Karadzic tells court he should be rewarded

17 Oct 2012, 7:31 am   -   Source: AAP

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has begun his defence at his war crimes trial by denying the charges.

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A strident Radovan Karadzic has told the UN Yugoslav war crimes court that he should be rewarded for doing everything to avoid war in Bosnia and insisted no one thought there would be genocide.

"I should have been rewarded for all the good things that I've done because I did everything within human power to avoid the war and to reduce the human suffering," the former Bosnian Serb leader told the court in The Hague as he began his defence against charges including genocide.

"Neither I nor anyone else that I know thought that there would be a genocide against those who were not Serbs," said Karadzic, who is notably charged with masterminding Europe's worst post-World War II massacre in the town of Srebrenica.

Looking relaxed, Karadzic projected an image of a schoolmaster, with his glasses perched precariously on his nose, lecturing the court and occasionally smiling.

His words were met with incredulous cries and sniggers from the packed public gallery, where several survivors and victims' relatives sat.

Karadzic, 67, is accused of being one of the masterminds of ethnic cleansing during the Bosnian war in the 1990s that claimed more than 100,000 lives and uprooted millions from their homes.

He faces a life sentence if convicted.

"I am a mild man, a tolerant man, with a great capacity for understanding others," Karadzic, a published poet and trained psychiatrist before the war, told the court.

"I have nothing against Muslims or Croats" Karadzic told judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, claiming even his hairdresser was a Muslim before the war.

But he said Bosnia's Serbs believed a genocide was planned against them by the Muslim and Croat population who were arming themselves after Yugoslavia broke up in 1991.

"It was no secret, we could see it. We were pushed into a corner."

As at the start of his trial in October 2009, Karadzic told judges that the atrocities blamed on Bosnian Serbs including the killings at Srebrenica were "lies, propaganda and rumours".

Brought to court after his arrest on a Belgrade bus in 2008, Karadzic is charged with masterminding the murder of nearly 8000 Muslim men and boys by forces loyal to him in the eastern Bosnian enclave in July 1995.

The massacre was carried out by Bosnian Serb troops under the command of wartime general Ratko Mladic who overran Dutch UN peacekeepers meant to be protecting the enclave.

Over the space of a few days, thousands were systematically executed and dumped into mass graves.

Prosecutors say Karadzic, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and Mladic acted together to "cleanse" Bosnian Muslims and Croats from Bosnia's Serb-claimed territories after the collapse of Yugoslavia.

Milosevic died midway through his own trial for genocide and war crimes in March 2006.

Karadzic is also charged for his alleged role in the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo between May 1992 and November 1995 in which 10,000 people died under sniper and artillery fire.

Like Mladic, he has also been charged for his alleged role in taking hostage UN observers and peacekeepers to use them as human shields during a NATO bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb targets in May and June 1995.

Indicted by the ICTY in 1995, Karadzic spent 13 years on the run before being arrested in 2008 in Belgrade where he practised as a doctor of alternative medicine.

Judges dropped one genocide count in June, saying there was not enough evidence to substantiate the charge for killings by Bosnian Serb forces in Bosnian towns from March to December 1992.

Karadzic plans a four-hour statement to open his defence, followed by the testimony of Russian colonel Andrei Demurenko, the UN chief of staff in Sarajevo from January to December 1995.

Karadzic is to call witnesses including Greek President Karolos Papoulias, who was Greece's foreign minister during the Bosnian war.

Karadzic has said Papoulias' testimony could prove his innocence for the infamous shelling of Sarajevo's Markale market on February 5, 1994, in which 67 people died.

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