In the News - Full Article
The Wall Street Journal
GENOCIDE TRIAL SET TO BEGIN FOR KARADZIC
By Marc Champion
BRUSSELS -- The trial of wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on war-crimes charges begins Monday, and lawyers say his courtroom strategy is already emerging.
Like the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, Mr. Karadzic looks set to try to string the proceedings out and turn them into an inquest into the role of the West in the war, these lawyers say. In addition, Mr. Karadzic has made it clear he plans to challenge the size of the death toll in the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, which is at the core of the genocide charge against him.
Mr. Karadzic has been in detention in The Hague since he was discovered in Belgrade last year, in disguise and practicing alternative psychiatric medicine. He has refused to be represented in court by a lawyer. He also said he won't show up in court Monday because he needs more time to prepare his case.
"He will not get a fair trial -- he has only five days to read one million new documents," said Svetozar Vujacic, who runs Mr. Karadzic's legal support team. The court has rejected the request for a delay.
Mr. Karadzic is charged with 11 counts of war crimes, including two of genocide. The charges relate to Srebrenica, the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo between April 1992 and November 1995, and the taking of United Nations hostages in 1995 to dissuade the North Atlantic Treaty Organization from air strikes.
Some lawyers familiar with the case say Mr. Karadzic appears to be following the same tactics as Mr. Milosevic, the former Serbian president who died of a heart attack in 2006, leaving his trial unfinished after four years. Mr. Milosevic stalled proceedings and used the courtroom as a bully pulpit to showcase his views on the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo -- political theater that played well on television back home in Serbia.
"Karadzic is playing for the pages of history. His audience is in Bosnia and Serbia, he doesn't care about the judges," said Marko Milanovic, a lawyer with the Belgrade Center for Human Rights, who closely follows the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Over the summer, Mr. Karadzic had the court issue binding requests for documents from Croatia, Malta and other countries to show that they, the U.S. and others broke a U.N. arms embargo to supply Bosnian Muslim forces with weapons from Iran and other sources during the war.
In a July pretrial hearing, Mr. Karadzic also demanded DNA data from the bodies dug up from mass graves in Srebrenica, where some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys are believed to have been executed when Serbian forces overran the U.N. "safe haven" in 1995. He said in the hearing he wanted to prove that many of the bodies were brought from elsewhere, or had died in fighting years earlier.
"The true death toll at Srebrenica was five times less than what people say, and those who died were military," said Mr. Vujacic, who leads Mr. Karadzic's defense team. Asked how he knew that information without access to the DNA data, Mr. Vujacic said: "we have proof."
Mr. Vujacic denied his client was pursuing a strategy similar to Mr. Milosevic's. Anthony D'Amato, who acted as lead counsel for the defendant in the U.N.-backed tribunal's first genocide case against a Serb, said Mr. Karadzic has a better case than the late Serbian leader, if only because he may have foreseen the risk of prosecution once the war ended.
"He has fairly voluminous statements that have him telling the army he would prosecute people if they committed war crimes," said Mr. D'Amato.
The tribunal also appears to have learned some lessons from the Milosevic trial. Prosecutors set out a more focused case against Mr. Karadzic -- his 11 counts look slim compared with the 66 counts Mr. Milosevic faced. The court judges have pressured the prosecution to narrow the charges and witness list further.
The tribunal is also under pressure from the U.N. Security Council to wrap up, some 16 years after it was established in 1993. The court's budget last year was $342 million.
But those efforts have sparked protests from families of the war dead in Bosnia. Two buses with representatives from Bosnian victims' organizations were due to arrive in The Hague to attend the start of the trial.
