Source: CNN
(CNN)Radovan Karadzic, nicknamed the “Butcher of Bosnia,” was sentenced to 40 years in prison Thursday after being found guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity over atrocities that Bosnian Serb forces committed during the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995.
A special U.N. court in The Hague, Netherlands, found the 70-year-old guilty of genocide over his responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed by Bosnian Serb forces under his command.
Karadzic, former leader of the breakaway Serb Republic in Bosnia, is the highest-ranking political figure to have been brought to justice over the bitter ethnic conflicts that erupted with the collapse of the former Yugoslavia.
“This judgment confirms Radovan Karadzic’s command responsibility for the most serious crimes under international law carried out on European soil since the Second World War,” said John Dalhuisen, Amnesty International’s director for Europe and Central Asia.
The former psychiatrist was found guilty of 10 of the 11 charges against him, including extermination, persecution, forcible transfer, terror and hostage taking.
In a statement, the tribunal said it found Karadzic had committed the crimes through his participation in four “joint criminal enterprises,” including an overarching plot from October 1991 to November 1995 “to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory.”
The trial was heard by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia — an ad hoc court the United Nations established to prosecute serious crimes committed during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia.
The Croatian government hailed the verdicts Thursday — which came at the end of an eight-year trial — as welcome but long overdue, calling them “the minimum, for which the victims and their families unfortunately waited too long.”
Categories: Bosnia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Crime, Criminal Justice, Europe, Genocide, The Muslim Times
an appalling event – after centuries of tolerance and a thousand years of Muslims living in former Yugoslavia. Glad there is finally some closure here….for some…but likely will never been for a generation of missing Muslim children.