Oct. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Radovan Karadzic, accused of genocide against Bosnia’s Muslim population, stayed away from the second day of his UN trial in The Hague as the prosecution made its opening statements.

The United Nations court may continue proceedings in his absence if Karadzic doesn’t attend the next hearing on Nov. 2, the presiding judge, O-Gon Kwon, said today. “In addition, counsel may, in the interest of justice, be assigned to represent the interests of the accused,” he said.

Karadzic, who is defending himself, said Oct. 22 he didn’t have enough time to prepare his case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and therefore wouldn’t attend the trial that opened yesterday.

“He can play this out for a while to see what impact this has,” said Terree Bowers, a lawyer at Howrey LLP in Los Angeles and a former prosecutor at the tribunal. “By disrupting the proceedings at this stage he’s not necessarily giving up his intent to turn it into a political referendum as well.”

The wartime leader, who spent more than a decade in hiding, is accused with the former Bosnian Serb military commander, Ratko Mladic, of atrocities against Muslims and Croats during the 1992-1995 Bosnia conflict. Mladic, 67, remains at large. Karadzic, 64, faces life in prison if convicted.

“He ethnically cleansed vast portions of Bosnia- Herzegovina and surrounded and besieged its capital,” prosecutor Alan Tieger said today. “His forces killed thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, imprisoned thousands more in brutal camps and detention facilities and forced hundreds of thousands away from their homes.”

Srebrenica Massacre

The former president and supreme commander of the self- proclaimed Bosnian Serb Republic is accused along with Mladic of responsibility for the mass murder of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the UN-protected Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995 and for killings during the 44-month siege of Sarajevo.

“This case is about that supreme commander, a man who harnessed the forces of nationalism, hatred and fear to implement his vision of an ethnically separated Bosnia,” Tieger told judges and the public in Courtroom 1, including Bosnian war survivors.

The prosecutor illustrated the rise to power of Karadzic, a one-time psychiatrist in Sarajevo, with transcripts of intercepted telephone calls, speeches and minutes of government meetings.

Karadzic refused to enter a plea to any of the 11 charges and disputes the jurisdiction of the court, following an example set by former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic died in prison in 2006 before his trial was concluded.

May End in 2012

The court expects the trial of Karadzic, who was arrested in Belgrade last year, to wind up in early 2012.

While the trial of Karadzic was under way, the Swedish government said Biljana Plavsic, a former Bosnian Serb leader, had left the country after being released from prison. Plavsic, 79, was sentenced to 11 years by the tribunal in 2003 for her participation in the persecution of Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats and other non-Serb populations.

Serbia, which extradited Karadzic, is under pressure from the European Union to apprehend Mladic and Goran Hadzic, a wartime leader of Serbs in Croatia between 1991 and 1995, and to hand them over to the tribunal. In return, the EU would speed up steps toward Serbian membership in the bloc. The men are the only suspects still sought by the tribunal.

Karadzic is held with 35 others at the court’s detention unit in a prison in the nearby seaside resort of Scheveningen. The tribunal was established by a UN Security Council resolution in 1993 to prosecute war crimes during the breakup of Yugoslavia. The court has sentenced 60 people and currently has 25 suspects on trial or awaiting trial.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jurjen van de Pol in The Hague jvandepol@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 27, 2009 12:35 EDT