How Not to Defend Yourself Against Genocide Charges

Arguing that your cause was "just and holy" has to be a sure-fire strategy for failure when faced with genocide charges in an international court of law. It might be an effective argument to mobilize willing dopes to engage in mass killing, but in a courtroom it makes you look like a guilty frenetic.

But such was the tactic chosen in the ill-conceived self-defense of alleged war criminal Radovan Karadzic, who stands accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed against Bosnian Muslims in the mid-1990s. In four hours of testimony described by an Al Jazeera correspondent as “unapologetic, proud, at times even veering to sarcasm,” Karadzic denied the ethnic cleansing campaigns, blamed the war on the Muslims, and justified the war as self-defense.

His message seemed to be, "No we didn't mean to kill all of the Muslims, we just couldn't live with them anymore." He was, he says, just doing his people a favor.

Accounts of his rambling history of Bosnia and Herzegovina sound like the regurgitation of genocidal propaganda, and he has apparently not yet addressed the actual charges against him -- nothing in the way of proof of innocence, only validation of his cause peppered with denial of wrongdoing.

Life is hard for poor misunderstood alleged war criminals. How will he greet the survivors of his killing campaigns when they testify on Wednesday?

Photo credit: Mikhail Evstafiev