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Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic attends a hearing at the United Nations tribunal in The Hague in this August 29, 2008 file photo. REUTERS/Valerie Kuypers/Pool
THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic will appear before the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal where he is charged with genocide, but only to argue for more time to prepare his defense, his advisers said Monday.
Karadzic, who has denied all 11 war crimes charges including genocide for the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica, has boycotted the trial since it began last week, but said in a letter he would make an appearance Tuesday.
Karadzic is representing himself.
"I hope we will be able to find a solution which will lead to not only an expeditious trial, but a fair one," Karadzic said in the letter released Monday.
Earlier, one of Karadzic's legal advisers, Marko Sladojevic, reiterated Karadzic's demand for more preparation time.
"We hope that the trial chamber will basically grant us the time that is necessary to prepare. We calculated that we needed 10 months to prepare and that is the only position we have."
Tuesday's hearing will investigate ways to resolve the impasse, the options including continuing the trial in Karadzic's absence, assigning counsel, seeking outside advice, and adjourning to allow assigned legal counsel time to prepare.
HUMANITY'S DARK CHAPTER
In Karadzic's absence the prosecutors, given permission by the judges to proceed, continued their opening statement and spent much of the afternoon discussing the Srebrenica genocide, Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.
Accusing Karadzic of responsibility for one of "humanity's dark chapters," prosecutor Alan Tieger said Karadzic ordered Bosnian Serb forces to capture the Muslim enclave at Srebrenica to crown his efforts to "cleanse" eastern Bosnia and was kept informed by his military commander, Ratko Mladic.
"He knew that men were being killed, he covered up the mass expulsions and the murders and continues to do so to this day, and the only regret he had about the entire operation was that some Muslim men got away," Tieger said.
In one video shown to the court, Tieger showed a Bosnian Muslim man forced to call out to his teenage son that it was safe to surrender to the Bosnian Serbs. Both father and son were later found dead in a mass grave, he said.
The charges against Karadzic relate to the 1992-95 Bosnian war and include the 43-month siege of Sarajevo that began in 1992 and killed an estimated 10,000 people. The siege was one episode in the destruction of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s by Serbs, Croats and Muslims fighting for land.
"Radovan Karadzic led a campaign of shelling and sniping that struck civilians and civilian objects in Sarajevo day after day," Tieger said.
Judge O-Gon Kwon had earlier said the trial chamber considered Karadzic's absence to be a waiver of his right to attend the trial.
(Additional reporting by Suzan Yucel in The Hague and Ivana Sekularac in Belgrade; editing by Tim Pearce)
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