Originally published on the CGS blog on March 2, 2010.
On March 1, 2010 the trial of Radovan Karadzic, former Bosnian Serb politician, resumed at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 after being on the run for over a decade. He is accused of eleven counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Karadzic refused to enter a plea to charges and so the tribunal judge entered a plea of not guilty to all charges on his behalf, in line with the rules of the court.
Karadzic described the Bosnian conflict as “just and holy.” Sarajevo, where some 12,000 people died in 44 months, has been described as the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Karadzic told the court that Sarajevo, was “not a city under siege” by Bosnian Serb forces. He also stated that claims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were based on “false myths and false victims”. Karadzic laid the blame for the outbreak of the Bosnian war on the Bosnian Muslims. He added: “It is going to be easy for me to prove that I had nothing to do with it.”
Karadzic was president of the self-declared Bosnian Serb Republic and commander of its army during the Bosnian conflict which left more than 100,000 people dead. Prosecutors say he orchestrated a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims and Croats in eastern Bosnia. Prosecutor Alan Tieger, in his opening statement last October, said Karadzic had “harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to pursue his vision of an ethnically segregated Bosnia.”
Karadzic is the most senior figure to face justice at the ICTY since the former Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic, who died of a heart attack in 2006 before his own trial was concluded. The trial is expected to run until 2012.
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