Karadzic: Prosecution Claims it Proved Defendant’s Guilt

Prosecutor Alan Tieger said that Karadzic, as undisputed political leader of Bosnian Serbs and supreme commander of the army, wanted to create an “ethnically clean state” by expelling hundreds of thousands of Bosniaks and Croats from 70 per cent of the Bosnian territory which he considered to belong to Serbs.

Karadzic is charged with genocide in Srebrenica and seven other municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, expulsion of Bosniaks and Croats, terror against civilians in Sarajevo, and taking members of UN peace forces as hostages, in the period between 1992 and 1995.

On June 11, Karadzic and his lawyer Peter Robinson presented an oral request to the Hague Tribunal Trial Chamber to be freed of all the charges contained in the indictment.

“It has been proven that genocide was committed in Srebrenica and that the defendant took part in it as supreme commander of Serb armed forces, with the intent of destroying Muslims as an ethnic group,” emphasised the prosecutor.

Tieger called Karadzic’s order to seize Srebrenica a “culmination of his attempts to ethnically clean eastern Bosnia,” which had begun in autumn 1992.

Dismissing as a lie Karadzic’s claim that he had not been informed about the events in Srebrenica, the prosecutor pointed out evidence that Karadzic received regular military reports on the operation.

“Karadzic knew about the first massacre of 1,000 Bosniaks in the Kravica cooperative, on July 13, 1995, because his civilian envoy, Miroslav Deronjic, whom he met the following day, ordered that the bodies of the murdered people be buried in a mass grave in the village of Glogova,“ said Tieger.

On the same evening, thousands of imprisoned Bosniak men were transferred, the prosecutor said, on Karadzic’s orders, from Potocari to Bratunac, from which they were taken to execution grounds in the region of Zvornik on July 14.

He said that numerous evidence deny Karadzic’s claims that Bosniaks left Srebrenica voluntarily. He reminded that Karadzic issued an order in March 1995 that the Army of Republika Srpska should create in Srebrenica “impossible conditions of total insecurity without hope for life and survival in the enclave.”

The prosecutor claimed that there was enough evidence to prove that Karadzic, who Tieger called “genocide-obsessed”, was responsible for the genocide against Bosniaks and Croats in another seven Bosnian municipalities.

Tieger cited examples of Zvornik, where around 2,000 Muslim men were systematically murdered, and camps near Prijedor, such as Omarska, in which “murder was routine”, and the Trnopolje camp from which 200 prisoners were taken to the Vlasic mountain and murdered in August 1992.

The prosecutor said there is plenty of evidence that the Bosnian Serb army, under Karadzic’s command, subjected the civilians of Sarajevo to a “campaign of terror” for over three years through unselective shelling and sniper fire.

“The evidence show that Karadzic ran a campaign aimed at carrying out his goals, knowing about its consequences,” emphasised Tieger and added that the attacks did not have any military goal.

The ICTY Trial Chamber will make a decision on Karadzic’s motion on June 28.

R.M.