Alan Tieger, prossecutor at Ratko Mladić trial

In the rebuttal ofthe closing arguments presented by thedefense last week, prosecutor Alan Tieger noted the ‘contrast’ between Karazdic’s claims and the arguments made by his legal advisor Robinson. The US lawyer blamed Ljubisa Beara and other VRS officers for the execution of prisoners in Srebrenica. Karadzic on the other hand ‘did provide support to his generals’ because he ‘cannot accept the reality of what happened to the Srebrenica men and boy because that reality charges him personally’.

According to the prosecutor, Karadzic in fact had ‘his finger on the pulse of the operation’ from the very beginning. Karadzic supervised the planning, issued the order to launch the operation and to transfer the prisoners ‘from the last place where they still had a chance of survival to the sites where the only reason for them being there was their execution’, the prosecutor stressed. Tieger said Karadzic received reports of all the developments. He later supervised the operation in which graves were dug up in order to ‘prevent the world from ever learning about what happened’. Karadzic then ordered a ‘false investigation’, which was ‘a fig leaf covering all the evidence’.

The prosecutor quoted from Ratko Mladic’s war diary, who wrote,after the US state secretary Madeleine Albright visited the execution site in Branjevo in March 1996, that Karadzic said ‘we have put up a big show, they expected to find 1,200 bodies and only got five’. At the time Karadzic knew that the graves had been dug up and the bodies transferred to other locations, the prosecutor noted. Karadzic ordered an investigation immediately after Albright’s visit, but it was never completed. According to the prosecutor, the order itself was ‘part of the cover-up’.

In the prosecutor’s opinion, Karadzic made repeated attempts to ‘justify, obstruct and misrepresent the evidence and generalize things to invent a new reality’ because the truth does not militate in his favor. ‘These are not failed attempts of an uneducated man. This is a man who is desperately seeking to deny the facts that incriminate him, the facts that show beyond any reasonable doubt his responsibility on all the counts in the indictment', prosecutor Tieger said.

He quoted some of Karadzic’s ‘false’ claims, such as the claim that in the entire war Karadzic did all he could to allow all the non-Serbs to return to their homes. The representatives of the international community knew at the time that Karadzic’s claim was ‘utter nonsense’. Now the accused is trying ‘yet again' to peddle the same claim, the prosecutor explained. The accused publicly supported ‘the two-way return’ to evade the criticism of the international community. At the same time, Karadzic ‘consoled’ the deputies in the Serb Assembly, telling them that it would never happen. ‘We have created a new reality and if Muslims want to return to Zvornik, they will have to start a new war to expel Serbs’, Karadzic said at the 46^th session of the Republika Srpska Assembly.

The prosecutor also said that Karadzic based his defense against the accusations for terror against Sarajevo on his ‘charlatan use of statistics’, ‘terror over logic’ and misinterpretation of the evidence of witnesses who testified before the Trial Chamber.

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