Karadžić defence trial starts
Listen /
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on trial at The Hague
The defence trial of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić opened in The Hague on Tuesday with Karadžić claiming he had done “everything within human power to avoid the war and to reduce the human suffering”.
Karadžić has been charged with 10 counts of war crimes and genocide related to the Balkan wars of the 1990s, including the killing of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995.
Through an interpreter, Karadžić told the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia that he should be "rewarded" for reducing the suffering of civilians during the conflict.
“Instead of being accused for the events in our civil war I should have been rewarded for all the good things that I’ve done, namely that I did everything in human power to avoid the war, that I succeeded in reducing the suffering of all civilians. That the number of victims in our war was three to four times less than the numbers reported in the public.” (Duration: 28")
Karadžić was arrested in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2008 after more than a decade on the run.
His trial began the following year.
