U.N. tribunal finds former Bosnia Serb leader guilty of genocide

(washingtonpost) Serb leader was found guilty of genocide and other charges on Thursday for his role in deadly campaigns during the Bosnian war in the 1990s, including the massacres of thousands in Srebrenica, as an international tribunal announced a long-awaited reckoning in Europe’s bloodiest chapter since World War II.

Radovan Karadzic was found guilty of 10 charges that touched on many of the atrocities and ethnic-cleansing policies that stunned the world as Bosnia became a crucible for the rivalries and fears that tore apart Yugoslavia.

Among the findings against Karadzic involved the worst systematic slaughter of the war: the slayings of 8,000 Muslim men and boys outside the Srebrenica enclave near the close of the three-year Bosnian conflict.

Karadzic, 70, was sentenced to 40 years in prison by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which is nearing the end of its investigations of alleged atrocities and other crimes from the country’s meltdown. In total, more than 100,000 people died in the three-sided Bosnian conflict among Bosnian Serbs, ethnic Croats and Muslims.

The court’s ruling placed widespread blame on Karadzic, who it said directed murders, purges and other abuses against civilians, including the 44-month siege of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in which Serb gunners and snipers fired nearly daily from surrounding ridges.

Karadzic — a Bosnian Serb political leader and commander of military forces — claimed he was seeking only to protect ethnic Serbs during the war. A legal adviser to Karadzic said he will appeal the court ruling.

The proceedings of the tribunal at The Hague, which is backed by the United Nations, have been closely watched as a potentially significant step in applying international law to investigations of alleged war crimes and other abuses against civilians.

“This is a momentous day for international justice, but also for those in Bosnia who lost husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters in a coordinated campaign of violence,” said Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy and partnerships at Physicians for Human Rights, a group that was involved in exhuming some of Srebrenica’s mass graves.