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Karadzic refuses to plead to genocide charges

AFP, The Hague
Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic refused to plead to genocide charges yesterday, rejecting the authority of a UN court and prompting an automatic not guilty plea on his behalf.
"I am not going to enter a plea at all," Karadzic told presiding judge Iain Bonomy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague. "This tribunal does not have the right to try me."
Bonomy replied: "I shall enter pleas of not guilty on your behalf' to each of the 11 counts.
Judges last week approved the prosecution's third, amended indictment against Karadzic, which lists two genocide charges and nine of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to his role in Bosnia's 1992-1995 war.
Dubbed the "Butcher of Bosnia," Karadzic was arrested on a Belgrade bus posing as a doctor of alternative medicine called Dragan Dabic in July 2008, 13 years after he was first indicted by the ICTY.
The main allegations against the 63-year-old relate to the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left 10,000 people dead, and the July 1995 massacre of around 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
Among other things, the prosecution has
charged Karadzic with having sought to "permanently remove" Bosnian Muslims and Croats from Serb-claimed territory, and to "eliminate" Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica.
He also stands accused of spreading terror among the civilian population of Sarajevo through a sniping and shelling campaign from April 1992 to November 1995, and of taking hostage UN personnel to prevent air strikes against Bosnian Serb military targets.But Karadzic repeated his claim Tuesday that an agreement with top US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, currently US envoy for Pakistan and Afghanistan, had given him immunity from prosecution.
"I am challenging the jurisdiction of this tribunal... on the basis of my agreement with the international community whose representative at that point in time was Mr Richard Holbrooke," Karadzic said.
Karadzic maintains that Holbrooke, the US peace negotiator in Bosnia and architect of the Dayton peace agreement that ended the Bosnian conflict, had promised on behalf of the UN to shield Karadzic from the tribunal in return from disappearing from die public eye.
Holbrooke has insisted that no such deal existed.
A defiant Karadzic declined to have the charges read, saying: "I do not wish to have anyone else read the indictment for me."