The trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic resumed in The Hague on Monday. Now the question is whether the proceedings can be prevented from descending—as they so often have before at the court—into farce.
Karadzic—who had boycotted the trial for four months—this week used the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to declare that his mass-murdering forces in the 1992-1995 Bosnian War were only defending against Islamic fundamentalists; that there was no campaign to create an ethnically "pure" Serbia; that accounts of Bosnian death camps are a hoax and that inmates were free to leave.
He also averred that the 44-month siege of Sarajevo never happened; that civilian corpses were planted in Markale and that the "myth" of 8,000 dead men and boys in Srebrenica was fabricated to lure the West into creating a Muslim state. The sometime "poet" and "faith healer" also succeeded in once more deferring the proceedings pending an appeal for more time to prepare his defense, scuppering Wednesday's planned appearance of the prosecution's first witnesses.
Survivors of the Bosnian genocide may understandably be following these shenanigans with a sense of dread, remembering how Slobodan Milosevic delayed his own Hague trial with a similar circus act until a fatal heart attack, rather than a verdict, ended it five years in. Once again, the butcher—this one now 64 years old—may get the last laugh.
We're sympathetic to that skepticism of U.N.-administered justice, which is why when Karadzic was arrested in July 2008 these columns urged for him to be tried in Bosnia, where he committed his atrocities and where there might be less patience for a mass murderer demanding to be handled with care.
But the trial is going forward, and it can still serve valuable purposes. The most obvious of these is simple justice. But ultimately the most important may be to secure a historical record about what actually happened in Bosnia, and who the perpetrators and victims were. As with Holocaust deniers, there is an active camp of Bosnia "revisionists" who argue that the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre never happened. In the fact-checking-less world of the Internet, these sorts of unhinged notions have a way of getting around.
Now there's a chance to set the record straight. The danger, as with the Milosevic trial, is that the proceedings against Karadzic risk descending into a procedural morass that serve only to obscure the truth that the tribunal was designed to lay bare. Karadzic deserves his day in court, and like any defendant has the right to present a defense. But a functioning judiciary must also recognize that the interests of justice are not served by trials without limit or bounds.
On Monday, Karadzic told the court: "The only thing that I expect here is to be given the opportunity to. . . show you the substance and the crux of this matter." We hope for nothing less.
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