RADOVAN KARADZIC threatened months before the start of the Bosnian war that 300,000 Muslims would die while the forces under his command turned Sarajevo into a “black cauldron”.
He told colleagues Bosnia’s Muslims would “disappear from the face of the Earth” and said he had up to 400,000 Serbs under arms awaiting his orders and 20,000 men ready to besiege Sarajevo.
The Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in The Hague yesterday was told of the former Bosnian Serb leader’s threats as he went on trial for genocide and war crimes 14 years after the end of the conflict.
For a second day running, the accused shunned the proceedings on the grounds that he was not yet fit to conduct his own defence. The presiding judge, O-Gon Kwon of South Korea, ordered the case to proceed despite the boycott.
US lawyer Alan Tieger, leading the prosecution, delivered several hours of graphic evidence against Mr Karadzic, including transcripts of phone intercepts in which he threatened the Muslim community with extermination should Bosnia declare independence from Yugoslavia. “There are 300,000 to 400,000 armed Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina . . . It will be a real bloodbath,” Mr Karadzic predicted.
The threats came as the war between Serbs and Croats raged in Croatia in autumn 1991, well before the outbreak of war in Bosnia in April 1992.
Mr Tieger painted a picture of a “supreme commander”, Mr Karadzic, who enjoyed total control of Bosnian Serb politics, parliament, police, paramilitary forces and the army during the 44-month war.
He sought to portray Mr Karadzic as a cold-blooded monster who systematically and methodically planned the war well in advance and conducted it to the letter.
At the end of the war, in summer 1995, the accused boasted he had ordered the murder of more than 7,000 Muslim males at Srebrenica, Mr Tieger said.
Mr Karadzic told a closed session of the Bosnian Serb parliament a few weeks after the massacre that he had signed “directive number seven” authorising it, the court was told.
“I was in favour of all decisions made and I support them. The time had come,” Mr Karadzic told the assembly, according to Mr Tieger.
The presentation of the prosecution case came amid a test of strength between the judges and Mr Karadzic. Although he spurns defence lawyers, Mr Karadzic has a team of 40 legal experts and lawyers assisting him behind the scenes and has filed about 400 motions on various issues to the court since being detained.
Judge O-Gon said Mr Karadzic (64) was entitled to defend himself but this right was “not absolute” and he may have forfeited it by his boycott. The judge added that he might impose defence lawyers next week if the non-appearances persisted.
The trial is arguably the most important of the tribunal’s 15-year existence and could be its swansong. Mr Karadzic faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for the Srebrenica massacre, the siege of Sarajevo, the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs and the seizure of more than 200 UN peacekeepers as hostages.
The aim of Mr Karadzic’s campaign, said Mr Tieger, was “to carve out a mono-ethnic state from a multi-ethnic country”.
The prosecutor cited a UN report from 1992 noting that, in Mr Karadzic’s strategy, “ethnic cleansing does not appear to be the consequence of the war, rather its goal”. – (Guardian service)