Bosnia’s butcher - Radovan Karadzic sentenced

THE victors get to write history and vindicate their policies and actions. The defeated are left to reflect and resent, to regret and remember sometimes too well and too often.

One of the institutions the world has established to balance out that process is the United Nations’ War Crimes Tribunal and even if it is not always an equal opportunities prosecutor it must be seen, in the grand scheme of things, as a commendable institution.

Yesterday it enhanced its reputation by sentencing the Bosnian Serb warlord Radovan Karadzic to 40 years in jail. Karadzic is 70 so he will probably spend the rest of his life in jail. The court found the despot guilty of orchestrating Serb atrocities throughout Bosnia’s 1992-95 war that left 100,000 people dead. He was found criminally responsible for genocide in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered. Despite these convictions Karadzic has many supporters in his homeland. It is unfortunate too that many other mass murderers are beyond the reach of the UN court and justice.