Karadzic to Appear Before Tribunal Today on War Crimes Charges

THE HAGUE, July 30 -- Former Bosnian Serb president Radovan Karadzic will appear in a courtroom here Thursday to be formally charged with war crimes related to the siege of Sarajevo, the execution of 8,000 prisoners in the town of Srebrenica and other atrocities of the three-year war in Bosnia, prosecutors said.

After more than a decade on the run, Karadzic, 63, was being held in a jail in The Hague on Wednesday, awaiting his first appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Hours earlier, he had been flown from the Serbian capital, Belgrade, under heavy security and secrecy.

"The arrest of Radovan Karadzic is immensely important for the victims who had to wait far too long for this day," Serge Brammertz, chief prosecutor of the U.N. court, told reporters here Wednesday. "It is also important for international justice because it clearly demonstrates that there is no alternative to the arrest of war criminals and that there can be no safe haven for fugitives."

On Thursday, Karadzic will be asked to enter a plea for each of the 11 counts against him.

Karadzic, indicted in 1995, was found in Belgrade disguised as a heavily bearded alternative-medicine practitioner. He has shaved and had his hair cut since his arrest, according to Serbian officials. He again resembles the swaggering leader who, along with his military commander, Ratko Mladic, became the public face of an "ethnic cleansing" campaign that brought some of Europe's worst atrocities since World War II.

Karadzic was head of the ministate that Bosnian Serbs carved out in the 1990s and supreme commander of the Bosnian Serb army. He is accused of crimes against Bosniaks, or Bosnian Muslims, and ethnic Croat civilians in a war that also displaced nearly 2 million people.

The indictment alleges that Karadzic's forces ran detention facilities where non-Serbs were "tortured, mistreated, sexually assaulted and killed."

The poet and former psychiatrist is accused of genocide in connection with the killing of nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys taken prisoner by Serb forces that overran Srebrenica in 1995. The indictment says he "instructed Bosnian Serb forces . . . to create an unbearable situation of total insecurity with no hope of further survival of life for the inhabitants."

Brammertz expressed hope that authorities in the Balkans will also capture Mladic and Goran Hazdic, an ethnic Serb from Croatia, the two remaining fugitives sought by the court. "Without those arrests, the tribunal can't fulfill its mandate," Brammertz said. The court's mandate expires in 2010, but it can be extended by the U.N. Security Council.

Serbia's cooperation with the court is also a condition of beginning membership talks with the European Union, an aspiration of the country's new pro-Western government. Officials in Belgrade view the arrest and extradition of Karadzic as an important step in ending Serbia's isolation. And the government of President Boris Tadic has been boosted by the muted reaction of Serb nationalists to Karadzic's capture and transfer.

A rally in central Belgrade on Tuesday night drew 15,000 people, a disappointment for its organizer, the Serbian Radical Party, whose leader, Vojislav Seselj, is also held in The Hague.

Karadzic's attorney in Belgrade has said his client intends to dispense with legal representation in The Hague and speak for himself. That raises the possibility that, like former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, he will try to use the courtroom for politically orientated speeches and lines of questioning, prolonging proceedings that already promise to be complex and drawn out because of the range of charges.