Ex-Bosnian Serb leader makes stunning remark at end of trial in The Hague, saying he was a ‘true friend to Muslims’

The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić has told a war crimes trial there was no systematic “ethnic cleansing” of the territory under his control during the Bosnian conflict.

Karadžić made the dramatic claim at the end of a five-year trial for genocide and crimes against humanity in The Hague, the biggest war crimes trial in Europe since the Nuremberg tribunal for Nazi atrocities.

Taking advantage of his last opportunity to make a public declaration before a verdict is reached, Karadžić portrayed himself as innocent, and said the court was a politically inspired western creation that was biased against Serbs.

“It is the Serb people who stand accused,” he said. “There was never been a situation where so many decent, innocent people, mostly Serbs, are imprisoned outside their country, while the murderers of Serbs go free.”

Dressed in a charcoal suit and red tie, Karadžić delivered an often rambling rebuttal of the charges against him, frequently referring to himself in the third person. “The entire case against me is false,” he said. “I really was a true friend to the Muslims.”

Karadzic added: “I know of no one in the Serb leadership who wanted to harm Muslims or Croats.”

About 100,000 people died in the Bosnian war when Karadžić’s self-proclaimed Serb Republic attempted to breakaway from a majority Muslim government in Sarajevo during the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

“The Serbs were cornered and they behaved much better than else would have behaved if cornered,” Karadzic said.

Although war crimes were committed by all sides, Bosnian Serb forces are accused of the most horrendous. Among other crimes, Karadžić himself is charged with genocide over the execution of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995, the three-year siege and shelling of Sarajevo and for conspiring to use mass killings and deportations to remove Muslims and Croats from Serb territory, a process often referred to as ethnic cleansing.

“Under his command and oversight, Karadžić’s subordinates and those cooperating with them expelled, killed, tortured and otherwise mistreated hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Croats,” the prosecution alleged in its own closing statement earlier in the week. The prosecution has asked for a life prison sentence.

In his most startling claim on Wednesday, Karadžić denied there had been any officially-sanctioned ethnic cleansing of non-Serbs at all. “There is no example of a case when the official authority rounded them up an drove them out,” Karadžić insisted. He claimed that most Muslims and Croats left Serb territory of their own accord, either to escape fighting or by volunteering to leave.

“In areas the Serb army took over, it never had any contact with civilians. The civilians had left earlier before the town fell,” he said. In other cases, he claimed: “People reported in advance and waited for when they could cross over [the frontlines]. It’s not that people were rounded up in their homes. That was not what happened. They placed their names on lists before they left, settled their accounts and were told the times of the buses.”

“They did leave their homes with a heavy heart but they left of their own free will,” Karadžić said. Where people were terrorised into leaving, Karadžić claimed it was the work of “criminals or renegades, and people carrying out retaliation whose own homes were burned”.

He also claimed that the killing of inmates at concentration camps around the town of Prijedor were the fault of individual soldiers acting against orders. “There were crimes in Prijedor, but they were by a shift guard who abused his position. It stopped when his superior told him to stop,” Karadžić said. “My men were there to prevent crimes.”

Throughout the trial, Karadžić has conducted his own defence but has taken advice from an American lawyer, Peter Robinson. “He’s being doing this for five years and he has more trial experience than many lawyers have in their lifetime,” Robinson said. “He’s a very optimistic person. He’s not at all exhausted or bowed by any of this.”

Karadžić is expected to complete his closing statement on Thursday. A verdict and sentence is expected next year.

• This article was amended on 2 October 2014. The original subheading wrongly suggested that Karadžić’s trial was taking place at the international criminal court.