by Damien McElroy
Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnia Serb leader accused of war crimes, used the closing arguments of his trial in The Hague to claim he was a “friend of the Muslims”, arguing prosecutors had produced no evidence to convict him.
The prosecution has demanded a life sentence for Karadzic on 11 charges ranging from genocide to responsibility for the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 men in Srebrenica.
The 69-year old psychologist used the first day of his defence submission to acknowledge that as commander of Serb forces he bore moral responsibility for the battlefield. But he said the case against him – that he perpetrated massacres in the name of ethnic hatred – did not stand up.
Rejecting these “lies” Karadzic said his record had been distorted. “I was really a true friend to the Muslims,” he said. “But this was all swept under the carpet.”
Facing a four-judge bench, he said it was “the Serb people that stand accused”.
“If I am crazy, are a million and a half crazy who let their only sons go into freezing trenches to defend their homes and families for three years?” he asked.
Dressed in a badly ironed charcoal suit, white shirt and maroon tie, Karadzic, who was arrested in 2008 while living incognito as a faith healer, said the prosecution lawyers had relied on “allusions, random chit-chat, (and) testimony by their own employees”.
“I know the truth, the prosecution knows the truth, they are trying to delude the court,” he said.
The trail of Karadzic began in 2009 and has cost more than £500,000.
The three-year war ended in 1995 after the deaths of at least 100,000 and left millions more to cope with a legacy of ethnic cleansing.
The 11 charges centre on Karadzic’s role as the leader of the Serb population of the divided Muslim-majority country.
But he has denied the involvement or knowledge of incidents such as the slaughter of Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995. It was the worst massacre in Europe since the Second World War.
He went on to claim evidence during the trial called into question the number killed there – widely accepted as over 8,000 – and whether the slaughter was indeed genocide.
The prosecution arguments finished on Tuesday with the argument that life behind bars “would be the only appropriate sentence”.
Alan Tieger, who lead the UN-backed prosecution in front of the special tribunal in The Hague, used his summing up to argue that Karadzic was indeed central to a “policy of ethnic cleansing”. “Dr Karadzic as its driving force,” he said.
The basis of the case has been Karadzic, along with late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, acted together to “cleanse” Bosnia’s Muslims and Croats from Serb-claimed territories after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.
Mustafa Hadziibrahimovic, a Bosnian Muslim man who survived the Srebrenica massacre, attended the closing stages of the trial. He said it was “kind of strange” to witness watch Mr Karadzic in the witness box and marvelled at the twist in fortune that had allowed him to view the court through a glass wall from the public gallery.
“I’m a free man and he is not,” said Mr Hadziibrahimovic. “And that’s the difference. And during the war … he was a free man and I was not.”
Taken from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/bosnia/11134355/Karadzic-dismisses-war-crimes-evidence-as-lies.html
