Former military commander of the Bosnian Serbs Ratko Mladic was back in court Thursday for a hearing to assess the progress of his trial.

Tentatively scheduled to start March 27, Mladic's lawyer Branko Lukic told judges that any trial beginning before the end of October 2012 would be “almost impossible--...unjust for the defense and for Mr. Mladic.”
It's unclear if the trial will actually begin in March, but for now, judges are moving ahead as planned.

Prosecutors are to submit their 45,000-word pre-trial brief, the document that outlines their case in detail, on 10 February. The defense has until 2 March to submit theirs.

But Branko Lukic, who says he still doesn’t have a co-counsel, insists there are hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and witness statements that he has to read through, which even if he just looks at the most basic ones, will take him at least until October 2012.

Many cases

Lukic also says he considers the Mladic case to be “three and one-half cases”—one for Bosnia’s municipalities, another for the shelling and sniping of Sarajevo, another for the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, and a “1/2” case for the charges related to the taking of UN peacekeepers hostage.

Prosecutor Dermot Groome countered that “we see it as one case—one accused, one case.” And when asked by presiding Judge Alphons Orie if he has any idea how he’ll open the trial, Groome said that although the crimes overlap, he (for now) intends to try the case “in chronological order and not be bound by artificial distinctions.”

That likely means that the trial will start with the charges relating to the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and then move onto the 44-month long siege of Sarajevo, ending with the Srebrenica massacre of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys and the taking of hostages.

Mladic, 69, is facing 11 overall counts including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity for the 1992-95 Bosnian war. He denies the charges. The last indictment against him was amended in December 2011.

The defendant speaks

At the end of Thursday’s proceedings, Mladic addressed the court. “I expect this trial to be fair,” he told Judge Orie, saying he was now experiencing what his people, the Serbs, have experienced for years—being “charged and tried by the same person.”

He also stressed, once again, his poor health. “I am a very sick man,” he said, citing a 2008 stroke that left the right side of his body permanently damaged. “Perhaps it is God’s will...because I carry a heavy burden and have for a while.”

Mladic also reiterated his objections to being handcuffed while transported from the prison to the courthouse and for not being allowed to wear his cap in court to protect him from a vent blowing overhead.

But when he got to “1918" and "Serbian officer Gavrilo" (Gavrilo Princip, the man who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, helping to spark World War One), Judge Orie cut him off. Mladic insisted he was speaking for “my people,” the Serbs, “who have been shackled for a long time.”

“One thing is for certain,” Orie reprimanded him. “You, and not your nation, is indicted by this Tribunal.”

Judges set a final status conference before Mladic’s trial for March 7.