“Far from preventing it, he ordered they be transferred elsewhere to be killed”, the judge said. He was acquitted on only one count, genocide in other areas of Bosnia at the beginning of the war.
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Hague tribunal holds Radovan Karadzic responsible for Sarajevo siege, Srebrenica massacre and other atrocities.
Campaign of terror… Bida Smajlovic, a survivor of the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, stands at a memorial centre in Potocari.
As he sat down after hearing his sentence, Karadzic slumped slightly in his chair, but showed little emotion.
Winning near-mythical status among his supporters by evading spy services as they hunted him, Karadzic took on the alter ego of spiritual healer Dragan Dabic, who gave lectures, had a national magazine column and drank in a Belgrade bar called the Madhouse.
“I have no sisters, no brothers, no husband”.
“We will protect their existence and their right to have their own state”, Vucic said, Reuters reported.
Eight years on, said chief United Nations prosecutor Serge Brammertz, “justice has been done”.
In 2006, former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic died in his cell at The Hague before judges could deliver verdicts in his trial.
Apart from Karadzic, three suspects remain on trial, including his military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic and Serb ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj. This included the sniping and shelling during the 44-month siege of Sarajevo and the deaths in Srebrenica.
Karadzic has denied the charges and defended himself during his trial, which lasted just short of 500 days. North Atlantic Treaty Organisation soldiers were forced to intervene to bring an end to the war. Set up in 1993, the court has so far indicted 161 suspects.
Serbia backed the Bosnian Serbs during the war. The AP says Karadzic faces a maximum life sentence.
Ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has been jailed for 40 years on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity during the 90s war that left tens of thousands of people dead.
The Yugoslavia tribunal was the first of a series of worldwide courts established since the 1990s in an attempt to replicate the post-war justice administered by the Nuremberg trials after the second world war.
After the Dayton accord, Karadzic was forced to resign and went into hiding, with reports emerging of him finding shelter in remote Orthodox monasteries in the region.
“I wish there was capital punishment”, added Vasva Smajlovic, 73.
The Anti-Defamation League, which welcomed Karadzic’s arrest in 2008, praised the verdict.
“Somehow I expected this”, Nusreta Sivac, a former judge from Prijedor, told Deutsche Welle. In the carefully planned 1995 operation, Serb forces moved Muslim men and boys to sites around the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia and gunned them down before dumping their bodies into mass graves.
Bida Smajlovic’s husband tried to escape through the woods but was killed along with his two brothers. Smajlovic’s home, where she lives alone, overlooks 7,000 white tombstones where the victims were buried. Another 1,000 are still unaccounted for.
“We were handed down a verdict in 1995”.
The arrest of Karadzic, then one of the most wanted men in Europe, stunned the world, above all for his masterful disguise and seemingly unparalleled ability to change personas.
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But Karardzic’s lawyer Peter Robinson said his client was “disappointed and astonished”.
