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The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has been quietly beavering away for more than a decade now - putting on trial and sentencing the men responsible for one of worst genocides of the twentieth century - right here in Europe.

Last week, Sonja Karadzic, daughter of former Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, gave an exclusive interview to the Â鶹ԼÅÄ in which she defended her father, claiming that he is innocent.

The one time poet, psychiatrist and President of the self styled Republica Serbska is accused of among other crimes, the massacre of thousands of Bosnian men and boys in and around the supposed safe haven of Srebrenica in 1996.

Seeing his face again takes me back to my experiences in that war which I covered for many years for Panorama.

It all began one night in a swish hotel in the capital Belgrade as Karadzic and his beefy bodyguards swept up to the door in a white Mercedes to talk to me and the Panorama team. An impressive figure - tall with a grey mane of hair and a cigarette dangling from his mouth all the time he was passionate about the plight of the Serb minority in Bosnia and the threat be believed they were under from the Bosnian Muslim majority. He presented himself as a patriot fighting for his people then, but his subsequent actions would provide overwhelming evidence that he became the politician responsible for genocide and for authorising and encouraging his generals to commit mass slaughter.

In the months and years that followed I followed Karadzic's path of destruction as Serbian paramilitaries began a reign of terror across Bosnia and then the Bosnian Serb army surrounded the town of Srebrenica, home to many thousands of Muslims. I got into Srebrenica for a few days by sweet talking a local Serb general at the time when it was designated a UN safe haven. I saw and heard from the terrified inhabitants awaiting their fate as the Bosnian Serb army surrounded and shelled the town. I could leave my Bosnian translator told me - he and his family could not.

I was back in London - it was my birthday July 16th 1995 and reports were filtering out terrible things that were happening in Srebrenica. I spoke to David Owen, the EU negotiator who I had filmed and travelled with many times in the region. We agreed that something terrible was happening, but no one dreamt then how terrible it would turn out to be. The Muslim men were taking to the hills around the town - the Serb army was moving in and bussing out families after separating out all men and teenage boys. The killing had begun in the woods and on the roads surrounding the town.

I went back to Belgrade in Serbia intending to get into Srebrenica. It was impossible but I managed to get hold of a tape made by a Serb cameraman that day in July. It showed Muslim men coming down from the hills as Serb soldiers shouted out to them, assuring them they would be safe.

It showed men herded into houses...bags and belongings in piles - but the following pictures were edited out. It showed women and children on buses and the famous shots of the Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic patting children on the head and smiling while his soldiers gave the kids sweets.

In Tuzla, the nearest Bosnian Muslim controlled town, the women and children waited in vain for their menfolk to join them. They never arrived - more than eight thousand had been killed and buried in mass graves in an attempt to cover up the genocide.

It was almost impossible for journalists to get back into the area controlled by the Serb army to investigate what was happening. But no one could stop me playing that tape again and again - finding out the names of the men from muttered conversations and identifying the locations where they were last filmed.

No one could stop me and my tireless Croatian researcher going around the refugee camps in areas not controlled by the Serbs showing pictures taken from the video - finding survivors and the families of those who had died to try and find out what had happened - to prove what the outside world was beginning to realise that innocent civilians had been slaughtered. No one could stop me looking at satellite pictures of areas where I had heard the mass graves were - to look for signs of recently disturbed earth - to enquire if local hauliers had provided diggers and dumpers to carry out the grisly task of disposing of the bodies. And no one could stop me going to Holland to interview the Dutch soldiers who were part of the UN peacekeeping force that was supposed to protect Srebrenica, but shipped out leaving the Muslims to their fate and an indelible stain on Holland's reputation. Many of these young men were traumatised and broke down in tears as they described to me what they had seen and heard as they left the town - the blood trails, the gunshots.

But I had to get into the area around Srebrenica to find the real proof and saw my chance when a UN Rapporteur for Human Rights was allowed by the Serbs to visit the town with a group of journalists. We joined the convoy on a snowy day with temperatures below freezing and treacherous icy roads.

And then we broke away once inside the Serb cordon around the outskirts of the city...

We had very little time and lots of ground to cover. From a survivor who had lain under a heap of bodies in a field and escaped at night before being shovelled into a mass grave by a dumper I had learned of a school where men - many of them old like himself had been held.

I had a map and co-ordinates. From another man who had survived in a corner of an agricultural barn as those mowed down by bullets in front shielded his body, I had more maps and a description of the barn. And from a thirteen year old boy who I had seen on the Serb video stumbling onto the main road I had another map of a key location - a white house they called 'the killing place' where those who were with him had perished. It had taken us three months to find this boy and persuade him to talk.

Somehow I found these places before dark and before roaming Serb patrols found us - the barn scarred with huge sprays of bullet holes and smeared with blood. The school just as the survivor had described it to me....and the white house the boy had passed in the video. In the snow around the house I found spectacles, broken shoes and - most valuable of all - identity documents which had been ripped from the men before they were gunned down. I took these as evidence of what had happened. A French detective working for the newly formed International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague had already been to see me. He knew I had the video and that it would provide vital evidence in court although crucial scenes had clearly been edited out.

On my return to London and once the programme 'War Crime: Srebrenica' was finished, Panorama handed over all the physical evidence I had collected, the documents and the ID photos of the men who died in the white house. I asked the 13 year old who had helped me if he would be willing to go to the Hague with other survivors too. They became important witnesses in the trials that began as Bosnian Serb Generals were captured and put on trial. But the two architects of the Srebrenica massacre - General Ratko Mladic who led the military operation and subsequent massacre and his political master Radovan Karadzic who was pictured in the vicinity of the town at the time remained elusive. Reports put them in Montenegro, shielded by the authorities in an apartment block in Belgrade, in the snowy forests where the army had their headquarters and a sympathetic population willing to hide them.

But it was the passage of time and political events that would eventually prove their downfall, not the teams of Special Forces from the French, British and German armies that moved in to keep the peace in the area. The regime in Belgrade changed - the people of Serbia knew they could not remain pariahs for ever. And so suddenly Karadzic was 'discovered' in the Serb capital - a practitioner of alternative medicine with a long grey beard whose lips were sealed on the matter of Srebrenica.

So now begins another long drawn out trial at the Hague which could last years but which the families of Srebrenica hope will finally answer the questions about what happened that day and bring them a sense of justice even if it cannot bring back the dead. I am proud of what I did and how Panorama stuck to uncovering what happened at Srebrenica - its not over yet and we'll be back on the trail!

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