RADOVAN KARADZIC’S long- awaited trial for genocide and war crimes could start without him today, after the former Bosnian Serb leader vowed to boycott its opening in protest at a lack of time to prepare his defence.
The 11 charges facing Dr Karadzic centre on his alleged responsibility for the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995 and the 43- month siege and bombardment of Sarajevo, which killed some 10,000 people and injured tens of thousands more.
Prosecution lawyers at the UN tribunal in The Hague are ready and eager to start the trial as planned today, but Dr Karadzic claims he has been given too little time to prepare his defence and will not attend the hearing.
“The final charges were filed on the 19th of this month and we could not even analyse those charges in six days,” said one of Dr Karadzic’s many legal advisers, Goran Petronijevic. “That is not fair and this cannot be a fair trial, and those are the real reasons why he doesn’t want to attend the start of the trial.”
The prosecution has limited the number of charges facing Dr Karadzic (64) to try to prevent his trial becoming the kind of frustrating marathon that the UN tribunal endured with former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died in a cell at The Hague in 2006 before sentence could be passed.
However the judges now face a dilemma over how to proceed with the case: if they start the trial without him, they could be accused of unfairness towards the accused; if they wait for him to announce his readiness for trial, they may face a delay of several months; and if they name a lawyer to defend him, he would almost certainly reject the appointee, causing further postponement.
“Karadzic has the tribunal in a stranglehold,” said Willem van Genugten, law lecturer at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. “The case is in legal limbo.”
About 160 Bosnian Muslim survivors of the country’s 1992 to 1995 war left Sarajevo by bus on Saturday to ensure they were in The Hague for the start of Dr Karadzic’s trial, while countless other relatives of his alleged victims hope to see him face justice after more than a decade on the run.
Twelve years after seeming to disappear without trace when he was forced from power under the Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war, a bearded, ponytailed Dr Karadzic was found in July 2008 living in a Belgrade suburb as new-age healer Dr Dragan Dabi.
“This trial is important for the victims, who will finally see justice being done,” said Serge Brammertz, the chief prosecutor at the UN court. “When you speak to a woman who tells you that 21 members of her family have been assassinated, and for some of them she even has no idea where the bodies are, you can easily measure the importance of this trial.”
