Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague in August 2008
The stage was all set, but the star failed to appear: the trial of Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader and alleged architect of the savage 1992-95 war in Bosnia, started without the defendant at the international war-crimes court in the Hague. As prosecutor Alan Tieger gave his opening statement on Oct. 27, listing the 11 counts of war crimes, including two counts of genocide, against Karadzic, the defendant's seat remained empty, a pair of earphones sitting idly on the desk in front of it.
Just days before the trial was scheduled to begin, Karadzic announced that he would boycott the proceedings to protest the court's decision to deny him additional time to prepare his defense. In a letter to the court, Karadzic complained that he was being "buried under tons of pages of legal documents" and compared himself with victims of staged trials in Nazi Germany. The trial opened as scheduled on Oct. 26 but was adjourned 20 minutes later when Karadzic refused to appear. With the defendant again absent the next day, the proceedings started without him. In his opening statement, Tieger said Karadzic had "harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to pursue his vision of an ethnically segregated Bosnia." He also quoted the former Bosnian Serb leader as saying before the war that he would turn the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo into a "black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die."
Karadzic, 64, is accused of orchestrating the 44-month siege of Sarajevo, during which some 10,000 people were killed, as well as the slaughter of about 8,000 captured Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in July 1995. After more than a decade on the run, living in Serbia under the assumed identity of a psychic healer named Dragan Dabic, the world's most wanted fugitive was finally captured in July 2008 and transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.
Despite the fact that the trial is under way, Karadzic's boycott has cast a pall over the tribunal, which was set up 15 years ago by the U.N. Security Council to try those responsible for atrocities committed during the war. Many survivors and relatives of victims fear that Karadzic's trial will play out similarly to that of former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, who used repeated stall tactics to drag out his proceedings for three years before eventually dying in custody. Many of the problems stemmed from the decision by the tribunal to allow Milosevic to defend himself — he used the court as a soapbox, delivering rambling political speeches. Karadzic, who is also representing himself, is now doing his best to sabotage his own trial and undermine the legitimacy of the tribunal.
"He's obviously trying to derail the whole trial," Natasa Kandic, a Serbian human-rights activist, told TIME by telephone from Belgrade, the Serbian capital. "I hope that the tribunal has learned some lessons from Milosevic's case and that they'll continue with the trial and disregard his games and claims that the court's unfair."
Relatives of the victims, who took an exhausting 30-hour bus trip from Bosnia to watch the trial, booed from behind the glass in the courtroom and cried, "Politics!" when it was adjourned on Monday. "It's a catastrophe," says Munira Subasic, the head of the Mothers of Srebrenica organization. She lost 22 members of her family, including her 14-year-old son Nermin, whose body was never found. "That criminal didn't even have guts to look us in the eyes," she adds, referring to Karadzic. "This is nothing but a circus."
Where the trial goes from here is far from certain. Although Karadzic's absence from the courtroom is permitted under the ICTY's rules for the start of the trial, he must be in attendance once the prosecution starts presenting evidence the first week of November or have an attorney represent him. On Monday, Judge O-Gon Kwon of South Korea said he could impose a legal team on Karadzic to allow the proceedings to continue. But this could actually lead to further delays. "If they enforce a lawyer upon him, they would have to allow that person at least two years just to get acquainted with the case," Goran Petronijevic, one of Karadzic's many legal advisers, said on Serbian television. "That is much longer than the delay we have asked for."
Despite the image he is trying to project of a lone individual squaring off against a heartless judicial machine, Karadzic is far from defenseless. He has assembled a formidable team of some 30 legal advisers, headed by Patrick Robinson, an American lawyer who once worked for the ICTY. For the past several months, the team has showered the tribunal with more than 400 motions and appeals, causing substantial delays to the process.
One of Karadzic's requests was for a re-examination of DNA samples and autopsy results from every body excavated from the mass graves in Srebrenica in an attempt to prove that the number of victims was grossly exaggerated and that many of the victims were not even Bosnian Muslims. "Everything in relation to Srebrenica that has been presented so far is erroneous ... Everything is contentious and everything needs to be established fact by fact," Karadzic said at the pretrial hearing in July.
Such statements no doubt rub salt in the wounds of the relatives of victims, who have waited years for justice. Outside the court on Tuesday, several head-scarfed Bosnian women assembled on the lawn and declared that they would not leave before they saw Karadzic in the dock. Some said they would even go on a hunger strike. But after a short while, they all turned and slowly headed toward their bus.