Last War Crimes Suspect Goran Hadzic before U.N. Court
Former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic will for the first time face a U.N. war crimes tribunal judge Monday as the court's last wanted fugitive, arrested after seven years on the run.
Hadzic, 52, who is wanted for his role in the 1991-95 Croatian war, will be asked to enter a plea at a first appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague at 1400 GMT.
Wanted since 2004, Hadzic is the last fugitive of the 161 persons indicted by the tribunal.
Its prosecution has charged the one-time leader of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina during the early 1990s, with 14 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes.
This included the extermination, murder and willful killing of hundreds of Croat and non-Serb civilians as part of a plan to remove them from about one-third of Croatia to make it part of a new Serb-dominated state.
Most notably, Hadzic is wanted for his role in the massacre by Croatian Serb troops of some 260 Croats and other non-Serbs taken from a hospital in Vukovar after it fell to Serbian troops in November 1991 following a harrowing three-month siege.
Hadzic, a former warehouse employee, is also charged with persecution which included the deportation or forcible transfer of tens of thousands of Croat and other non-Serb civilians, including 20,000 inhabitants of the town of Vukovar.
ICTY spokeswoman Nerma Jelacic said Monday that Hadzic spent his first weekend behind bars meeting officials from the tribunal's registry and also underwent a medical examination.
"He is still separated from the others," she told Agence France Presse.
Jelacic said the tribunal would appoint a duty counsel for Hadzic later Monday, but his Belgrade-based lawyer Toma Fila told the Beta news agency Friday that he would be represented by Serbian lawyer Vlada Petrovic.
At his first appearance Hadzic will be asked to identify himself and his rights will be read -- in the very same room where its first ever accused, Dusko Tadic told the court on April 26, 1995, "I am innocent."
Tadic, a Bosnian Serb official, was later sentenced to 20 years for his role in committing murder, torture and deportations in northwestern Serbia during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.
On Monday, South Korean Judge O-Gon Kwon, acting ICTY president, will read a summary of the 14 counts of crimes against Hadzic.
Arrested in northern Serbia on Wednesday and transferred to the ICTY's U.N. detention unit in The Hague on Friday, Hadzic will then be asked to plead guilty or not on each of the counts.
He will however be able to ask for a 30-day extension before having to answer again to the same question. If he fails after 30 days to enter a plea, a "not guilty" plea will be entered on his behalf.
Should Hadzic plead guilty, no trial will take place and he will be sentenced.
It could however still take months for the trial to start.
His arrest came less than two months after Serbian authorities finally captured wartime Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic, the court's most wanted man.