The genocide trial of Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic resumed after a six-week delay in The Hague on Tuesday with the prosecution’s first witness to his alleged war crimes set to face him.
Presiding judge O-Gon Kwon declared the hearing open shortly after 2:30 pm (1230 GMT) as Karadzic and witness Ahmet Zulic, a former inmate of Serb detention camps, prepared to square off in the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The prosecution was set to deliver Zulic’s written evidence to the court, after which he would be cross-examined by Karadzic, who is acting as his own defence counsel.
The testimony of Zulic, who has previously given evidence in three other ICTY trials including that of former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic, concerns the murders, beating and starvation of prisoners held in Serb detention camps in the region of Sanski Most in northwestern Bosnia.
According to court documents, his evidence includes the assassination in June 1992 of about 20 men who had their throats cut after being made to dig their own graves, allegedly by Serb soldiers.
In five months in detention, Zulic claims he suffered broken ribs and head injuries and weighed 35 kilogrammes less by the time he was released.
Karadzic, 64, faces 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide charges arising from Bosnia’s 1992-95 war in which 100,000 people were killed and 2.2 million left homeless.
Key among the charges against him is the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys at the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995, as well as the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that ended in November 1995 with some 10,000 civilians killed in sniper and shelling attacks, according to rights groups.
Karadzic was arrested on a Belgrade bus in July 2008 after 13 years on the run.
Pleading not guilty, he insists on conducting his own defence and has demanded more time to prepare — boycotting the opening of his trial last October and causing several months of delay.
Accused by prosecutor Alan Tieger of being the “supreme commander” of a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Karadzic faces life imprisonment if found guilty.
In his opening statement to the court in March, Karadzic claimed that wartime atrocities blamed on Bosnian Serbs were “staged” by their Muslim enemies and said the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was a “myth”.
The prosecution expects to present the evidence of about 410 witnesses in a process expected to take several months.
