Karadzic guilty /not guilty
02 March 2010, 08:39 AM
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Karadzic guilty /not guilty
Karadzic opens defence with retelling of history
• I was servant of the people, says Bosnian Serb leader
• ITN and Guardian attacked for 'distorted' camp reports
The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic takes the stand at his war crimes trial at The Hague. Photograph: Reuters TV
He is accused of masterminding the worst crimes in Europe since the *****. His tormentors seek to portray him as a "monster".
But in the long-awaited self-portrait delivered yesterday from the dock of a war crimes tribunal, Radovan Karadzic painted himself as a misunderstood and much-maligned anti-communist dissident.
The bombastic warlord associated more than anyone else with the Bosnian bloodbath and the pogroms of "ethnic cleansing", it transpires, was all along the Vaclav Havel of the Balkans.
It is almost 15 years since the end of the war in Bosnia that left 100,000 people dead, two-thirds of them Muslims mostly killed by Serbs. Karadzic was the Bosnian Serb political leader and military commander-in-chief. Cheated of justice, the victims' families have waited a long time to see Karadzic in the dock.
And yesterday, in a four-hour soliloquy behind bulletproof glass at the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the 64-year-old for the first time laid out his version of what happened in the 1992-95 conflict.
Predictably, he rubbished the charges against him.
"They're trying to convict us for something we never did," he said. "There should have been no indictment against me in the first place … There is no Serb responsibility."
The record strongly suggests otherwise. Dozens of books have been written about the bloodshed in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Millions of pages of testimony have accumulated through years of war crimes trials, laying out in exhaustive detail how a ruthless political mafia led a collapsing country into an orgy of sadistic butchery.
Srebrenica
A solid body of case law has been established, creating juridical facts such as that what happened in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in July 1995 was an act of genocide by Bosnian Serbs seeking to eliminate Bosnian Muslims.
But Karadzic was having none of it. He insisted he bent over backwards repeatedly to save a country he is widely seen as having destroyed.
"The Serbs tried to defend themselves by making endless concessions," he declared. "We had five conferences and five peace plans. I, the accused, agreed to four of them … There were 12 ceasefires in Sarajevo, 11 of them were breached by the army of the Muslim party."
In the autobiography presented yesterday, Karadzic was a reluctant politician with no ambition to be a leader, purely a "servant" of his people. He tried self-deprecation, but occasionally slipped up: "I don't want to defend myself by saying that I was not important."
Frequently he shifted into a third person narrative as if talking about someone else. "Karadzic had been a dissident since 1968," he said.
In a dark suit and white shirt, playing professorially with his spectacles and constantly rummaging through his shock of silver hair, Karadzic was confident and combative.
Unlike many of his Serb co-defendants, he was also courteous. There was no sneering, no theatrics, no attempt to disrupt the proceedings.
But for many of those watching and listening to the Karadzic narrative, the former Bosnian Serb leader was from another planet.
While dismissing the charges against him, he failed to address any of the specific 11 counts, ranging from the mass murder at Srebrenica to the 43-month siege of Sarajevo carried out by forces under his command, from the hostage-taking of more than 200 UN soldiers to the mini-gulag of camps his subordinates erected in the summer of 1992 where thousands of Bosnian Muslims died.
The latter brought a brazen denial. The Muslim and Croat inmates of Trnopolje camp in the summer of 1992 near the purged town of Prijedor were "free people" who were managing their own "collection centre" after having run away from the war and finding themselves stranded.
He went on to specifically attack ITN and the Guardian, which broke the story of these camps in the summer of 1992, reporting on scenes of emaciated men imprisoned behind barbed wire. Karadzic said the journalists, Penny Marshall and Ed Vulliamy, had abused his hospitality. He had flown them from London to north-west Bosnia to inspect the camps and they had wilfully distorted what they found there. He alleged that the reporters had entered a storage area secured behind barbed wire and filmed "three people" on the other side, making it look as if they were incarcerated. "I don't know how Penny Marshall can sleep," he said.
The four-hour performance – Karadzic is defending himself with the help of legal assistants – was a long history lecture dwelling on the perennial victimhood of the Serbs, with the villains ubiquitous and formidable – Bosnian Muslim jihadists; Croatian fascists; the Turks reassembling an Ottoman empire; the Germans victoriously completing in 1991 what they started in 1941 with the **** occupation of Yugoslavia; Nato; the Americans; the Vatican.
"I stand here before you not to defend the mere mortal that I am but to defend the greatness of a small nation in Bosnia-Herzegovina … I will defend that nation of ours and their cause, which is just and holy," Karadzic declaimed.
That may play well with the television audience back home in a Bosnia now more entrenched in its ethnic division than when Karadzic was in his prime. But the tour of 500 years of Balkan history did little to mitigate the 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity that Karadzic faces.
Paranoia
What Karadzic and his cohorts were stopping was the "Green Transversal" – the alleged Bosnian Muslim role helping to establish an Islamist caliphate from "the Great Wall of China to the Adriatic".
For veteran Balkan-watchers, it was a blast from the past, a rerun of the paranoia and propaganda that was the nightly staple diet on Serbian state television throughout the 1990s.
Karadzic was on the run for 13 years until apprehended on a Belgrade bus under a fake identity and unrecognisable as a Serbian new-age quack in the summer of 2008.
He boycotted the opening of the trial last year and has repeatedly delayed the proceedings, rejecting defence lawyers and maintaining he needs more time to prepare and wade through the mountains of evidence.
But yesterday he was methodical and well-prepared, peppering his arguments with PowerPoint projections of TV clips and documentary footage.
When the trial opened in October with a Karadzic boycott, the court heard a tape with the defendant predicting that the forces then under his control would turn the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, into "a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. They will disappear. That people will disappear from the face of the Earth."
Yesterday he averred that "the Serbs wanted to live with the Muslims, but not under the Muslims … They wanted Islamic fundamentalism from 1991-95 … That's what they wanted then. That's what they want now."
He, by contrast, wanted to turn Bosnia into a Balkan Scandinavia or Switzerland. Besides, many of Bosnia's Muslims were not really Muslims at all, but apostate Serbs, he said.
Karadzic has another four hours to morrow to complete his opening statement, and perhaps he will try to refute the charge sheet after yesterday's history lecture.
Then on Wednesday it is the turn of the victims, with Bosnian camp survivors filing into court to tell their stories. It remains to be seen whether Karadzic, representing himself, will turn up to question them
• I was servant of the people, says Bosnian Serb leader
• ITN and Guardian attacked for 'distorted' camp reports
(2)- Ian Traynor
- The Guardian, Tuesday 2 March 2010
- Article history
The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic takes the stand at his war crimes trial at The Hague. Photograph: Reuters TVHe is accused of masterminding the worst crimes in Europe since the *****. His tormentors seek to portray him as a "monster".
But in the long-awaited self-portrait delivered yesterday from the dock of a war crimes tribunal, Radovan Karadzic painted himself as a misunderstood and much-maligned anti-communist dissident.
The bombastic warlord associated more than anyone else with the Bosnian bloodbath and the pogroms of "ethnic cleansing", it transpires, was all along the Vaclav Havel of the Balkans.
It is almost 15 years since the end of the war in Bosnia that left 100,000 people dead, two-thirds of them Muslims mostly killed by Serbs. Karadzic was the Bosnian Serb political leader and military commander-in-chief. Cheated of justice, the victims' families have waited a long time to see Karadzic in the dock.
And yesterday, in a four-hour soliloquy behind bulletproof glass at the international criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the 64-year-old for the first time laid out his version of what happened in the 1992-95 conflict.
Predictably, he rubbished the charges against him.
"They're trying to convict us for something we never did," he said. "There should have been no indictment against me in the first place … There is no Serb responsibility."
The record strongly suggests otherwise. Dozens of books have been written about the bloodshed in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Millions of pages of testimony have accumulated through years of war crimes trials, laying out in exhaustive detail how a ruthless political mafia led a collapsing country into an orgy of sadistic butchery.
Srebrenica
A solid body of case law has been established, creating juridical facts such as that what happened in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in July 1995 was an act of genocide by Bosnian Serbs seeking to eliminate Bosnian Muslims.
But Karadzic was having none of it. He insisted he bent over backwards repeatedly to save a country he is widely seen as having destroyed.
"The Serbs tried to defend themselves by making endless concessions," he declared. "We had five conferences and five peace plans. I, the accused, agreed to four of them … There were 12 ceasefires in Sarajevo, 11 of them were breached by the army of the Muslim party."
In the autobiography presented yesterday, Karadzic was a reluctant politician with no ambition to be a leader, purely a "servant" of his people. He tried self-deprecation, but occasionally slipped up: "I don't want to defend myself by saying that I was not important."
Frequently he shifted into a third person narrative as if talking about someone else. "Karadzic had been a dissident since 1968," he said.
In a dark suit and white shirt, playing professorially with his spectacles and constantly rummaging through his shock of silver hair, Karadzic was confident and combative.
Unlike many of his Serb co-defendants, he was also courteous. There was no sneering, no theatrics, no attempt to disrupt the proceedings.
But for many of those watching and listening to the Karadzic narrative, the former Bosnian Serb leader was from another planet.
While dismissing the charges against him, he failed to address any of the specific 11 counts, ranging from the mass murder at Srebrenica to the 43-month siege of Sarajevo carried out by forces under his command, from the hostage-taking of more than 200 UN soldiers to the mini-gulag of camps his subordinates erected in the summer of 1992 where thousands of Bosnian Muslims died.
The latter brought a brazen denial. The Muslim and Croat inmates of Trnopolje camp in the summer of 1992 near the purged town of Prijedor were "free people" who were managing their own "collection centre" after having run away from the war and finding themselves stranded.
He went on to specifically attack ITN and the Guardian, which broke the story of these camps in the summer of 1992, reporting on scenes of emaciated men imprisoned behind barbed wire. Karadzic said the journalists, Penny Marshall and Ed Vulliamy, had abused his hospitality. He had flown them from London to north-west Bosnia to inspect the camps and they had wilfully distorted what they found there. He alleged that the reporters had entered a storage area secured behind barbed wire and filmed "three people" on the other side, making it look as if they were incarcerated. "I don't know how Penny Marshall can sleep," he said.
The four-hour performance – Karadzic is defending himself with the help of legal assistants – was a long history lecture dwelling on the perennial victimhood of the Serbs, with the villains ubiquitous and formidable – Bosnian Muslim jihadists; Croatian fascists; the Turks reassembling an Ottoman empire; the Germans victoriously completing in 1991 what they started in 1941 with the **** occupation of Yugoslavia; Nato; the Americans; the Vatican.
"I stand here before you not to defend the mere mortal that I am but to defend the greatness of a small nation in Bosnia-Herzegovina … I will defend that nation of ours and their cause, which is just and holy," Karadzic declaimed.
That may play well with the television audience back home in a Bosnia now more entrenched in its ethnic division than when Karadzic was in his prime. But the tour of 500 years of Balkan history did little to mitigate the 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity that Karadzic faces.
Paranoia
What Karadzic and his cohorts were stopping was the "Green Transversal" – the alleged Bosnian Muslim role helping to establish an Islamist caliphate from "the Great Wall of China to the Adriatic".
For veteran Balkan-watchers, it was a blast from the past, a rerun of the paranoia and propaganda that was the nightly staple diet on Serbian state television throughout the 1990s.
Karadzic was on the run for 13 years until apprehended on a Belgrade bus under a fake identity and unrecognisable as a Serbian new-age quack in the summer of 2008.
He boycotted the opening of the trial last year and has repeatedly delayed the proceedings, rejecting defence lawyers and maintaining he needs more time to prepare and wade through the mountains of evidence.
But yesterday he was methodical and well-prepared, peppering his arguments with PowerPoint projections of TV clips and documentary footage.
When the trial opened in October with a Karadzic boycott, the court heard a tape with the defendant predicting that the forces then under his control would turn the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, into "a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. They will disappear. That people will disappear from the face of the Earth."
Yesterday he averred that "the Serbs wanted to live with the Muslims, but not under the Muslims … They wanted Islamic fundamentalism from 1991-95 … That's what they wanted then. That's what they want now."
He, by contrast, wanted to turn Bosnia into a Balkan Scandinavia or Switzerland. Besides, many of Bosnia's Muslims were not really Muslims at all, but apostate Serbs, he said.
Karadzic has another four hours to morrow to complete his opening statement, and perhaps he will try to refute the charge sheet after yesterday's history lecture.
Then on Wednesday it is the turn of the victims, with Bosnian camp survivors filing into court to tell their stories. It remains to be seen whether Karadzic, representing himself, will turn up to question them
02 March 2010, 09:26 AM
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I suppose the question is how far you are allowed to go to defend your country. We may have our own day in the Haig yet Iraq Inquiry Digest
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