Radovan Karadzic jailed for 40 years for genocide
The court found Karadzic guilty of genocide in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in Europe’s worst mass murder since the Holocaust.
Presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon said Karadzic was the only person in the Bosnian Serb leadership with the power to halt the genocide, but instead gave an order for prisoners to be transported from one location to another to be killed.
In a carefully planned operation, Serb forces transported Muslim men to sites around the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia and gunned them down before dumping their bodies into mass graves.
Kwon said Karadzic and his military commander, General Ratko Mladic, intended “that every able-bodied Bosnian Muslim male from Srebrenica be killed”.
Karadzic was also held criminally responsible for murder, attacking civilians and terror for overseeing the deadly 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and for taking hostage UN peacekeepers.
However, the court acquitted Karadzic in a second genocide charge, for a campaign to drive Bosnian Muslims and Croats out of villages claimed by Serb forces.
Peter Robinson, part of Karadzic’s legal team, said he would appeal.
“Dr Karadzic is disappointed. He’s astonished,” Mr Robinson told reporters. “He feels the trial chamber took inference instead of evidence in reaching the conclusions that it did.”
Karadzic had faced 11 charges and a maximum life sentence, but was given 40 years’ imprisonment.
Prosecutors held him responsible as a political leader and commander-in-chief of Serb forces in Bosnia, which are blamed for the worst atrocities of the war.
The 70-year-old had insisted he was innocent and says his wartime actions were intended to protect Serbs.
Karadzic’s conviction will most likely strengthen international jurisprudence on the criminal responsibility of political leaders for atrocities committed by forces under their control.
“Victims and their families have waited for over two decades to see Karadzic’s day of reckoning,” said Param-Preet Singh, senior international justice counsel at Human Rights Watch. “The Karadzic verdict sends a powerful signal that those who order atrocities cannot simply wait out justice.”
Karadzic’s trial was one of the final acts at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal. The court, set up in 1993, indicted 161 suspects. Of them, 80 were convicted and sentenced, 18 acquitted, 13 sent back to local courts and 36 had indictments withdrawn or died.
