DUSHANBE, August 8, 2008, Asia-Plus – Radovan Karadzic will aim to prove at the Hague tribunal that no genocide took place in Srebrenica, and that fatality figures were deliberately exaggerated, a Serbian paper said on Thursday.
The Srebrenica massacre, where up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed by Serb forces in 1995, is one of two main charges facing the former Bosnian Serb leader, who was transferred to The Hague-based tribunal last week after more than a decade on the run.
The Blic daily quoted Karadzic”s defense lawyer Goran Petronijevic as saying the defendant had outlined the defense strategy himself.
“The general defense strategy is to prove that war crimes could have taken place in Srebrenica, but not genocide, and that the number of victims among Muslims was deliberately overestimated in order to bring genocide charges. War crimes and genocide are different things,” Petronijevic told the paper.
Karadzic earlier said he would draw up his own defense at the Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where he also faces war crimes charges. He will follow the example of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic died in jail in 2006 before his trial could be completed.
