Karadzic’s ‘Clean Conscience and Heavy Heart’

Presenting his comment on the Hague Prosecution’s closing statement, Radovan Karadzic, former President of Republika Srpska, points out that he always advocated for a peaceful solution of conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, BiH.

Karadzic said that numerous witnesses, who were examined during the five-year long trial, including some Prosecution witnesses, clearly said that, prior to the beginning of the war, he had always advocated for peace and non-violent solution of problems.

“The Prosecution has got 95 intercepted conversations, which I led prior to the war. I gave thousands of interviews, said hundreds of thousands of sentences and millions of words. I babbled all the time, but still they cannot find a whole, uncut sentence, which they could use against me. All they can find in them is that I advocated for peace,” Karadzic said.

According to Karadzic, many of the intercepted conversations were led with other alleged participants in the joint criminal enterprise. He said that those conversations made it clear that he “advocated for Muslims to be safe and not harassed by anybody” prior to the war.  

“My attitude was that, if Muslims or Serbs or Croats wanted a secular life, we could live together, but if any of those three peoples wanted to build the religious ideas into the state mechanism, we could only live next to each other,” Karadzic explained.  

He said that The Hague prosecutors’ stand that the joint criminal enterprise appeared “all of a sudden” during the war was illogical.  

“Even during the wartime, there were a number of my orders, which were strictly confidential and not meant for public, but they have not been able to find a single one ordering, enabling or tolerating crime. There were individual crimes, of course, but such things always exist. In some countries only 30 to 40 percent of violent crimes are solved despite the existence of a fully-fledged state apparatus, while we are requested to process them all, although we were destroyed and lacked infrastructure or the state apparatus,” Karadzic said.

Karadzic, former President of Republika Srpska and supreme Commander of its armed forces, is charged with the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats from municipalities under the control of the Republika Srpska Army, VRS, which reached the scale of genocide in seven municipalities.

Besides that, he is on trial for genocide in Srebrenica, taking UNPROFOR members hostage and terrorising citizens of Sarajevo through an artillery and sniping campaign.  

Karadzic repeated his stand that the VRS did not use artillery and snipers to shoot civilians in Sarajevo.  

“Looking at the whole picture, more civilians got killed by stray bullets than by snipers. The Serb side snipers did not target civilians. Not one single piece of evidence has been provided to support that,” Karadzic said.

At the end of his presentation he pointed out that the wartime leadership of Republika Srpska ensured the minimal killing of civilians.
 
“God forbid that the Serb leadership consisted of other people instead of experts, writers, doctors, attorneys, university professors. Who knows how the war would have looked like but nothing that happened during the civil war was a product of the state behaviour. I have a clear conscience but a heavy heart, because the war was not to my taste. It was horrible. Please God, let it be the last one,” Karadzic said.

The verdict against Karadzic is expected to be pronounced next year.