The Trial of Radovan Karadzic: The Accused Takes Up His Own Defense
The Trial of Radovan Karadzic: The Accused Takes Up His Own Defense
Radovan Karadzic turns to the almost empty viewing gallery in Courtroom 3, and nods a brief smile of acknowledgement to an unfamiliar face. It is two weeks since he opened his defense at The Hague tribunal with a 90-minute statement urging the court to recognize him as a “mild and tolerant” man of peace—and not the war criminal he has been portrayed by prosecutors and the press. He has now begun his bid to prove that Bosnian Muslims shelled and shot at their own people during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995.
In three years representing himself at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the 67-year old former Bosnian Serb leader has developed the air of an unkempt dinner party host. In a crumpled shirt unbuttoned at the neck, a multi-colored tie under a blue jacket, he tries to put his defense witness, a British ballistics expert, at ease. In the dock Dr. Derek Allsop, sweats and cracks a nervous joke about the risk of badly directed mortars. Karadzic smiles patiently and politely asks him whether he needs to continue talking trajectories.
Indicted in 1995 for the genocide at Srebrenica in which 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys were murdered, as well as orchestrating the murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats during a war that ultimately cost more than 100,000 lives, Karadzic was finally arrested in 2008 in Belgrade disguised as the long bearded new age health guru, Dragan David Dabic.