Karadzic Accuses His Accusers
By MARLISE SIMONS
THE HAGUE — In a rambling letter released by the war crimes tribunal on Friday, Radovan Karadzic raised what he called “serious irregularities” in his treatment and said that an international “media witch hunt” had jeopardized his chances for a fair trial.
The four-page signed submission, filled with arguments and accusations, also went into greater detail about the deal that Mr. Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, contends he made with the United States in 1996 to help him evade justice.
Mr. Karadzic had begun to read the letter out loud on Thursday during his first appearance before the international tribunal, but the judge stopped him, saying he would have only two minutes to speak. Mr. Karadzic was invited to submit the letter to the registrar, whose office translated it from Serbian and released it as a trial document.
In the letter, he offered bitter criticism of the former American envoy Richard C. Holbrooke; Mr. Karadzic claimed in court on Thursday that he had brokered a deal with Mr. Holbrooke that would enable him to avoid a trial. Mr. Karadzic also asserted in the letter that Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of state at the time, had proposed that he drop out of sight by opening a private clinic somewhere abroad.
Ms. Albright suggested that “I get out of the way and go to Russia, Greece or Serbia and open a private clinic or at least go to Bijeljina,” he wrote.
Mr. Holbrooke, who brokered the peace agreement that ended the war in the Balkans in 1995, denied that he had agreed to any deal with Mr. Karadzic, calling the accusation “ridiculous.”
In an interview, Mr. Holbrooke said that in July 1996 he had traveled to Belgrade and, over 10 hours of talks, negotiated a signed agreement forcing Mr. Karadzic to resign as the Bosnian Serb leader, with Slobodan Milosevic, then the president of Serbia, also pressing him to quit.
“There was an agreement he would leave power,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “He got nothing in return.”
During the hearing on Thursday, Mr. Karadzic was required to hear a summary of his indictment. Occasionally twitching his mouth, he stared straight ahead as Judge Alphons Orie cited from the catalog of crimes from the ethnic war that he led in Bosnia and that turned into genocide.
But Mr. Karadzic became more animated in court when he began to list his grievances, what he called the “many drastic irregularities.” His written statement elaborates on old rumors that Mr. Holbrooke had brokered a deal with him to avoid arrest.
The offer, he asserted, required him to withdraw from public life, declining all interview requests and offers to write articles or books.
“Mr. Holbrooke undertook on behalf of the U.S.A. that I would not be tried before this tribunal and that I should understand that for a while there would be very sharp rhetoric against me, so that my followers would not hamper the implementation of the Dayton agreement.”
That agreement, which ended the Balkans war, was negotiated and signed in Dayton, Ohio.
Mr. Karadzic, who was arrested in Belgrade on July 21, according to the Serbian government, described in the letter his life after leaving office in 1996. He said that he had kept his side of the bargain, lying low to avoid the attention of international troops “whom I used to pass quietly,” and also to avoid “possible adventurers and glory hunters.”
Mr. Karadzic also contended that the State Department had urged the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, Richard Goldstone, who had indicted him a year earlier, “to refrain from hunting me.” Mr. Goldstone threatened to resign “if this happened,” he wrote.
In a telephone interview on Friday, Mr. Goldstone, who was the chief prosecutor from 1994 to 1996, scoffed at the claims. “I cannot imagine what he is talking about,” said Mr. Goldstone, a South African judge. “The whole thing does not make sense. Resign because of what?”
Mr. Goldstone said the United States had not asked him to withdraw Mr. Karadzic’s indictment. “No one could ask me to do that,” he said.
Mr. Karadzic said that he had tried to meet his end of the deal, but that it eventually became apparent that there were attempts to have him killed — and he blamed Mr. Holbrooke for them. “It is clear that, unable to fulfill the commitments he had undertaken on behalf of the U.S.A., he switched to Plan B, the liquidation of Radovan Karadzic,” he wrote.
Some observers of the trial of Mr. Milosevic, the former Serbian president and Mr. Karadzic’s mentor, said they saw parallels between the men. Mr. Milosevic often used his time in court to criticize and try to embarrass the West.
Christian Schwarz-Schilling, a formal international envoy to the region, told German radio on Friday that he did not rule out that Mr. Karadzic would reveal embarrassing secrets during his trial.
“I believe Karadzic knows certain things which in any case aren’t pleasant for the international community,” he said. “I suppose that he, having been involved in the events, will have to say some new things which were unknown until now.”
These might involve what other governments knew in 1995 of the impending seizure of the United Nations-protected enclaves of Srebrenica and Zepa by troops under Mr. Karadzic’s command, assisted by forces from Serbia. The fall of Srebrenica ended with the execution of nearly 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys.
The allegations in Mr. Karadzic text, including his fear that Mr. Holbrooke was, and still is, out to kill him may seem like the fruits of a fevered mind.
Mr. Holbrooke has insisted that there was no deal for immunity for Mr. Karadzic. But he may well have left room for ambiguity or provided hints during talks in Belgrade that Mr. Karadzic took to be a promise that international troops would not arrest him.
In his book “To End a War” (Random House, 1998), Mr. Holbrooke wrote that in 1996, heading for the talks to persuade Mr. Karadzic to give up power, he called Strobe Talbott, then the deputy secretary of state. He wrote that Mr. Talbott told him, “Just use that old creative ambiguity.”
Graham Bowley contributed reporting from New York.
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http://www.upi.com/…
Karadzic lashes out at media
Published: Aug. 1, 2008 at 6:18 PM
THE HAGUE (OTCBB:HGUE), Netherlands, Aug. 1 (UPI) — Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader accused of war crimes, says a “media witch hunt” will cost him a fair trial in the Netherlands.
In a letter to the tribunal at The Hague (OTCBB:HGUE), Karadzic claimed he had been branded a war criminal before the trial by the press, making an acquittal “unimaginable.”
Karadzic, who faces 11 counts of war crimes including genocide, also claimed he made an immunity deal with the United States.
But, Richard Holbrooke, who negotiated the accord that ended the Bosnian war, told BBC there was never any such deal.
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http://www.cnn.com/….
Karadzic details ‘deal with U.S. to vanish’
From CNN’s Nic Robertson
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CNN) — Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic says he made a deal with the United States to disappear from public life — in exchange for immunity from the war crimes tribunal he’s currently facing.
Radovan Karadzic makes an initial appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Radovan Karadzic makes an initial appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
In a letter, submitted to the court Thursday and released to the public Friday, Karadzic further explains the accusations he made Thursday in his first appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
An ICTY spokeswoman said she could not comment on the letter because it is part of a case in progress.
Karadzic is charged with 11 counts including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes stemming from the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, when he was president of a breakaway Serb republic.
Karadzic, 63, says he made a deal in 1996 with U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke that involved his complete withdrawal from public life. The “offer,” Karadzic says, required him to “become invisible long enough for the Dayton agreement to be implemented in full.” Video Watch Karadzic’s first court appearance
In exchange, Karadzic writes in the letter, Holbrooke agreed that the former leader would not be tried before the tribunal.
The U.S.-sponsored Dayton peace accord, signed in 1995, ended the three-year war and divided the country into Serb Republic and a Bosnia-Croat Federation. It also established a NATO-led peacekeeping force to maintain peace among the Serb, Muslim and Croat populations. Holbrooke was the architect of the Dayton agreement.
“There is no doubt that this offer was made in the name of the USA,” Karadzic writes.
Responding to Karadzic’s accusation Thursday, Holbrooke told CNN it is a “flat-out lie.”
“He’s been spreading it for 12 years through his friends, now he’s making it personally. It would have been morally reprehensible and illegal to do such a thing. … We made no deal with Radovan Karadzic.”
He added, “Why would anyone believe one of the most dangerous and awful mass murderers in modern history?”
Before Serbian authorities announced his arrest July 21, Karadzic had been missing for more than a decade. Afterward it emerged that he had worked at a clinic in Belgrade as an alternative medicine therapist, using an elaborate disguise of a long white beard, white mustache, and long white hair.
Karadzic says the idea for at least part of his ruse came from former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who suggested to the former Serbian president “that I get out of the way and go to Russia, Greece or Serbia and open a private clinic.”
Karadzic says he held up his part of the bargain until it became clear that Holbrooke did not want to hold up his end and instead wanted to see him dead.
“Unable to fulfill the commitments he had undertaken on behalf of the USA, he switched to Plan B — the liquidation of Radovan Karadzic,” he writes.
That led Karadzic to want to turn himself in to the tribunal at the Hague, where he knew he would at least be safe from the threat of death, Karadzic says. The tribunal does not impose the death penalty, and should he be convicted, Karadzic may face a sentence of life imprisonment.
But Karadzic says he changed his mind when investigators arrived in Pale, Bosnia — his headquarters during the war — and started looking through the archives. The investigators first identified themselves as being from the tribunal, indicating they were unbiased, Karadzic said.
“When it was noticed that they were acting selectively and were reluctant to take exculpatory documents,” Karadzic writes, “we realized that we had been tricked and that they were not investigators from the tribunal but investigators from the Office of the Prosecutor who had fooled us and rummaged through our archives without legal permission.”
Karadzic’s letter also details his arrest in Belgrade, building on hints from his Belgrade lawyer that he was not arrested when Serbian authorities said he was.
“Unknown civilians showed me a badge so quickly that I could not identify it, took me out of a public transport vehicle and held me in an unknown place for 74 hours,” he writes.
Karadzic says his captors never told him who they were, what his rights were, or allow him to call or text his friends.
“For these 74 hours I did not exist,” he writes.
Karadzic had insisted on expressing his version of the alleged deal with Holbrooke and the “irregularity” of his arrest during Thursday’s proceedings, despite the protests of Judge Alphons Orie, who urged him to submit the matter in writing.
The resulting letter also expresses Karadzic’s concerns about the chief prosecutor’s promise to bring his case “in the most efficient manner.”
Quoting a Serbian proverb which says, “Justice is slow but sure,” Karadzic writes, “Speed is essential to the calculations of a gunslinger, but not at all in matters of law and justice.”
He also asks how he can have a fair trial when “no one on earth believes in the possibility of an acquittal.”
The tribunal accuses Karadzic of leading a campaign that killed thousands of men, women and children — mainly Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats who were killed by Serbs as part of a violent effort to rid the region of non-Serbs.
Forces under Karadzic’s command rounded up tens of thousands of non-Serbs and held them in camps where, an indictment says, the Serbian forces, “tortured, mistreated, sexually assaulted and killed non-Serbs,” the tribunal said Wednesday.
“The indictment also charges Karadzic with responsibility for a protracted campaign of shelling and sniping of civilian areas of Sarajevo, killing and wounding thousands of civilians, including children and the elderly,” a tribunal statement said.
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The Bosnian war was Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II and the longest of the wars spawned by the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
Backed by the government of then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Bosnian Serb forces seized control of more than half the country and launched a campaign against the Muslim and Croat populations that introduced the term “ethnic cleansing” to the world.
