Ratko Mladic appealed to the president of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal Friday to disqualify the presiding judge in his trial, accusing him of bias, and to postpone the trial scheduled to start next week.

Mladic's lawyers argued in a written motion that judge Alophons Orie is biased because he has sat in several other cases in which former subordinates of the ex-Bosnian Serb military chief have been convicted and accused him of favoring prosecutors in preparations for the trial.

Orie was removed from the case of Mladic's former political master Radovan Karadzic in 2008 after Karadzic made a similar complaint, although the tribunal called his removal an administrative change and did not directly rule on Karadzic's complaint.

Mladic's lawyers also claimed that Orie's Dutch nationality makes him biased in charges linked to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Dutch U.N. peacekeepers have been accused of not doing enough to prevent the slaying by Serb forces of 8,000 Muslim men.