On Thursday the former Bosnian Serb leader will learn his fate when the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia delivers a verdict on 11 counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
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A United Nations court convicted former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic of genocide and nine other charges overnight.
Karadzic, seen in 1994 has been sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Karadzic is the most senior figure to be convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in its 23 year history.
The one-time psychiatrist, poet, president and New Age healer was finally arrested in 2008 on a Belgrade bus after 13 years on the run. He based his defense on the premise that the Bosnian war broke out because Serbs had no choice but to defend themselves against a Bosnian Muslim separatist regime that meant to create an Islamic state.
He said the ruling was in accordance with “stereotypes about Serbs’ exclusive guilt for the war in Bosnia”, Beta news agency reported.
The Karadzic case is also likely to drag on for years, as his legal advisor said he would appeal the verdict issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
More than 20 years after the guns fell silent in Bosnia, Karadzic is still considered a hero in Serb-controlled parts of the divided country.
During her questioning, she said, Karadzic claimed she was lying and that thousands of other Srebrenica widows and mothers had buried empty coffins just to make him look bad.
But he said the court could not conclude that Karadzic had “genocidal intent to destroy a group” in the seven municipalities.
In a separate statement, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, welcomed the verdict calling it “hugely significant”.
In his address at a rally of his party in Belgrade Thursday, Serbia’s opposition Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj said: “Karadzic was innocent, without any guilt, they sentenced him only because he’s a Serb”.
Serbia’s prime minister says Serbia will stand by the Bosnian Serb mini-state whatever the verdict against its wartime leader Radovan Karadzic.
It also found Karadzic, 70, guilty of war crimes for the “indiscriminate and disproportionate” shelling and sniping of Sarajevo in a 44-month siege in which thousands died.
In Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, which Karadzic helped to found, many complained they had been unfairly singled out for punishment. Karadžić, acting as his own attorney, questioned her account and instead accused the hospital of torturing Bosnian Serbs and serving as a staging area for Bosnian government military attacks.
FILE – In this September 18, 1996 file photo shows International War Crimes Tribunal investigators clearing away soil and debris from dozens of Srebrenica victims buried in a mass grave near the village of Pilica, some 55 kms (32 miles) north east of Tuzla, Boisnia-Herzegovina.
To Bosnian Muslims and Croats, Karadzic is synonymous with war, death, and destruction. The court, set up in 1993, indicted 161 suspects.
Bosnian Serb forces under the command of Ratko Mladic, who is also on trial in The Hague, in July 1995 entered Srebrenica, a town in Bosnia, rounded up the boys and men, then killed them.
Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian president, died while in custody at the tribunal in 2005. While living in Sarajevo in 1984 he was arrested on charges of embezzlement, but the case never came to trial.
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Speaking before the judgment was read out, Karadzic said he expected to be “acquitted”, adding that “there is no reasonable court that would convict me”.
