Karadzic claims he did not want war

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic claimed he was a peace-lover as he addressed his trial for crimes against humanity today. He cast himself as a "mild man, a tolerant man" who tried to prevent war and then worked to reduce casualties on all sides in the bloody 1992-95 Bosnian conflict, as he opened his defence in his long-running genocide trial. His claims brought snorts of derision and cries of, "He's lying! He's lying!" from Muslim survivors of the war watching from the public gallery at the court in The Hague. Karadzic was given 90 minutes to make a statement on his role in the war that left an estimated 100,000 dead. The statement was not made under oath, meaning he could not be cross-examined by prosecutors. In another of the tribunal's courts, Goran Hadzic, a former leader of rebel Serbs in Croatia, became the last of the tribunal's 161 indicted suspects to face justice as his trial got under way. He was arrested last year in northern Serbia after more than seven years on the run and pleaded not guilty to charges of murdering hundreds of Croats and expelling tens of thousands more. Karadzic, a former psychologist and poet, told judges he was a ...