Radovan Karadzic in the courtroom

Following last week’s status conference, former Republika Srpska president Radovan Karadzic has sent a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. In his letter, Karadzic repeats a series of complaints about his and other detainees’ health problems that he raised last week at the status conference

Noting that the Tribunal is a ‘project’ of the UN, Karadzic says that the Tribunal’s president and the chief prosecutor are entitled to report regularly twice a year to the UN Security Council and its General Assembly. Unlike them, the accused don’t have an opportunity to do so, Karadzic stresses. To rectify this injustice, Karadzic has now produced his own report, entitled Serious illnesses in the United Nation’s Detention Unit in The Hague.

In the letter, Karadzic has denounced the UN Detention Unit Administration, the ICTY Registry and the Trial Chamber for their refusal to accept responsibility for the ‘serious’ situation in the Tribunal’s detention unit. Karadzic goes on to suggest that the Secretary General has not been kept informed about the developments; if he knew about the situation, he ‘would have already acted.’ Two detainees died suddenly, Kovacevic in 1997 and Milosevic in 2006, Karadzic notes, while 11 have got cancer and leukemia. Karadzic then uses himself as an example: he was perfectly healthy when he arrived in the Detention Unit. During his stay in The Hague, his health deteriorated and now he has diabetes. He has also recently undergone gall bladder surgery.

In Karadzic’s view, the high percentage of malignancies should have already been investigated but neither the United Nations nor the International Red Cross Committee and the World Health Organization have done anything about it.

Karadzic has called on the Secretary General to launch an enquiry into the health problems of the detainees. Moreover, Karadzic also wants to see more support for the families of the deceased, for those undergoing treatment and for the detainees as well. They “have been taken from our own society, culture, and legal system,

and brought to The Hague’ where they ‘were subjected to a number of irregularities’, Karadzic says. People from the former Yugoslavia accustomed to being questioned by investigative judges found the legal system unfamiliar. The trials were conducted in a foreign language, the disclosure of evidence depended upon the prosecutors’ good will, there was a general lack of knowledge of the Yugoslav constitution, laws and its legal system, the trials are very long and convicts must serve their sentences in foreign countries, Karadzic lists their woes. According to Karadzic, this is a clear case of a ‘victor’s justice’.

Karadzic hasn’t mentioned at all why he and all other ‘unwilling guests of the UN were brought to The Hague’ in the first place. The letter seems to imply the accused ended up there at someone’s whim, when in the actual fact Karadzic and the others are charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Karadzic was charged with no less than double genocide: in seven BH municipalities in 1992 and in Srebrenica in 1995.

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