http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Helping+fight+history/2745756/story.html
Helping in the 'fight for history'
U.S. lawyer Peter Robinson's client, Radovan Karadzic, wants to set the record
straight about his role in Yugoslavia's brutal civil war,
By Robert Sibley., the Ottawa CitizenMarch 31, 2010
Peter Robinson, the lead lawyer for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan
Karadzic, is visiting Ottawa to interview witnesses such as retired Maj.-Gen.
Lewis MacKenzie, in preparation for Karadzic's war crimes trial in The Hague.
Photograph by: Bruno Schlumberger, The Ottawa Citizen
OTTAWA - The lawyer's words were definitely out of place. Talk of body counts,
mass graves and butchered innocents, or references to places such as Sarajevo,
Srebrenica and Pale; it all seemed so far away, both in time and place, from
clinking cutlery and soft music of the Château Laurier café.
Yet that's what American lawyer Peter Robinson was in Ottawa to talk about this
week. Robinson, a 30-year veteran lawyer and a former California prosecutor, is
leading the legal team defending Radovan Karadzic, the former president of the
Bosnian Serb republic, against war crimes charges. Karadzic is accused of being
responsible for the "ethnic cleansing" that saw thousands of Bosnian Muslims
die when civil war gripped Yugoslavia after it collapsed in the early 1990s.
Robinson spent three days in the nation's capital interviewing people he
thought might be helpful to his defence, including former Canadian Maj.-Gen.
Lewis MacKenzie, who led a United Nations peacekeeping operation in Bosnia in
1992, and James Bissett, the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria
and Albania from 1990 to 1992. Both men witnessed first hand the horrors of the
civil war, which lasted from 1992 to 1995.
A lot of what the lawyer heard will not please a lot of people, particularly
those who blame the Serbs and, in particular, Karadzic for the horrors of that
time and place.
"Gen. MacKenzie was probably the most outspoken United Nations official about
the fact that the Muslims were shelling their own people in order to get
international opinion on their side," Robinson said Tuesday. "Essentially they
created disasters or massacres and blamed them on the Serbs. Some of those
(massacres) Karadzic is charged with committing himself."
At the time he spoke to the Citizen, Robinson had yet to interview Bissett.
However, the ambassador earlier told the Citizen that there is "a lot of
evidence to indicate that Muslim leaders killed their own people." As for
Karadzic, he said: "I don't know if he is a war criminal, but I do know he did
his damnedest to prevent the war."
Robinson said he hopes to produce sufficient evidence to prove that the
one-time Serb leader was not responsible for everything of which he is accused.
"My goal is to make sure Karadzic gets a fair trial."
Karadzic faces 11 charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, including
the claim that he was responsible for a mass murder of 8,000 Muslim men in
Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia, and authorized the shooting of civilians during
the 43-month siege of Sarajevo carried out by forces under his command. The
64-year-old is regarded by Bosnian Serbs as a hero for defending them against
being forced to live under Muslim rule. He went into hiding in 1997 and eluded
capture until 2008. He is now on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal
for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. He boycotted the trial when it began in
2009, but when it resumed in early March, the one-time psychiatrist and
published poet took the stand to deny he was responsible for any of the
atrocities.
"Everything that Serbs did is being treated as a crime," Karadzic said in his
opening statement. Karadzic, who has plead not guilty to all the charges
against him, wants to demonstrate that Muslim leaders ordered the shelling and
shooting of their own citizens in order to win international sympathy and
pressure the United States into intervening on their behalf.
"He really disputes the scale of the killings in Srebrenica," said Robinson.
"And there are about 20 incidents of shelling (in Sarajevo) that are charged
against Karadzic. If we can show that some of them were committed by Muslims,
that will bring the credibility of other charges into question."
Two of the most notorious incidents charged against Karadzic are the shelling
of people queuing for bread in Sarajevo in May of 1992, and the so-called
market massacre in 1994.
Robinson said that while MacKenzie does not have personal knowledge of the 1992
bread line attack, he told the lawyer there is good reason to believe, as
Robinson put it, "the Serbs were not responsible."
MacKenzie refers to such incidents in his 1993 book, Peacekeeper: The Road to
Sarajevo, in which he recounts telling then French president François
Mitterand, who visited Sarajevo in June of 1992, that while "the majority of
the blame" for the violence "rests with the Serbs," the Bosnian Muslims were
usually the first to break any ceasefire.
Worse, though, there was "strong but circumstantial evidence that some really
horrifying acts of cruelty attributed to the Serbs were actually orchestrated
by the Muslims against their own people, for the benefit of an international
audience."
Karadzic blames the United States for the civil war, and, thus, his own
predicament. In 1992, the Bosnian Muslims, Serbs and Croats signed a peace
agreement, the Lisbon Agreement, but then, by some accounts, former U.S.
ambassador Warren Zimmermann subsequently met the Bosnian Muslim president
Alija Izetbegovic and told him that if he withdrew from the agreement and
unilaterally declared independence, the United States would support him. The
Americans, so the story goes, were trying to currying favour with the Muslim
world after the 1991 Gulf War. Izetbegovic was encouraged to think that he
would be establishing the first Muslim nation in the heart of Europe.
According to Karadzic, there was no way Bosnian Serbs were going to be ruled by
Muslims. Bosnian Muslims were intent on creating an Islamic fundamentalist
state. Opposing that, even if it meant war, was "just and holy."
Before the 1992 civil war, Bosnian Muslims were bringing in experienced Muslim
fighters, including some who had fought against the Russians in Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden is known to have been in Bosnia, along with fundamentalist
Muslims from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
At the time, as Robinson put it, the U.S. "took the position that the Bosnian
Muslims were the good guys and the Serbs were the bad guys.
"It was a huge miscalculation by the United States. They should have put their
support behind Karadzic. He was an anti-communist dissident, democratic and the
Serbs had a long history of supporting the (western) allies and fighting
against fascism. They basically backed the wrong horse. We're paying the price
for it now. We see some of the same people now in Afghanistan and Pakistan were
in Bosnia."
None of this geo-political history is likely to help Karadzic directly, at
least in terms of the charges against him. But Karadzic is "fighting for
history," as Robinson put it. "He's more concerned with the legacy of what he
leaves behind. He wants to show the justice of what he did for the future, that
what he created was not a genocidal state."
Testimony from people such as MacKenzie will help, said Robinson. "The benefit
of MacKenzie's testimony is that he is courageous enough to say that, in fact,
the Muslims were involved in killing their own people."
Robert Sibley is a senior writer with the Citizen.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
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