought to trial since former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, who died of a heart attack in 2006 before his case was concluded.
Karadzic, president of the breakaway Bosnian Serb state, negotiated with diplomats, UN officials and peace envoys; he appeared often in the media; and he set the tone and pace of the 1992-95 Bosnian war that killed an estimated 100,000 people.
In his statement, Karadzic portrayed himself in the pre-war years as a conciliator who had been prepared to compromise on Serb ambitions to preserve the Yugoslav federation or to unite predominantly Bosnian Serb territory with Serbia.
“The Serbs were claiming their own territories, and that is not a crime,” he said. “It was never an intention, never any idea let along a plan, to expel Muslims and Croats” from the autonomous Republika Srbska.
Bosnia’s Serbs “wanted to live with Muslims, but not under Muslims,” when they would be deprived of fundamental rights, he declared.
Karadzic rarely referred to specific allegations in the indictment, concentrating instead on what he described as the victimisation of the Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, which prompted them to take up arms. He denied charges that the Serbs ran concentration camps where non-Serbs were tortured and killed, saying the camps were “collection centres” for refugees. “It was a transit point for persons who had nowhere to go because of the
fighting going on around them,” he said.
He also denied that Serb forces deliberately targeted a market during the siege of Sarajevo, an attack that killed 68 people.
Karadzic said in the run-up to the conflict he repeatedly accepted peace proposals put forward at international conferences. He accused Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic of rejecting or reneging on them.
He charged that Serbs were the first victims of violence, killed by Muslims who “had blood up to their shoulders.”
He said: “Their conduct gave rise to our conduct.”
Karadzic, who is representing himself, boycotted the opening of his trial four months ago, claiming he had not had enough time to study more than a million pages of trial documents.
Accusing Karadzic of obstructing the proceedings, the judges allowed him to continue his self defence, but appointed a veteran British defence lawyer, Richard Harvey, to take over if Karadzic was found to again hinder the case.
Karadzic has refused to cooperate with Mr Harvey, who was in the court today but not at the same table as Karadzic.
The trial is likely to be one of the last handled by the court. The UN Security Council has asked the tribunal to wind up its cases and appeals and close down, leaving future trials to national courts in the former Yugoslav republics.
The court, set up in 1993, has indicted 161 political and military officials, of which 40 cases are still continuing.
Two key figures are fugitives and could still be brought to trial in The Hague: Karadzic’s former top general, Ratko Mladic, and Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic.
AP