Twenty-one years after the crime and eight years after Radovan Karadzic was captured, the Bosnian Serb leader was convicted of genocide and war crimes by a United Nations tribunal Thursday. Karadzic, now 70, was found guilty on ten charges including genocide for his role in the organized massacre of more than seven thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995.
Here’s more on the conviction from the New York Times:
The trial here was the most important in the 23-year history of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and a defining test for the entire system of international justice, human rights advocates said… The conviction offered a note of closure to the bloodiest European conflict since World War II, a civil war that tore apart the former Yugoslavia and left more than 100,000 people dead… While the tribunal had convicted many lesser figures of war crimes, it had never prosecuted as senior a figure as Mr. Karadzic. Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president whose extreme nationalism instigated and enabled much of the fighting, died in March 2006 in his cell in The Hague before the end of his trial before the United Nations tribunal. Ratko Mladic, who was Mr. Karadzic’s military chief during the campaign, is being tried separately.
Karadzic was also found guilty for his role in the shelling of Sarajevo and orchestrating an ethnic cleansing in the conflict. Karadzic spent years on the run, but was found in 2008, despite a dramatically changed appearance; he had also adopted a new accent and was working as an alternative medicine healer. Karadzic defended himself in the trial at the Hague that lasted eight years. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
