Karadzic trial begins with a whimper

It was an anti-climatic beginning to a long-awaited trial. After 15 minutes, judges were forced to adjourn because the accused, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, was still sitting in his cell.

Karadzic, who is representing himself, boycotted the first day of the trial, saying he has not had enough time to prepare. 

I wrote last week about how Bosnian Serbs feel the court is biased against them. Today, the frustration of victims of the war, many of them Bosnian Muslims, was on full display in The Hague. 

Bosnian Muslims see Karadzic's boycott of today's trial was little more than another attempt to avoid justice by a man who spent 13 years on the run. When judges announced the court would be adjourned, an anguished cry rose from the gallery packed with the families.

They fear that this trial, like that of former Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic, will drag on for years — and perhaps never be completed. Milosevic also represented himself in a trial that lasted four years before being cut short by Milosevic's death from a heart attack in March 2006. That trial was frequently delayed by Milosevic's bad health and by the Serbian leader's long tirades about the injustices faced by Serbs and against the legitimacy of the court.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has promised that Karadzic's trial will be fair, but also quick. Karadzic faces just 11 charges, compared to the 66 filed against Milosevic. And in the final indictment filed a week ago, prosecutors also reduced the number of incidents they would present evidence about, largely in order to keep the trial to a manageable length. Even so, they expect it to take a year to present their case against Karadzic. 

But with Karadzic's boycott, the trial judges are faced with a difficult dilemma. Tribunal officials seem determined to go ahead, but doing so is likely to feed Bosnian Serb resentment against the international body. They can appoint Karadzic with a court-appointed lawyer — which he has said he will refuse — or simply continue without him, piping the proceedings into Karadzic's cell.

Whatever happens tomorrow and in the weeks to come, it is unlikely that any verdict will be reached for several years. And two other men, Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, a Serb leader in Croatia, remain at large.

But more importantly, perhaps, 14 years after the end of the Bosnian war and 16 years after the United Nations first called for the creation of a tribunal to look into crimes committed as Yugoslavia collapsed, reconciliation still seems a long way off. The justice process, long and far away as it is from the people whose lives it affected, has done little to help Bosnians come to a shared narrative about what happened. 

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/europe/091026/karadzic-trial-begins-whimper