Karadzic sees no chance of fair trial

The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic says he will not get a fair trial at the UN war crimes tribunal.

Radovan Karadzic in the court room of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the start of his initial appearance in The Hague.

THE HAGUE // The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has said it is unimaginable he could get a fair trial at the UN war crimes tribunal because the world's media have already branded him a war criminal. In a submission published by the tribunal today and apparently the document Mr Karadzic, 63, wanted to read in court a day earlier, he detailed "drastic irregularities" in his case. He accused the international media of conducting a "witch-hunt" against him and "proclaimed me a war criminal at a time when the only victims were Serbs".

This had continued in the international media, he said. "It is now unimaginable to many people that this court could acquit me. I believe that this fact seriously jeopardises the trial itself." An occasionally combative Mr Karadzic appeared before The Hague court for the first time yesterday to face 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including two of genocide over the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.

He declined to enter a plea and demanded more time to study a new indictment and consider his plea. In the four-page document Mr Karadzic repeated and expanded on the charge he made in court that in 1996 the US peace mediator Richard Holbrooke had offered him immunity from the tribunal if he disappeared from public life. Mr Karadzic said he had tried to seek the same deal for Gen Ratko Mladic, also charged with genocide and still a fugitive, but once Mr Holbrooke realised he could not persuade the court's chief prosecutor to drop the indictment he decided to "liquidate" him instead.

Mr Holbrooke said there was "zero" truth to the claims. "Such a deal would have been immoral and unethical ... It obviously didn't happen," he said in Washington yesterday. Mr Karadzic continued in the document that he would have surrendered to the tribunal had prosecution investigators in Bosnia not passed themselves off as court representatives and tricked the Bosnian Serb government. "It then became clear to me that I could not come before the tribunal," Mr Karadzic said, adding a former chief prosecutor had said he would get a life sentence, which Mr Karadzic suggested meant that the verdict and sentence was already fixed.

Mr Karadzic, arrested in Belgrade after 11 years on the run, appeared gaunt in the court room, and had sheared the flowing beard and long hair that disguised him while working as an alternative healer. The case resumes on Aug 29. *Reuters