[R-G] Karadzic says he has no hope of a fair trial

[Anthony Fenton]

Karadzic says he has no hope of a fair trial
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/26/AR2008082602147.html
By MIKE CORDER
The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 26, 2008; 3:36 PM

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic  
has called for the U.N. genocide and crimes against humanity case  
against him to be dismissed because negative publicity means he can  
not get a fair trial.

In a three-page filing dated Aug. 24 and released Tuesday, Karadzic  
said any presumption of innocence "has been ... reduced to a joke" by  
what he called "demonization in the media."

The document's release came just days before Karadzic was due to make  
his second appearance at the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal  
for the former Yugoslavia.

On Friday he will be asked by Scottish judge Iain Bonomy to enter  
pleas to 11 charges. If Karadzic refuses, the court will enter not  
guilty pleas on his behalf and begin preparations for trial. If  
convicted, he faces a maximum life sentence.

Karadzic was extradited to The Hague after his arrest in Serbia in  
July while posing as a bearded new age guru. He had been on the run  
for 13 years.

Since his arrival in The Hague, Karadzic has been held in a cell at  
the tribunal's detention unit built inside the walls of a Dutch jail  
near the North Sea coast.

He is charged with genocide for allegedly masterminding atrocities,  
including the slaughter of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in  
Srebrenica in July 1995 and the deadly siege of Sarajevo, when he was  
president of the breakaway Bosnian Serb republic.

In the written statement, Karadzic wrote that "nobody in the world  
believes that there is any possibility of an acquittal."

The filing released Tuesday was Karadzic's latest attempt to draw  
attention to a deal he claims he cut with the United States to  
disappear from the public eye in return for immunity from prosecution  
at the U.N. court.

Karadzic says he agreed to the deal with U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke  
in the aftermath of the peace deal known as the Dayton Accord that  
ended Bosnia's bloody 1992-95 war.

Holbrooke has rejected the claim, calling it "an invented story" that  
no one should believe.

In his latest filing, Karadzic says the deal meant that he was unable  
to defend himself against "the systematic, continuous and total  
demonization of my person" in the media following his disappearance in  
1996.