The Trial of Radovan Karadzic: The Accused Takes Up His Own Defense

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Radovan Karadzic turns to the almost empty viewing gallery in Courtroom 3 and nods a brief smile of acknowledgement to an unfamiliar face. It is two weeks since he opened his defense at the Hague tribunal with a 90-minute statement urging the court to recognize him as a “mild and tolerant” man of peace — and not the war criminal he has been portrayed by prosecutors and the press. He has now begun his bid to prove that Bosnian Muslims shelled and shot at their own people during the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1995.

In three years representing himself at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the 67-year-old former Bosnian Serb leader has developed the air of an unkempt dinner-party host. In a crumpled shirt unbuttoned at the neck, a multicolored tie under a blue jacket, he tries to put his defense witness, a British ballistics expert, at ease. In the dock, Dr. Derek Allsop, sweats and cracks a nervous joke about the risk of badly directed mortars. Karadzic smiles patiently and politely asks him whether he needs to continue talking trajectories.

Indicted in 1995 for the genocide at Srebrenica in which 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys were murdered, as well as orchestrating the murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats during a war that ultimately cost more than 100,000 lives, Karadzic was finally arrested in 2008 in Belgrade disguised as the long-bearded new-age health guru, Dragan David Dabic.

Fatter now, clean-shaven and peering through rimless glasses, the former poet and psychiatrist appears to be growing into his lawyerly role. His legal adviser, Peter Robinson, says his defense has three main strands. “Some of the things he is accused of he blames on the Muslims. Other things, like ethnic cleansing, is the result of civil war. Then with the Srebrenica events, he says that he did not know they were executing the prisoners. He says he was not aware of it.”

The tactic of pushing the blame for war crimes onto Muslims and painting forced deportations as an unfortunate side effect of civil war is evident in the latest in an avalanche of recent correspondence from the Karadzic camp. In a letter via the Bosnian ambassador in the Hague, Karadzic wrote, with typically pronounced civility, that he would like to call a former Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister Hasan Cengic to the dock. “I believe you have valuable information to contribute to my trial. Specifically, I wish to ask you about your instruction to Bosnian Muslims to depart from Trebinje to make it look like Bosnian Serbs were conducting ethnic cleansing,” he wrote. “This is important to my defense because such tactics of blaming Serbs for acts of the Muslims have spilled over from the war to the courtroom. I am now being charged with crimes that the Bosnian Muslims themselves committed in order to blame the Serbs and obtain international intervention. I need your testimony to clarify these matters to my Trial Chamber.”

Allsop has been called to help prove that the mortar that killed 68 in the February 1994 Markale Market massacre in Sarajevo was not fired from Bosnian Serb positions. Yet Bosnian Serb guilt has already been proved in the trial of a Karadzic subordinate, Stanislav Galic, who will also be called to testify on behalf of his former leader. The strategy of total denial, as well as Karadzic’s insistence that he represents himself, means he will be defending his case until 2014, at least.

It also means the former Bosnian Serb leader delays, for as long as possible, the conviction that Robinson says even Karadzic knows is inevitable and his probably lifetime jail sentence.

As one of 35 men — from all sides of Europe’s last war — still on trial at the Hague, he is being held on one of three wings in the adjoining detention unit. Some Balkan critics of the ICTY describe it as the Hague Hilton. Like Ratko Mladic, arrested in 2010 and also indicted for the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, Karadzic looks visibly healthier since arriving. The accused men have good health care; each wing houses around a dozen of the accused, has a kitchen where they can cook together. They can also order food from a local Balkan shop; and as Nerma Jelacic, the ICTY chief spokesperson points out, there have even been interwing football competitions.

At an average age of 63, violent disputes in the unit are rare, and there has never been a fight over ethnicity. Muslim and Christian festivals are even celebrated together. “For special occasions like ‘Id or Easter or Christmas, they can order roast meat on a spit or baklava,” says Jelacic.

The cuddly image of Karadzic as an aging man of peace is cultivated by his legal adviser. During four years working with Karadzic, Robinson says the pair have grown close. “He is very easy to get along with,” says the mild-mannered Bostonian. “He has very good personal skills, he is very funny, very intelligent. He’d prefer to be enjoying poetry and literature than be a lawyer. He isn’t physical or violent at all. He’s really very mild. The idea of someone being beaten or shot is horrible to him. He was a psychiatrist and a writer. He was forced to become a commander in chief.”

Watching the unfailingly polite Karadzic in the civilized surroundings of the ICTY, where delayed interpretation between English and Serbian takes the sting out of cross-examination, the image of the urbane former poet and psychiatrist as a reluctant lawyer and warrior appears credible.

But Mirko Klarin, a Serbian journalist who has followed Karadzic for more than 20 years says Karadzic’s manner is unchanged since he practiced psychiatry at a Sarajevo hospital in his 30s. “He was an average poet, an average psychiatrist and he is a hopeless lawyer,” he says.

Throughout the first three years of this trial, Karadzic had promised a point by point destruction of the prosecution’s case. Now, with his defense just two weeks old, he has been reduced to reading agreed statements to witnesses and asking them to confirm the information.

The method is sometimes applied here to speed up lengthy cases, but Klarin says it is a device to prevent the bungling amateur attorney from asking questions that might damage his own case.

Frederick Swinnen, special adviser to the prosecutor, says that in the past, defense witnesses have often proved more useful to the prosecution than they were to the accused. Klarin says this will certainly be the case with Karadzic. “He has called 600 witnesses. The prosecution will be rubbing their hands together,” he says.

Take this example. Former U.N. peacekeeper Major Sergey Moroz was called to testify. Karadzic read a written statement in which Moroz recalls a 1994 conversation with a Russian U.N. military observer, Nicolaj Rumyantsev. The now dead Russian had told Moroz that the Markale Market mortar could not have come from a Bosnian Serb position. In the nine years since he first gave evidence in the Galic trial, however, the prosecution has found the report signed by the dead Russian that says exactly the opposite.

The Nanny Who Was a Princess: How a Kindness Turned Controversial

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While loyal subjects in Britain celebrated a royal pregnancy, across the North Sea, in Norway, a very different kind of crown princess was being celebrated for her own brush with uterine politics. Princess Mette-Marit’s trip to India, posing as a nanny to care for the newborn surrogate twins of a gay courtier and his husband, has landed her in a very Norwegian royal row involving birth, morality, exploitation and what it means to be a parent.

When it became clear on Oct. 23 that a delayed visa would prevent the prospective parents from making it to New Delhi in time for the birth, the princess jetted off to care for the infants while the married pair dealt with the red tape. Posing as a nanny to oblivious clinical staff, Mette-Marit was spotted by a Norwegian journalist who only broke the story once the children were safely back inEurope.

But the warm-hearted tale of a princess posing as a commoner to ensure the health and safety of two helpless infants is complicated, or perhaps enhanced, by the problematic legality of surrogacy in her home country. Surrogacy, including an arrangement in which a woman is paid to carry someone else’s child to birth, is outlawed in Norway. Outsourcing the pregnancy is legally murky.

The future Queen’s use of diplomatic access to fast-track herself into India in order to care for the children is being hailed by the political classes in Norway as heroic. Bent Hoie, health spokesman for the opposition Conservative Party and a staunch opponent of surrogacy, spoke warmly of her journey. “She did what all of us want our best friends to do in that situation. She was the only one who could help her friends. They were desperate. The children were born in a faraway country with nobody to take care of them. She was the only one who could have done it. The children have to come first.”

But the princess, a former single mother and waitress who married Prince Haakon in 2001 and whose self-proclaimed “rebellious past” would make the British Windsors reach for their abdication procedures, has nevertheless brought the surrogacy debate into sharp focus and may help to legitimize a practice frowned upon in Norwegian law.

In this famously liberal country where same-sex marriages have been legal for three years, objections to surrogacy still run deep. Hoie, himself one half of a same-sex marriage, says the practice exploits women in poorer countries, confuses children’s parentage and pours health resources into treating people who aren’t sick. “Not having children is not being sick,” he says. “Having children is not a human right.”

Oyvind Habrekke, leader of the Christian Democrats, goes further, likening overseas surrogacy to human trafficking. “They are not the same thing. But they are connected. And we have to take into account the parallels.

“I respect the crown princess’s choice in this specific situation. But at the same time, the whole situation is a very good illustration of the problems with the surrogacy industry. There are thousands of surrogate children born in India every year. This is one story where there was a problem with getting a visa. There are so many other stories where the children are just used in a game here. The whole situation tells us that this is a cynical industry that works for its own profit and an industry where the children are left behind.”

Habrekke is no political outlier. The ban on surrogacy in Norway has cross-party political support. But the law preventing Norwegians from seeking surrogate children overseas is more complicated. It is a by-product of 2002 legislation intended to regulate clinical professionals in the field of biotechnology and has never been enforced. “It was never meant for individuals,” says Hoie, whose party was in power when the legislation was introduced.

Now with her Indian intervention, the crown princess has stumbled into a debate that has been bubbling away since last May when Oystein Maeland, a gay, married activist for the ruling Labor party, was appointed as police chief despite having a second California-born surrogate baby on the way. Avoiding overseas surrogacy will remain the official advice in Norway, come what may. But a consultation paper proposing the decriminalization of individuals under the Biotechnology Act was tabled only last month. Under the new proposals, Maeland, the now former police chief, would escape any possibility of punishment.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg has already absented himself from the debate because of his close friendship with Maeland. In a palace statement, Princess Mette-Marit has wisely sought to do the same. “There are times in life when one finds oneself in a complex situation where there are few or no good solutions. In such cases one must make difficult decisions, even though there may be repercussions. I found this to be precisely such a situation,” she said. “There is an important ongoing social debate on surrogacy. My trip was not intended to be a contribution to this debate. For me, this was a situation in which I was in a position to help to care for two newborn babies who were alone in the world.”

Why Europe’s Healthiest Economy Has Its Worst Drug Problem

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Aivar has already begun to sweat. His last hit of “China white” was yesterday evening. Shortly his limbs will begin to ache, and if he doesn’t get a fix soon he will vomit what little food and water he’s had since waking up two hours earlier.

He is at a needle exchange in the center of Estonia’s capital Tallinn and is using the opportunity to reflect on the deaths of his closest friends and the four overdoses he has suffered since he started injecting drugs 14 years ago. The 32-year-old understands how easily he could add to the statistic. One day the defibrillators will not work, he says. Still he can’t stop. Neither can so many other Estonians.

Estonia has the highest number of per capita drug fatalities anywhere in Europe. The reason is fentanyl. Colloquially it is called China white, Persian white or Afghan. But they’re misnomers — glamorous tags attached to a powder, prosaically synthesized in clandestine labs across the border in Russia. It arrived in 2002 during a heroin drought. It never went away. These days it is the drug of choice for the many thousands of dedicated injectors in Tallinn. And, according to government chemists at the sparkling new labs in the capital’s Estonian Forensic Science Institute, it is anywhere between 100 and a thousand times stronger than the scag it replaced.

The effectiveness of the drug makes it easy to smuggle. The largest single police bust last year was a batch of 1.5 kg — small enough to fit in a knapsack, but enough for almost 40,000 doses of the drug on the street. Uncut, it is hardly detectable at all.

The tiny brown-powder doses carried around by addicts in fingernail-size sachets of aluminum foil have to be cut with whey powder or glucose to make them “safe” for humans. Typically, says Aime Riikoja, chief chemist at the Estonian Forensic Science Institute, the purity level is from 5% to 10%. Tragically, the drug gangs’ amateur chemists can bungle the ratios. “In 2009 there were batches which were 13% to 14% pure,” says Peep Rauseberg, a forensic chemist at the institute. “Many people died.”

Sometimes the dealers know the drug is dangerously pure and warn their customers to be careful. Sometimes they can be carrying hits from several different batches at the same time and don’t know themselves what is and what is not safe. “It has happened that we bought two doses at the same time from the same guy,” recalls Aivar, who used to shoot up with his childhood friend in the alleyways of Tallinn. “When I woke up, my friend was already dead.” One of five friends who started injecting together in their late teens, Aivar is the only one still alive.

In 2011 there were 123 drug deaths in Estonia, making this country of just 1.3 million, easily the overdose capital of Europe. The 2012 figures for the rest of the E.U. are not yet available. But Estonia’s 160 deaths will see it top the table again. The injecting-drug scourge is also connected with Estonia’s other public-health epidemic: Aivar is one of the 1.2% of Estonian adults diagnosed with HIV. The European country in second place is next-door-neighbor Latvia with just 0.7%.

Despite topping these twin E.U. leagues of infamy, Estonia is, in many ways, the standout European success story of the past 20 years.

As a part of the Soviet Union until 1991, the country is often lumped in with its more sluggish Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Lithuania. But with its Finnic language, modern supermarkets and burgeoning information economy, the country feels more Nordic, orienting itself politically and culturally westward to its main trading partners, Germany, Finland and Sweden rather than to Russia on its eastern border.

The country is also pulling away economically. After becoming one of the first East European states to join the euro at the beginning of 2011, self-confident Estonian politicians now lobby the E.U. to make Latvia and Lithuania members of the currency union too. And despite savage contraction in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, Estonia has now resumed its gangbuster growth, expanding 8.3% in 2011, compared with an E.U. average of 1.5%, and 2.5% in 2012, even while the rest of the E.U. shrank.

Aljona Kurbatova, head of infectious-disease prevention at the Ministry of Health, however, believes the breakneck growth has come at a price, with many young people left behind in the murky backwash of the economic ocean liner. “The 1990s were a time of great change. A lot of Estonians felt like they had to excel. But a lot of young people have not been able to keep up, and they have turned to these drugs.” The pockets of social deprivation where jobless young people with weak social networks have been allowed to fester, has helped to create the conditions where fentanyl has thrived.

“It is a social problem,” says Risto Kasemae, a major at the National Criminal Police. “The police can only do so much. We are not a police state. We need to deal with the underlying social problems as well.”

One of the many tragedies associated with fentanyl in Estonia is the youthful complexion of its users. It predominates among a marginalized group of mainly ethnic Russian men aged between 16 and 24. The drug’s victims also die wretchedly young: 28, on average, for women and 31 for men. In the U.K., where its few users tend to extract the drug from painkillers prescribed to cancer patients, the statistics are 47 for women and 39 for men.

In a November survey the E.U.’s drugs watchdog, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, suggested, among a series of measures proposed to limit the use of fentanyl, an information blitz for vulnerable people. But users in Estonia are already morbidly aware of the dangers. In the spirit of stoic black humor, some refer to the drug simply as “flatline.”