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Mr. Karadzic, 69, insisted on acting as his own
lawyer, but he also worked with a legal team that included Peter
Robinson, an American lawyer. Last week, Mr. Robinson spoke in Mr.
Karadzic’s defense on the gravest charges — two counts of genocide —
saying that he had neither knowledge of nor intent to commit the
mass murders of Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims during the 1992-95 war.
The trial ended on a heated note, with sharp
exchanges. Mr. Robinson told the three judges hearing the case that
if they agreed to the prosecution’s “legal lynching,” they would be
“convicting an innocent man.”
Mr. Karadzic — the ex-fugitive whose astonishing
career has included stints as a psychiatrist, a poet, a politician,
a bearded New Age healer and now a lawyerly professor — remained an
enigmatic and chameleonlike figure during his trial, earnestly
presenting an alternative narrative that stunned specialists
following the case. Although he had delivered fiery speeches leading
up to the war, he said he was a “true friend to Muslims” and had
tried to make them feel safe.
During Mr. Karadzic’s often-rambling
presentations, he remained polite to the judges and even to
prosecutors.
Mr. Karadzic’s broad line of defense was that the
Bosnian war erupted because the Serbs, predominantly Eastern
Orthodox Christians, needed to defend themselves against a new
Bosnian Muslim separatist regime determined to create an Islamic
state.
The prosecution, led by another American lawyer,
Alan Tieger, has said that Mr. Karadzic was himself commander of a
separatist Serb government that set out to remove non-Serbs from all
areas of Bosnia that had been traditionally Serb.
In the resulting 1992 campaign, which came to be
known as ethnic cleansing, hundreds of thousands of Muslims and
ethnic Croats, largely Roman Catholic, were driven from their
villages, their homes looted and their mosques and churches
demolished. In many cases, men and boys were rounded up and held in
concentration camps, where thousands were tortured and executed or
died of starvation, prosecutors said. Women were raped or used as
sex slaves. These crimes, prosecutors say, constitute genocide.
The prosecution has also accused Mr. Karadzic of
organizing the three-year siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. An
estimated 12,000 Sarajevans were killed.
But the single crime that has provoked the
greatest international outrage involves the execution of more than
7,000 men and boys in July 1995 in and around the eastern town of
Srebrenica, which had been declared a United Nations “safe area” two
years earlier. When the United Nations declined to order airstrikes
to support the small contingent of United Nations peacekeepers
there, the Bosnian Serb Army, assisted by Serbian forces, overran
the area.
Mr. Robinson said that even though the Srebrenica
massacre was one of the world’s best-documented crimes, there was no
evidence that Mr. Karadzic had planned or ordered the executions.
Mr. Tieger responded that Mr. Karadzic had lied
and mischaracterized events, presented unsupported statements and
“invented a new reality.” In his final statement, Mr. Karadzic
struck a different tone. If the Serbs, Croats and Muslims had wanted
to live in a secular state, without building religion into it, “we
could have lived together, each in their own canton.”
He went on: “I apologize to everyone for my
amateurism, but my thirst for the truth is much stronger than my
legal knowledge.”
A verdict is expected next year.
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