Trying Situation

Can the trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic in The Hague, which resumed this week after he boycotted for four months, be prevented from descending into a farce? “Karadzic—who had boycotted the trial for four months—this week used the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to declare that his mass-murdering forces in the 1992-1995 Bosnian War were only defending against Islamic fundamentalists; that there was no campaign to create an ethnically ‘pure’ Serbia; that accounts of Bosnian death camps are a hoax and that inmates were free to leave. He also averred that the 44-month siege of Sarajevo never happened; that civilian corpses were planted in Markale and that the “myth” of 8,000 dead men and boys in Srebrenica was fabricated to lure the West into creating a Muslim state. The sometime ‘poet’ and ‘faith healer’ also succeeded in once more deferring the proceedings pending an appeal for more time to prepare his defense, scuppering Wednesday’s planned appearance of the prosecution’s first witnesses.”