Karadzic guilty of Bosnia genocide, jailed for 40 years

THE HAGUE:

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years in jail by UN judges who found him guilty of genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and of nine other war crimes charges. Karadzic, 70, the most senior political figure to be convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, was found guilty of 10 out of 11 war charges.

He was acquitted of a second count of genocide in various towns across Bosnia during the war of the 1990s.

The judges said Karadzic was criminally responsible for the siege of Sarajevo and had committed crimes against humanity in Bosnian towns. They said he had intended to eliminate the Bosnian Muslim males in Srebrenica, where 8,000 Muslims died in Europe's worst war crime since World War Two.

Presiding judge O-Gon Kwon said the three-year Sarajevo siege, during which the city was shelled and sniped at by besieging Bosnian Serb forces, could not have happened without Karadzic's support. His sentence will be reduced by slightly more than 7 years for time already spent in detention.

It will be served in an as yet undetermined state prison. He is expected to appeal, a process that could take several more years.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 25^th,  2016.