RADOVAN Karadzic finally appeared at his United Nations war crimes trial yesterday and claimed his "fundamental rights have been violated" by judges who started without him.
The former Bosnian Serb leader, who is accused of masterminding Serb atrocities during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, had boycotted the first three days of the trial, saying he needed more time to prepare. Karadzic, who is defending himself, put forward th
e same argument from the dock yesterday.
"I do not want to boycott these proceedings, but I cannot take part in something that has been bad from the start and where my fundamental rights have been violated," he said.
Karadzic faces two counts of genocide and nine other charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. He has refused to enter pleas, but insists he is innocent of all charges.
The prosecution's two-day opening statement portrayed him as supreme commander of a brutal campaign to ethnically cleanse Muslims and Croats from territory claimed by Bosnian Serbs. The campaign included the deadly 44-month siege of the capital, Sarajevo, and culminated in the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica.
Prosecutor Hildegard Uertz-Retzlaff urged judges to impose a court-appointed lawyer for Karadzic, so the case can continue even if he continues his boycott. "Mr Karadzic cannot be allowed to manipulate the proceedings through his decision to not attend hearings," she said.
However, she acknowledged that if a lawyer was appointed to represent Karadzic, the attorney may need months to prepare.
She told judges they could also force Karadzic to attend. "If necessary, force can be used to secure his presence in the court room," she said.
Presiding judge O-Gon Kwon said judges would issue a written ruling later this week on how the hearing will proceed. He cancelled a hearing scheduled for today and adjourned the trial pending the ruling.
The court is desperate to avoid a carbon copy of the case against his political mentor, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, whose political grandstanding, stalling tactics and ill health dragged his trial out for more than four years. That case ended without a verdict in 2006 after he died of a heart attack in his UN jail cell.
Milosevic also defended himself, and when the war crimes court forced a defence lawyer on him in an attempt to speed up proceedings, he refused to co-operate with him.
Karadzic says he has not had enough time to prepare his defence – even though he was indicted in 1995 and has been in custody for 14 months.
He said prosecutors had loaded him down with 1.3 million pages of evidence and that he had been able to work on his defence only since May, when he got all the evidence from prosecutors.
He said he was not ready to deal with the first three prosecution witness, who were to have testified this week, or to make an opening statement.
And he rejected the proposal of having a lawyer appointed by the court to represent him. "I don't need other people, I just need time," he said.
A psychiatrist before becoming president of the self-proclaimed Republica Srpska, Karadzic stepped down in 1996 and went into hiding until he was arrested in July 2008, disguised as an alternative healer in Belgrade.
