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Survivors' despair as Karadzic boycotts his war crimes trial
Ed Harris26 Oct 2009
The war crimes trial of former Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was opened and adjourned today in The Hague after he carried out his threat to boycott proceedings.
The decision enraged survivors of atrocities who had travelled from Bosnia to see him face justice after being on the run for 13 years.
A small group briefly refused to leave the courtroom after the adjournment and one woman threatened to go on hunger strike.
Judges then vowed that the trial would begin tomorrow with or without Karadzic when the prosecution makes its opening statement.
The starting date has already been put back twice and his request for a further 10-month delay to prepare his case was rejected.
The only sign of Karadzic, 64, in the courtroom today was a pair of headphones lying on the desk where he has sat during pre-trial proceedings.
The man held responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the 1992-95 Bosnian war was arrested on a bus in Belgrade last July.
He was posing as New Age healer Dr Dragan Dabic, disguised with thick glasses and a bushy beard.
The prosecution and defence will each have one year to present their case.
Karadzic is charged with genocide - one count for the 1995 murder of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica and a second for the Bosnian Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing against the country's Muslim and Croat populations.
He faces nine other charges including extermination, persecution and taking peacekeepers hostage.
Karadzic has repeatedly refused to enter pleas, but insists he is innocent. He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted.
Seeing Karadzic face a court is enormously significant to victims who still cannot put to rest their memories of the horrors, said the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Serge Brammertz.
He recalled meeting a woman who lost 21 family members in the war and still has not found all their bodies. The war left more than 100,000 dead, most of them victims of Bosnian Serb attacks.
Survivors remember Karadzic as the man whose political dream of creating an ethnically pure "Greater Serbia" triggered the Srebrenica massacre - Europe's worst bloodbath since the Second World War.
Karadzic says he cut a deal with US peace envoy Richard Holbrooke in 1996 in which he agreed to drop out of public life in return for immunity from prosecution.
Mr Holbrooke denies making such a deal and tribunal judges say it would not be binding on them.
Prosecutors wanted to try Karadzic with his wartime military chief, General Ratko Mladic, but he remains at large, one of only two suspects still sought by the court. The other is a former leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia, Goran Hadzic.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, died in 2006 during his four-year trial on an indictment spanning nearly a decade from the opening shots of the Balkan conflicts to 1999 fighting in Kosovo.
Reader views (3)
Will the Israeli Zionist war criminals be hunted and brought to Justice like this Man Karadic or are they immune from the accusations of war crimes committed by their forces in the Palestinian territories.Hamas need to answer a few questions too.
- Thomas Hayes, Leeds UK, 26/10/2009 20:28
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Can he sleep at night? Don't the ghosts of those he murdered not haunt him at night?
A ghastly man - a horrible man - a man who deserves to be killed with little regard, as those he killed with little regard.
- John Grotrian, Sussex / England, 26/10/2009 17:27
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Let the man rot in prison until he chooses to face his accusers, if they want to let him get away with it - though I do question the principle behind such refusal. I'm trying to imagine a mass murderer in the UK deciding he didn't want to play with the courts - even in modern day softly-softly legal Britain that wouldn't be accepted.
- Rogan, Irving, 26/10/2009 16:34
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