Karadzic appears at war crimes trialWritten by: Guðmundur Gíslason on 3rd November 2009
 
After boycotting tribunal, former Bosnian Serb leader goes to Hague courtroom seeking more time to prepare defence Radovan Karadzic appeared yesterday at his UN war crimes trial for the first time, claiming his “fundamental rights have been violated” by judges who started without him. The former Bosnian Serb leader, accused of masterminding Serb atrocities throughout the 1992-95 Bosnian war, had boycotted the first three days of the trial, which began last week. Karadzic, who is defending himself, insisted yesterday that he needed more time to prepare. “I do not want to boycott these proceedings, but I cannot take part in something that has been bad from the start and where my fundamental rights have been violated,” Karadzic said. Karadzic faces two counts of genocide and nine other charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. He has refused to enter pleas, but insists he is innocent of all charges. The prosecution’s two-day opening statement portrayed Karadzic as the supreme commander of a brutal campaign to ethnically cleanse Muslims and Croats from Bosnian Serb claimed territory. The campaign included the deadly 44-month siege of the capital, Sarajevo, and culminated in the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica. Prosecutor Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff urged judges to impose a court-appointed lawyer on Karadzic so that the case can continue even if he continues his boycott. “Mr Karadzic cannot be allowed to manipulate the proceedings through his decision to not attend hearings,” she said. The court is desperate to avoid Karadzic’s trial becoming a carbon copy of the case against his political mentor, the former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, whose political grandstanding, stalling tactics and ill-health dragged his trial out for more than four years. Milosevic’s trial ended without a verdict in 2006, after he died of a heart attack in his jail cell. Milosevic also defended himself, and when the court forced a defence lawyer on him in an attempt to speed up proceedings Milosevic refused to co-operate with him. Karadzic said he has not had enough time to prepare his defence, even though he was indicted in 1995 and has been in custody for 14 months. “The situation is such that I would really be a criminal if I were to accept these conditions to enter a trial for which I am not prepared,” he said. Karadzic said prosecutors have loaded him down with 1.3m pages of evidence and that he had only been able to work on his defence since May, when he got all the evidence from prosecutors. But the presiding judge, O-Gon Kwon, said Karadzic was repeating claims he had made in pretrial hearings and in motions that had been rejected by trial and appeal judges. He signalled the court was unlikely to grant him any more time. “At the end of the day, I again remind you that it is in your best interest to attend and participate fully in the trial so that justice can be done,” Kwon said.
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