RADOVAN KARADZIC today accused Bosnian Muslim forces of killing their own people in Sarajevo to engineer a western intervention against Bosnian Serbs.
The former Bosnian Serb leader made the claim as he defended himself against charges of genocide and other war crimes at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. On the second day of his opening statement, Karadzic sought to rewrite the historical record on the 44-month siege of Sarajevo – the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
Bosnian Serb forces encircled the city from 1992 to 1996, shelling it with artillery, mortars and anti-aircraft guns. It is estimated almost 10,000 people, including more than 1,500 children, were killed. A further 56,000 were wounded. One of the 11 indictments against Karadzic is for the siege.
In a lengthy defence, during which he used maps of the city, he claimed Bosnian Muslim forces had turned schools, hospitals and nurseries into military installations during the siege, making them legitimate targets for Serbian forces. “We were accused of firing indiscriminately at Sarajevo, but the targets were legitimate targets,” he told the court.
The 64-year-old accused Bosnian Muslim forces of shelling their own people as part of a “cunning” trick aimed at bringing Nato forces into the conflict against Bosnian Serbs. “They killed their own people,” Karadzic said, as he again accused Bosnian Muslims of staging the Markale market massacre, in which 68 civilians were killed and 200 wounded on February 5th, 1994.
In 1995, a second massacre, in which 37 people died at the same market, helped bring about international intervention against the Serbs.
The final straw came when Serb forces raided a UN-monitored weapons collection site. Nato jets attacked Bosnian Serb ammunition depots and other strategic military targets, and fighting on the ground escalated as joint Bosnian and Croatian forces went on the offensive. The Serbs were slowly driven back in Sarajevo and elsewhere, which eventually allowed the city’s heating, electricity and water supplies to be restored.
Karadzic said the “alleged siege” of Sarajevo was a “myth” aimed at drawing Nato into the conflict on the side of Bosnian Muslims.
Gen Stanislav Galic, who commanded the 18,000-man Romanija Corps that encircled and bombarded Sarajevo, was sentenced to life imprisonment. His successor, Gen Dragomir Milosevic, was sentenced to 33 years.
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 siege of Sarajevo and the torture and murder of hundreds of prisoners in detention camps.
That violence culminated in the massacre of around 8,000 Muslim males in the Srebrenica enclave in one week in July 1995 – the worst bloodbath in Europe since the second World War.
Karadzic spent relatively little time on Srebrenica, although he dismissed the massacre as another “myth” designed to engender sympathy for Bosnian Muslims.
He sought to cast doubt on the number of bodies found at Srebrenica, saying it could be no more than 2,000 to 3,000, adding that questions remained about who had been killed there and how.
“Let’s establish once and for all what happened in Srebrenica,” Karadzic said. He called for yet another investigation, although the tribunal has found beyond reasonable doubt that Bosnian Serb and other forces killed between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys between July 11th and 19th, 1995 approximately.
Karadzic boycotted the prosecution’s opening statement last October, forcing a four-month suspension of his trial. Yesterday, he appealed against last week’s court ruling to proceed with the first prosecution witness tomorrow, and is seeking another four-month recess in which to continue preparing his case. In his long-awaited self-portrait, delivered yesterday, Karadzic depicted himself as a misunderstood and much-maligned anti-communist dissident.