Widows, children and other relatives of killed Bosnian Muslims often stare disbelievingly at what they see through the bullet and sound-proof glass in "Courtroom One" of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Radovan Karadzic, the man blamed for ordering the death of many thousands, sits there five to six hours, four times a week.
Self- confident, relaxed and impeccably dressed, he represents himself against charges that he is among those most responsible for 100,000 deaths.
The accusations do not seem to perturb the former Bosnian Serb leader, a psychiatrist, poet and quack healer, as he takes his usual stance of sullen history professor lecturing ignorant UN judges on events in Bosnia during the 1992-95 war.
Karadzic puts the blame for atrocities - which he also says are regrettable - on Bosnian Muslims themselves, as well as Nato, the United States and, to a certain extent, Germany.
"All we Serbs did we did to defend ourselves," Karadzic declared at the start of the trial in March. And it all was done in a "righteous and holy war," he said.
The genocide at Srebrenica, where Serb soldiers executed 8,000 Muslim boys and men, Karadzic describes as a "myth" and "fabrication.
"It is a lie," he said, and that phrase can be seen as the central thread of his defence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Karadzic went to work with that particular line by challenging the credibility of every detail, even the smallest one, in the 10,000- page indictment and of every witness called by the prosecution.
When the prosecution summoned a survivor of the massacre, Karadzic first wanted a Serbian weapons expert to give "his opinion on the line of fire, origin of modified bombs and other technical details."
That was necessary, he explained in a brief to the presiding judge, O-Gon Kwon, so "Dr Karadzic is in position to adequately cross-examine the witness," Karadzic said of himself.
It was just one out of hundreds of motions he has filed. In some Karadzic has focused on apparently tiny details, in others reached into the sphere of high politics.
At one point he requested documents from Germany that he said would prove that Nato violated a UN-weapons sale embargo to Bosnian Muslims, arming them so they could massacre Serbs.
The South Korean judge, who has shown great patience in the proceedings, allowed Karadzic's request to proceed. After a month-long wait came a terse response from Berlin: Germany has no such documents.
Lawyers and judges around the world tend to say that people representing themselves in court have an idiot for a client, but Karadzic is certainly no idiot.
"He knows the facts better than anybody else," says US attorney David Robinson, Karadzic's chief legal adviser in preparations for trial. He heads a small army of experts and assistants, largely paid from the ICTY budget - so, even if indirectly, Karadzic's defence aid is mostly funded by taxpayers in rich UN member-states.
And that will go on for years. ICTY President Patrick Robinson recently reported to the UN Security Council that he counts on a verdict in late 2012.
With the expected appeal, the trial of the man charged with the worst war atrocities in Europe since World War II is unlikely to close definitely before early 2014.
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