Peter Robinson, legal advisor of Radovan Karadzic

‘What happened in Bosnia in 1992, gruesome as it was, wasn’t genocide’, Radovan Karadzic's legal advisor Peter Robinson said in his part of the closing arguments. Robinson admitted that ‘crimes were committed in 1992’ in the municipalities, but, as he contended, the prosecution failed to prove that the intent behind the murders, grave bodily harm and unbearable living conditions was to exterminate in part or wholly an ethnic or religious group. ‘Consequently’, Robinson called the Trial Chamber to acquit his client of genocide in Bratunac, Foca, Kljuc, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica and Zvornik.

Robinson also asked for Karadzic’s acquittal for the genocide in Srebrenica. For Robinson’s client ‘it is a matter of life and death’: if the Trial Chamber is convinced that Karadzic was part of the joint criminal enterprise, it means that ‘he too will die as a prisoner’. That would be ‘legal lynching’, Robinson claimed. According to Robinson, Srebrenica is the ‘best documented war crime since Nuremberg’ but ‘Karadzic didn’t plan or order the executions’ that had been ‘kept hidden from him’.

Karadzic said that he was still ‘trying to put together a picture’ of what had happened in Srebrenica. Unlike Karadzic, Robinson has no doubts. ‘It was an incredible crime, thousands of Muslim captives were executed’, Robinson said. Victims ‘were not given any recourse to justice’ because they were executed ‘without a lawyer, trial or judgment’. Karadzic on the contrary was given ‘a lawyer, a defense team and a five-year trial, and finally he will receive his judgment from three renowned international judges’. ‘The trial has established the principle that the society puts its trust in justice in the face of barbarism, regardless o f how heinous the crimes are’, concluded Robinson; this is why it would ‘be unfair to convict Karadzic for the crimes he didn’t commit’.

Unlike Robinson who at least acknowledged that there were crimes, Karadzic is still in denial. Addressing the court after Robinson, Karadzic said that during the 1,260 days of the war, Sarajevo ‘wasn't as much as scratched’. ‘Where are those victims’, Karadzic wondered at one point. The only victims – at Markale town market, and in the queues for water, food and humanitarian aid, were caused by the enemy side. The evidence of the representatives of the international community are ‘biased’, and ‘generalized’, Karadzic noted. According to the accused, foreign journalists' reports were based on ‘guesses’, the findings of the Bosnian investigators were ‘flawed and inaccurate’ while the testimonies of the victims were a ‘laugh’. In Karadzic’s words, the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps fired only at military targets and its generals Stanislav Galic and Dragomir Milosevic were unjustly convicted.

Karadzic accepted only ‘moral responsibility’ and he felt ‘sorry for all the victims’. He denied every other allegation against him, certain that the judges will acquit him ‘if they will establish the truth’.

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