Radovan Karadzic to begin Yugoslavia war crimes defence at The Hague

Radovan Karadzic will begin his defence at the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal on Tuesday as the panel in The Hague also embarks on the trial of its last suspect, the Guardian reports.

Karadzic is one of a trio of architects of the Balkan wars brought to trial in The Hague for conflicts among the successor countries and the peoples of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999, in which well over 100,000 people were killed and millions were displaced.

The Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic went on trial this year, and the former Yugoslav and Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died in 2006 before the end of his trial.

The trial of Karadzic began in 2009. He was arrested in 2008 after living in hiding under the name Dragan David Dabic and working as a natural healer.

Goran Hadzic, the last of 161 suspects still alive and at large after the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia, was arrested last year and is accused of murder, torture and forcible deportation at the outset of the wars.

Prosecutors say Hadzic, president of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina from 1992-94, was responsible for killings and forced deportations of minority ethnic Croats from the region after the Croatian government in Zagreb broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991.

Already sentenced in his absence to a total of 40 years in prison by Croatian courts in the mid-1990s, Hadzic was finally detained by Serbian authorities in 2011.

The opening of his trial at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) coincides with the opening of the defence's case in the trial of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, which began in 2009.

The last suspect may be on trial but the ICTY's business still has several years to run, with eight cases under way and a further six under appeal.

It expects to rule on its final appeals by 2016. After that any further cases arising from the Balkan wars of the 1990s must be tried in the countries where the crimes were committed.