Karadzic wins small victory at war crimes trial, say analysts

Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic won a small victory in a battle of wills with U.N. court judges when they adjourned his genocide trial to March next year, legal analysts said Sunday.

While the judges opted to impose a lawyer on Karadzic, who has boycotted his trial since it started on Oct. 26, they did not strip him of the right to conduct his own defense and effectively gave him more time to prepare - exactly what he was after.

“This is an indirect way of giving Karadzic a bit more time to prepare his case,” while trying to minimize further interruptions, Willem van Genugten, international law professor at the Netherlands' Tilburg University, told AFP.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY on Thursday ordered the imposition of a defense lawyer on Karadzic and adjourned his genocide trial to March 1. Karadzic, 64, has refused to attend his trial since it opened in The Hague nearly two weeks ago, insisting on more time to prepare his defense, which he is conducting himself with the backing of about 20 legal advisers, many of them volunteers.

He had asked the court in September for an extra 10 months to study 1.3 million pages of prosecution evidence and hundreds of witness statements. Karadzic stands charged with 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1992-95 Bosnian war in which some 100,000 people died and 2.2 million were forced to flee their homes.

The judges warned that Karadzic would lose his right to self-representation should he continue his boycott when the trial resumes, in which case the court-assigned lawyer would take over. "The judges were looking for a compromise to end the impasse," said Harmen van der Wilt, international law professor at the University of Amsterdam. "They had to show that they retain the control, that they won't be held hostage, all the while trying to cooperating with the accused," he said.

According to Xavier Tracol, a former ICTY prosecutor, Karadzic "has won a battle but not the war." "His objective is to hold the tribunal hostage. Winning time is one way of achieving that."