Karadzic appears briefly before judge Bosnian Serb wartime leader
Radovan Karadzic made a brief appearance in a UN court Tuesday with no indication of a trial date more than three months after his arrest for genocide and war crimes. Appearing before judge Iain Bonomy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Karadzic complained about receiving documents from the prosecution late, and said he had been unable to prepare.
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He received a Serbian translation of the amended indictment against him only Monday while the English version was filed a month ago.
"I am not prepared for today's status conference," Karadzic, formerly one of the world's most wanted men, said at the start of a minutes-long hearing in preparation for an eventual trial.
The judge expressed disappointment with the "slow pace" of the proceedings thus far.
"It has been three months... and we've gone actually nowhere," Bonomy said after the prosecution indicated that it was not quite ready to file documents in support of its motion to amend the indictment.
These documents would be filed by the end of the week, after which Karadzic would be given two weeks to respond.
The 63-year-old former Bosnian Serb leader faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, notably for the 44-month siege of Sarajevo that left 10,000 dead and the July 1995 massacre of around 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica.
Dubbed the "Butcher of Bosnia," Karadzic was arrested on a Belgrade bus on July 21 posing as a doctor of alternative medicine called Dragan Dabic -- 13 years after he was first indicted by the ICTY.
He declined to plead to the charges on his first appearance, causing the judge to enter an automatic not-guilty plea on his behalf.
Karadzic has claimed during previous appearances that US diplomat Richard Holbrooke had promised him immunity from prosecution on behalf of the UN Security Council in exchange for disappearing from the public eye.
The prosecution announced last month it would amend the indictment, retaining the 11 charges but modifying the content and reducing from 41 to 27 the number of crime scenes.
Karadzic is next set to appear for a pre-trial conference on January 20.
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