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Trial to resume for Butcher of Bosnia

The trial of the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic is set to resume before a UN court after a four-month-long suspension.

The hearings, which started in October 2009, have been adjourned since early November after the tribunal appointed a lawyer to represent Karadzic.

The infamous ex-leader has been conducting his own defense and has boycotted the trials once, claiming he needed more time to prepare.

Karadzic, who insists he’s innocent, is expected to outline his defense at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague on Monday.

The session will see its first witness on Wednesday.

Karadzic, known as the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, is charged with 11 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

They include the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys at the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica in July 1995.

The brutal slaughter is known as the ‘largest mass killing on European soil since World War II.’

The supreme commander of an ethnic cleansing campaign is also charged with responsibility for the 44-month siege of Sarajevo, which ended in November 1995 after some 10,000 people, many of them civilians, had been killed.

Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade in July 2008 after nearly 13 years on the run.

During his time in power, he was president of the self-styled Bosnian Serb Republic and commander of its army during the Bosnian conflict, which claimed about 100,000 lives, mostly Muslim and caused the displacement of 2.2 million people.

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