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Had secret deal with U.S. to disappear: Karadzic

The Hague: Radovan Karadzic, former Bosnian-Serb warlord awaiting trial for genocide, has said high-ranking officials in the 1990s U.S. administration of the former President, Bill Clinton, want him dead and that it would be impossible for him to receive a fair trial after 12 years on the run ended with his arrest last week, it has emerged.

“No one on earth believes in the possibility of an acquittal,” Karadzic argued in a four-page statement, which he was prevented from reading to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague on Thursday at a pre-trial hearing. “Others from President Clinton’s team ... are in a hurry to see me dead.”

He said several months after the Bosnian war ended in November 1995, Richard Holbrooke, U.S. envoy who engineered the peace settlement at Dayton in Ohio, made the genocide suspect an offer. “The offer was as follows: I must withdraw not only from public but also from party offices and completely disappear from the public arena.”

Karadzic, who was head of the main Serbian party in Bosnia and President of the self-proclaimed Serbian republic in half of Bosnia, was indicted for genocide and crimes against humanity in 1995. He retired from politics a year later and vanished until he was arrested on a bus in Belgrade last week disguised as a long-haired alternative medicine aficionado.

“Holbrooke undertook on behalf of the U.S.A. that I would not be tried before this tribunal,” Karadzic wrote in the first statement prepared for his defence against 11 counts of genocide and extermination of Muslims as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The allegations of a secret deal between Mr. Holbrooke and Karadzic have circulated in the Balkans for years and the American has repeatedly dismissed them contemptuously over the past week while stating that Karadzic is a mass murderer who deserves the death penalty.

“It’s an invented story and no one ought to believe it,” said Mr. Holbrooke. “What I said was, ‘If anyone deserves the death penalty, it’s Karadzic and Mladic’,” said Mr. Holbrooke, referring to Karadzic’s top military commander, Ratko Mladic, who is still a fugitive.

Karadzic added that Madeleine Albright, the then U.S. Secretary of State, told Biljana Plavsic, Karadzic’s successor as Bosnian-Serb leader — who is serving an 11-year sentence for war crimes after plea-bargaining and confessing her guilt — that Karadzic should go away to “Russia, Greece or Serbia.” He claimed The Hague tribunal defied U.S. pressure to drop the case against himself, causing Mr. Holbrooke to “switch to Plan B — the liquidation of Radovan Karadzic.”

Accused of being responsible for the murder of thousands of mainly Muslims in Bosnia, Karadzic said he now feared for his own life. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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