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Radovan Karadzic: "Instead of being accused for the events in our civil war I should have been rewarded"
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has begun his defence at his war crimes trial by denying the charges and saying he should instead be rewarded for "reducing suffering".
He told the court in The Hague he was a "tolerant man" who had sought peace.
Mr Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in 2008 after almost 13 years on the run.
He faces 10 charges of genocide, other war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war in the 1990s, including the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.
More than 7,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed at Srebrenica in the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of World War II.
He is also being prosecuted over the 44-month siege of Sarajevo, in which more than 12,000 civilians died.
- Ordered or planned genocide of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and Bosnian Croats to permanently remove them from territories of Bosnia-Hercegovina
- Persecuted Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats and responsible for "acts of extermination and murder"
- Masterminded the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995
- Responsible for siege of Sarajevo in 1992-95, in which 12,000 civilians died
- Took UN peacekeepers and military observers hostage
Mr Karadzic, 67, went on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in October 2009.
He began his lengthy personal statement by saying he had done "everything within human power to avoid the war and to reduce the human suffering".
'Truth will grow stronger'Speaking calmly, Mr Karadzic said he was a "mild man, a tolerant man with great capacity to understand others".
He had stopped the Bosnian Serb army many times when it had been close to victory, he said, had sought peace agreements, applied humanitarian measures and honoured international law.
He insisted that there had been no history of conflict between ethnic groups until Serbs came to feel increasingly threatened by growing power amongst Muslims in Serbia.
"Neither I, nor anyone else that I know, thought that there would be a genocide against those who were not Serbs," he said.
He criticised media coverage of the war as biased and disputed the official number of victims of the war, saying the true figure was three to four times less. More than 100,000 people were killed, according to official figures.
"As time passes this truth will be stronger and stronger, and the accusations and the propaganda, the lies and hatred, will get weaker and weaker," he said.
Mr Karadzic is also expected to be questioned about the shelling of a market in Sarajevo in 1994 - an event he says was a "shameless orchestration".
He has called as his first witness Col Andrey Demurenko, a Russian, who was chief of staff of the UN peacekeeping force in Sarajevo in 1995 and investigated a second attack on the market that same year.
Mr Karadzic says that report "indicated that the Serbs could not have fired the shell" which landed in the market.
The BBC's Anna Holligan, at The Hague, says many survivors and relatives of the war's victims have travelled from Bosnia to see the trial of the man they hold most responsible for their suffering deliver his statement.
Each of Mr Karadzic's statements were met with cries of dismay, disgust and disbelief from the public gallery, says our correspondent.
In June, Mr Karadzic had one charge of genocide - related to the forcible expulsion of hundreds of thousands of non-Serbs from towns and villages in Bosnia - dismissed. But he failed in his attempt to have the other charges against him dropped.
Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic is also on trial at The Hague.
The former Yugoslavia was a Socialist state created after German occupation in World War II and a bitter civil war. A federation of six republics, it brought together Serbs, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, Slovenes and others under a comparatively relaxed communist regime. Tensions between these groups were successfully suppressed under the leadership of President Tito.
After Tito's death in 1980, tensions re-emerged. Calls for more autonomy within Yugoslavia by nationalist groups led in 1991 to declarations of independence in Croatia and Slovenia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav army lashed out, first in Slovenia and then in Croatia. Thousands were killed in the latter conflict which was paused in 1992 under a UN-monitored ceasefire.
Bosnia, with a complex mix of Serbs, Muslims and Croats, was next to try for independence. Bosnia's Serbs, backed by Serbs elsewhere in Yugoslavia, resisted. Under leader Radovan Karadzic, they threatened bloodshed if Bosnia's Muslims and Croats - who outnumbered Serbs - broke away. Despite European blessing for the move in a 1992 referendum, war came fast.
Yugoslav army units, withdrawn from Croatia and renamed the Bosnian Serb Army, carved out a huge swathe of Serb-dominated territory. Over a million Bosnian Muslims and Croats were driven from their homes in ethnic cleansing. Serbs suffered too. The capital Sarajevo was besieged and shelled. UN peacekeepers, brought in to quell the fighting, were seen as ineffective.
International peace efforts to stop the war failed, the UN was humiliated and over 100,000 died. The war ended in 1995 after NATO bombed the Bosnian Serbs and Muslim and Croat armies made gains on the ground. A US-brokered peace divided Bosnia into two self-governing entities, a Bosnian Serb republic and a Muslim-Croat federation lightly bound by a central government.
In August 1995 the Croatian army stormed areas in Croatia under Serb control prompting thousands to flee. Soon Croatia and Bosnia were fully independent. Slovenia and Macedonia had already gone. Montenegro left later. In 1999 Kosovo's ethnic Albanians fought Serbs in another brutal war to gain independence. Serbia ended the conflict beaten, battered and alone.
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