‘I will be acquitted,’ Karadzic tells court

THE HAGUE: Radovan Karadzic did not know of the 1995 massacre of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica, his lawyer said Thursday, with the former Bosnian Serb leader defiantly telling the UN tribunal he would be acquitted.
“There is not a single piece of evidence that Dr. Karadzic planned or ordered the execution of prisoners (at Srebrenica), or that he knew about it,” his legal adviser Peter Robinson told the Hague-based UN Yugoslav war crimes court.
“In fact they (the events) were concealed from him and therefore he is not guilty of genocide,” Robinson said in the second and final day of the defense’s closing arguments before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Once one of Europe’s most wanted men, Karadzic, 69, denies charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1990s Balkans conflict.
A final verdict in the marathon five-year trial is not expected before late 2015.
Karadzic is accused of being one of the masterminds of ethnic cleansing during Bosnia’s brutal 1992-95 civil war that claimed more than 100,000 lives and made refugees of 2.2 million people.
The president of the former self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb republic faces a total of 11 charges, most notably that of genocide for his alleged role in the Srebrenica massacre.
Almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered and their bodies dumped in mass graves after Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN-protected enclave in eastern Bosnia in July 1995.
The slaughter is deemed one of the bloodiest crimes committed on European soil since World War II.
“If Dr. Karadzic was truly guilty of the Srebrenica killings you would have heard something more than what the prosecution has presented in five years of trial,” Robinson told the four-judge bench.
“If you agree to the legal lynching as done by the prosecution, you will be convicting an innocent man,” he added.
Karadzic himself said he was told that reports of killings at Srebrenica were “nothing, they’re lies” when he asked Bosnian Serb commanders about it.