Cross-examined for three days by Radovan Karadzic

For former Army colonel Colm Doyle, facing down the one-time Bosnian Serb leader in court was a gruelling experience, but one he would gladly go through again to establish the truth of Karadzic's war crimes, writes MARY FITZGERALD

COLM DOYLE didn’t really know what to expect when he walked into a small detention centre room in The Hague last month. He was there to meet Radovan Karadzic, the man accused of direct responsibility for the worst atrocities of the Bosnian war. The meeting, days before Doyle was due to testify as witness number six at Karadzic’s trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, took place at Karadzic’s request. He wanted to clarify some elements of Doyle’s testimony in the earlier trial of the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. It had been almost 18 years since the two men had last met.

In 1991, just before the precipitous steps that led Bosnia to years of war, Doyle, then a colonel with the Irish Army, served as head of the EU’s monitoring mission in the country. He later became special envoy for Lord Carrington, who headed an international peace initiative that was to prove futile as the region tipped into the bloodiest conflict Europe had witnessed since the second World War.

Karadzic, then leader of the Bosnian Serbs, cut a swaggering figure. Psychiatrist, poet and rabid Serb nationalist, he smoked Cuban cigars and had a penchant for cognac. Almost two decades on – 13 years of which he spent on the run – Karadzic’s trademark grey-streaked bouffant hair was now completely white, his once bulky frame shrunken with age.

“He looked a bit pale, because age pales us all, I suppose,” Doyle says of the three-hour meeting before his testimony. “But the same feelings and justifications were there. He was not in any way regretful over what had happened, and he denied that there was wholesale slaughter. Even now, after all these years, he still contends that what they did was right.”

Karadzic’s party, supported by Milosevic and backed by the rump of the Yugoslav national army, rallied Bosnian Serbs to fight against the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) after Bosnia declared independence. A vicious war ensued, during which Serbs besieged the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, for more than 40 months. Karadzic’s forces, with the help of paramilitaries from Serbia proper, also drove hundreds of thousands from their homes in a brutal campaign of what became known to the world as “ethnic cleansing”.

Karadzic faces 11 counts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities at The Hague. Some of the charges relate to the killing of at least 7,500 Muslim men and boys over five summer days in the town of Srebrenica in 1995.

Doyle told prosecutors at Karadzic’s trial about a conversation he had with a senior Bosnian Serb politician as the drumbeats of war grew louder in 1992. In a chillingly matter-of-fact tone, she told him that even if Serb aspirations in Bosnia meant the deaths of three million people, then “we should get on with it”.

Doyle met Karadzic some 20 times before he left Bosnia in late 1992.

“He was always friendly,” he says. “When I met him before I went into trial he was the very same. He was courteous and he smiled. I hesitate to use the word charming, but he was quite engaging.

“There was little doubt when you met Karadzic that he was the boss. Everyone deferred to him. When he was in the room everyone stayed quiet. His argument to me during the trial that he didn’t control everything was not something I would have accepted.”

It was clear right from the beginning, he says, that Karadzic was “fanatically supportive” of the Bosnian Serb cause and obsessed with the notion that the Bosniaks were Islamists determined to dominate the Serbs. “He was always suspicious of Muslims,” says Doyle. “He felt that they were all going to be fundamentalist, which to my mind was ridiculous . . . During the trial I said to him, ‘You can’t live with Muslims.’ He said he had never said that. He said he had said he will not live under Muslims. That was his philosophy all along.”

Karadzic requested 14 hours to cross-examine Doyle. “It lasted three long days. Around 50 per cent of his cross-examination might have been relevant, but the other 50 per cent was just getting his philosophy out in the public domain,” Doyle says. “Near the end, I started to wonder if I was the accused in this case, not Karadzic. He truly believes he has a very strong case and that, by the time this is all over, people will see that he was right and everybody else was wrong.”

Karadzic had access to Doyle’s diary because it had already been made available during Milosevic’s trial. “When he got my diary he added up all the meetings I had at the time and then claimed that I didn’t talk to the Serbs as much as I talked to the Muslims. He claimed that meant I am biased,” Doyle says. “This was an attack on my integrity. I told the judge I would not allow my character, my impartiality and my professionalism to be queried by this man. I resented that and I wanted to put it on the record.”

During the cross-examination Karadzic took issue with Doyle’s use of the expression “ethnic cleansing”. He also claimed that photographs Doyle had shown him at a meeting in Brussels during the war were “manufactured”. The images, made famous in television reports at the time, showed emaciated Muslim prisoners standing behind barbed wire in a Serb-run detention camp.

On the third day Karadzic was told he had to complete his cross-examination of Doyle that day.

“He got rattled. He was under pressure and he began to get a bit aggressive,” Doyle says. “He brought up certain subjects that I disagreed with and then he accused me of being insufficiently educated about the political situation.”

The chief judge later rebuked Karadzic for the nature of his cross-examination and accused him of trying to play for time. Testifying was a gruelling experience, Doyle says, but he would do it all again tomorrow.

“I was there to tell the truth of what I experienced, and nothing was going to detract from that,” he says. “I didn’t cloud or dramatise anything; I just told it as it was.”

The tribunal, which was established after a UN Security Council resolution in 1993, has indicted more than 160 people and heard testimony from more than 6,000 witnesses. Doyle believes its work is crucial to putting the ghosts of the Bosnian war to rest.

“It has brought a sense of closure to a lot of people, and it has given the victims the chance to sit in court and tell their story,” he says. “It is also important in the sense that, even though the wheels of justice are very slow, the message has been put across that if you carry out gross violations of international law, you will at some stage be held to account.”

Doyle, who served on peacekeeping missions with the Irish Army in Cyprus, Lebanon and Syria during his career, says his experience in Bosnia left a mark. “I think Bosnia showed us that it doesn’t take much to slip from peace to war. The fact that this happened in the heart of Europe makes it all the more difficult to comprehend.”