海角大神

Accused Bosnian war criminal Radovan Karadzic opened his defense today at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, claiming that he was a "tolerant man" who had done "everything within human power to avoid the war and to reduce the human suffering."

Mr. Karadzic is on trial for 10 counts of genocide and crimes against humanity, including the 1995 massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. But reading from a personal statement on Tuesday, the former Serbian leader told the court,聽"Instead of being accused for the events in our civil war, I should have been rewarded for all the good things I've done," reports BBC News. According to the translation of his statement, those deeds include:

Karadzic is accused of being the mastermind behind the Bosnian genocide during the wars fought in the 1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia. A trained psychiatrist and the first president of the Bosnian Serb government, he pushed a program of "ethnic purity" in the state that led to events like the Srebrencia massacre and tied the West in knots for much of the '90s. He was caught in 2008 in Belgrade, where he had been living in disguise and working at an alternative medicine clinic.

Although Karadzic is only one of several men blamed for the genocide in the Balkans -- along with the late Slobodan Milosevic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, both of whom have also appeared before the court at The Hague -- he is widely believed to be the ideological force behind the campaign, the Monitor reported at the time of his arrest.

During the opening statements of his trial in 2010, Karadzic claimed that the massacres were either self-defense or lies on the part of Bosnians. He accused Bosnians in Sarajevo of shelling their own city and killing their own residents -- then packing the corpses into mass graves at Srebrenica -- in order to create world sympathy and to impugn the Serbs. The Monitor reported at the time that while Karadzic's account conflicted with all the known evidence of the genocide 鈥� Sabra Kolenovic, a representative of the Mothers of Srebrenica, said that Karadzic 鈥渟hould be given the Nobel Prize for lying鈥� in his opening statement 鈥� some experts think that Karadzic nonetheless believes it.

The Monitor was the first news outlet to publish evidence of the mass graves in Srebrenica in 1995. Then-staff writer David Rohde's stories are still available online.