July 11, 1996

Fugitive Bosnian Serb Has Legal Team Ready

By MARLISE SIMONS

HE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Radovan Karadzic may appear no closer to surrendering real power or to giving himself up to NATO forces. But the Bosnian Serb leader does seem to be preparing to confront charges that he is a war criminal by appointing lawyers to represent him at the war crimes tribunal here.

It is too early to say whether this is a sign that Karadzic is feeling vulnerable as Western pressure mounts or whether this is a fresh attempt to mislead the international community about his intentions. But Karadzic has been forming a legal defense team that includes two American lawyers who say they plan to challenge the tribunal's procedures as biased and unfair.

First a Serbian lawyer and then the two Americans have appeared in the past two weeks at the tribunal saying they represent Karadzic. They arrived here as the tribunal was hearing evidence to support its war crimes charges against Karadzic and the Bosnian Serb military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic.

The lawyers' unscheduled arrival astonished court officials because until now, Karadzic had brushed aside the tribunal, created by the United Nations in 1993, and repeatedly mocked it as irrelevant. But his position seemed to have changed with the arrival June 27 of Karadzic's first lawyer, Igor Pantelic, from Serbia.

Asked to explain his presence in The Hague, Pantelic said in an interview: "We have now reached an important stage in the proceedings. My mission here is to follow the proceedings and to see if everything is going according to the rules."

Pantelic, who has a law office in Belgrade, also counts among his clients a notorious Serbian paramilitary boss and reputed black marketeer known as Arkan, whose real name is Zeljk Raznatovic. "I am counselor to Captain Arkan," he told reporters here. "It is mainly financial, his business affairs. A bit of politics and a bit of business."

Last week, as the tribunal rang with evidence of mass murder, torture, rape and other atrocities in Bosnia for which Karadzic and Mladic are held responsible, two more lawyers for Karadzic appeared, demanding to be heard in court. The two Americans, Edward Medvene and Thomas Hanley, both practice law in Los Angeles.

All three were refused permission to take part in the hearings or to gain access to court documents. Under the tribunal's rules, one-sided hearings such as last week's are permitted to allow prosecutors to present evidence against indicted suspects who have not appeared before the court.

Should Karadzic be arrested or voluntarily turn himself in, then he would have the right to defense lawyers and a trial.

"Dr. Karadzic wants the Western countries to know he is anxious to prove his innocence," said Medvene, who has since returned to Los Angeles and was reached by telephone. He said his client would consider standing trial, but only if the tribunal's rules were changed.

"At present the rules are biased and not fair," said Medvene, who belongs to the Los Angeles law firm of Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp. "We want the right to register our position. The proceedings are still being worked out."

Medvene, whose past clients have included a Mexican businessman who was convicted in the torture and murder of a U.S. drug agent, said he had taken on the Karadzic case "because of the immense challenge it affords."

"This is a situation in which, if society is not careful, it will do great damage to international law," he said. "It will do damage if shortcuts are taken because of the unpopularity of the defendant."

Medvene said that he and his colleague, Hanley, who is from the Los Angeles law firm of Berger, Kahn, Shafton, Moss, Figler, Simon, and Gladstone, had been approached by an intermediary to consider taking the case. Then they traveled last week to meet Karadzic in Pale, the Bosnian Serb headquarters, where they agreed to represent him.

A spokeswoman for Medvene refused to discuss who was paying him, and how much.

They brought a four page list to The Hague challenging what they considered flaws in the tribunal's statute and rules. Among those flaws he cited the court's admission of hearsay evidence and charges that are "vague and ambiguous."

Referring to the atrocities widely reported from Bosnia and repeated at the tribunal's hearings, Medvene said: "The acts described and the publicity have been so egregious that common safeguards and rules of fairness are not respected. We ought to have the right to challenge this."

The tribunal, Medvene said, will be testing new issues of international law. One of them, he said, is that the tribunal is charging Karadzic with command responsibility for war crimes. "This doctrine of command responsibility has never been used before against a civilian political leader," he said. This is a unique doctrine, he went on, "which forces the defendant to prove that he is innocent." Moreover, he complained, this doctrine was not being applied to civilian leaders of the other parties in the Bosnian war.

Some legal scholars have questioned the propriety of the just- concluded hearings against Karadzic and Mladic because the tribunal barred defense lawyers from the courtroom, inviting them instead to follow events from the public gallery.

But the tribunal's legal experts argued the lawyers' presence would have turned the proceedings into a trial in absentia, which the rules do not allow.

The tribunal's legal experts say they had designed the hearings to protect the court against the obstruction of justice and prevent the defeat of the judicial process by the suspects' failure to appear.

These experts said the tribunal held the hearings to publicize the case because it has no powers to enforce decisions. This week, Medvene complained that the tribunal's charges were "politically motivated" to force Karadzic to resign from his post.