Once a war-time strongman, now it's Karadzic the lawyer

By Nicholas Rigillo May 8, 2010, 18:20 GMT

The Hague - Lawyers like to say that 'a man who defends himself has a fool for a client.'

But Radovan Karadzic is no fool.

His decision to handle his own defence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), while in no small part dictated by political reasons, is now being closely watched by law experts and laymen alike.

Unlike another famous ICTY defendant, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, the former Bosnian Serb leader did not study law. And yet, he appears to have warmed to the legal task at hand, countering the charges of war crimes and genocide that have been brought against him with calm and even some degree of competence.

Whether it will be enough to spare him a life sentence, however, remains to be seen.

According to Gideon Boas, a senior lecturer at the Monash University Law School and a former ICTY legal officer, Karadzic is 'functioning reasonably well considering the task and multitude of pressures.

'However, it would be a mistake to think that he has learned what it takes to be a defence lawyer,' said Boas who also authored The Milosevic Trial: Lessons for the Conduct of Complex International Criminal Proceedings.

Karadzic's chief legal advisor, Peter Robinson, says Karadzic does not need a lawyer since 'he knows the facts better than anyone else.' The former president of Republika Srpska also makes up for his lack of legal background by virtue of being a 'very bright' and hard-working man, Robinson told the German Press Agency dpa.

In reality, Karadzic relies on a small army of legal advisors - among them Robinson, a highly experienced US-born criminal defence lawyer who is also defending clients at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

Nevertheless, Karadzic deserves praise for introducing a large body of fresh evidence into the proceedings as he seeks to build his own case through the prosecutor's witnesses, Robinson says.

Moreover, Karadzic appears to no longer be stalling proceedings, as he did during the trial's opening hearings.

ICTY Presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon is keen to prevent the delaying tactics employed by Milosevic, who died in 2006 in The Hague, four years after the start of his war crimes trial.

And unlike Milosevic, who initially refused to accept the authority of the ICTY and then proceeded to direct coarse insults at his accusers, Karadzic has so far been respectful of the court and reasonably polite when cross-examining witnesses.

At the same time, Karadzic has frequently been reprimanded for asking irrelevant questions or lacing them with unnecessary comments.

Last month, for instance, he was scolded by Judge O-Gon for his 'appalling comment' that a surviving witness of the infamous massacre of about 8,000 Muslim men at Srebrenica was 'not a victim but a soldier.'

Karadzic's defence strategy is clear: To discredit the prosecutor's witnesses as he seeks to portray Bosnian Serbs as victims of Muslim aggression and play down alleged Bosnian-Serb atrocities as ordinary acts of war.

However, he failed during cross-examination to get Ambassador Herbert Okun - Special Adviser on Yugoslavia to former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance - to concede that the then Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegovic, had been planning to establish an Islamic state in the heart of Europe.

Karadzic also failed to get from Okun any confirmation of his claims that Izetbegovic had been seeking to provoke international sympathy for his cause by ordering the shelling of his own people in Sarajevo.

Robinson concedes that Karadzic needs to rid himself of a few 'bad habits.'

But Boas argues that the trial's unfolding shows that Karadzic was wrong to refuse being represented by an attorney.

'For non-lawyers - and in the enormously complex area of international criminal trials - the prospects of a self-represented accused not significantly harming their case legally is quite small,' Boas said.

The old legal adage about self-appointed defendants as fools condenses a variety of criticisms directed at such a practice: For instance, the accused may be too emotionally involved to mount a successful defence, or may lack the necessary knowledge to put their case across.

But when it comes to high-profile political figures like Karadzic, such objections may well be trumped by the opportunity of being given a platform from which to address their sympathisers.

During his opening speech, for instance, Karadzic said his role during the 1992-95 Bosnian war was to defend 'that nation of ours' from the aggression of Muslim fundamentalists.

Boas argues that one of the strongest arguments for wanting to stop war criminals like Karadzic from representing themselves at the ICTY is to prevent them from peddling such unsubstantiated rhetoric.

Moreover, 'the forensic value' of making political statements in court has been shown to be 'highly questionable,' he says.

In any case, most Bosnian Serb nationalists appear to be more interested in the incendiary comments of the current premier of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, who denies the Srebrenica genocide, than with Karadzic's trial.

Ultimately, Karadzic will have to instil reasonable doubt in the minds of judges as to whether he was indeed responsible for some of the worst massacres committed in Europe since World War II, or whether he was simply defending his people.

For that to happen, even the legal skills of a Perry Mason may not be sufficient.