THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, charged with the worst genocide in Europe since the Holocaust, testified Monday that his people were simply defending themselves against Islamic fundamentalists who he claimed were seeking to take over Bosnia.
In his opening defense statement at the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Karadzic denied any intention to expel non-Serbs from their homes, and said the Serb objective was to protect their own lives and property during the violent 1990s breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
The Serb "cause is just and holy," Karadzic said as he began his two-day statement, relying only on sparse notes. "We have a good case. We have good evidence and proof."
Karadzic, 64, faces two counts of genocide and nine other counts of murder, extermination, persecution, forced deportation and the seizing of 200 U.N. hostages. He faces possible life imprisonment if convicted.
Prosecutors say Karadzic orchestrated a campaign to destroy the Muslim and Croat communities in eastern Bosnia to create an ethnically pure Serbian state. The campaign included the 44-month siege of the capital of Sarajevo and the torture and murder of hundreds of prisoners in inhuman detention camps. That violence culminated in the massacre of some 8,000 Muslim males in one horrific week in July 1995 in the Srebrenica enclave, the worst bloodbath in Europe since World War II.
Karadzic sought to trace the origin of Bosnia's full-scale civil war to the Muslims' rejection of all power-sharing proposals.
A core group of Muslim leaders in Bosnia was "plotting and conniving," Karadzic told the court. "They wanted Islamic fundamentalism and they wanted it from 1991."
Prosecutors are trying "to present me as a monster because they do not have any evidence" that I committed a crime, he said. "This indictment should not have been issued in the first place."
Karadzic is the most important figure to be brought to trial since former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who died of a heart attack in 2006 before his case was concluded. Karadzic, president of the breakaway Bosnian Serb state, negotiated with diplomats, U.N. officials and peace envoys; he appeared often in the media; and he set the tone and pac.
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