THE NETHERLANDS: RADOVAN KARADZIC, the former Bosnian Serb warlord awaiting trial for genocide, says that high-ranking officials in the 1990s US administration of Bill Clinton want him dead and that it will be impossible for him to receive a fair trial.
"No one on earth believes in the possibility of an acquittal," Mr Karadzic argued in a four-page statement which he was prevented from reading to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Thursday. "Others from President Clinton's team . . . are in a hurry to see me dead."
He said several months after the Bosnian war ended in November 1995, Richard Holbrooke, the US envoy who engineered the peace settlement at Dayton in Ohio, made the genocide suspect an offer: "I must withdraw not only from public but also from party offices and completely disappear."
Mr Karadzic, who was head of the main Serbian party in Bosnia and president of the self-proclaimed Serbian republic, was indicted for crimes against humanity in 1995. He retired from politics a year later and vanished until his arrest on a Belgrade bus.
"Holbrooke undertook on behalf of the USA that I would not be tried before this tribunal," Mr Karadzic wrote in the statement prepared for his defence against 11 counts of genocide and extermination of Bosnia's Muslims as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.
The allegations of a secret deal between Mr Holbrooke and Mr Karadzic have circulated in the Balkans for years and the American has repeatedly dismissed them over the past week.
"It's an invented story and no one ought to believe it," Mr Holbrooke said. "What I said was, 'If anyone deserves the death penalty, it's Karadzic and [Ratko] Mladic." The latter, Mr Karadzic's top commander, is still a fugitive.
Mr Karadzic added that Madeleine Albright, Mr Clinton's secretary of state, told Biljana Plavsic, Karadazic's successor as Bosnian Serb leader (now serving an 11-year sentence for war crimes after plea-bargaining), that Mr Karadzic should go away to "Russia, Greece or Serbia".
Accused of being responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of mainly Muslims in Bosnia, Mr Karadzic said he now feared for his own life: "Mr Holbrooke's wish for my disappearance . . . is today still fresher and stronger and the actions aimed at bringing this about are tireless."
- (Guardian service)