prijava
THE HAGUE, March 20 (FENA) - Under the second-instance (final) verdict, the former Republika Srpska (RS) president Radovan Karadžić has been found guilty of genocide in Srebrenica and other serious crimes committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the last war between 1992 and 1995, but not for genocide in seven BiH municipalities.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICJ) in The Hague today announced the verdict to the war criminal and sentenced him to life imprisonment while he received 40 years in prison under the first-instance verdict.
After the finalizing of the appeal phase, the final verdict against Karadžić, charged with the worst war crimes, was announced today by Judge Vagn Prüsse Joensen, presiding judge of the IRMCT Appeals Chamber.
“Karadžić’s claims that he was found responsible only because he was the president are unconvincing,” said, among other things, the presiding judge.
Given Karadžić’s participation in several joint criminal enterprises, the Appeals Chamber understates the gravity of his crimes and his involvement in them. The judge underscored that these crimes remain unprecedented in scale and brutality.
Karadžić's indictment, charging him with the worst crimes committed on the soil of Europe after the Second World War, consisted of a total of 11 counts - two for genocide, five for crimes against humanity and four counts of violations of the laws and customs of war committed by Serb forces during the war in BiH.
The surviving victims and witnesses of the genocide expressed their expectation that Karadžić, as the media called him, "the Balkan Butcher", would be convicted on all counts, because, what Karadžić had stated as a speaker in the parliament of the Republic of BiH on 14 October 1991, will never be forgotten. These were his most frequently quoted words.
“This, what you are doing, is not good. This is the path that you want to take Bosnia and Herzegovina on, the same pathway of hell and death that Slovenia and Croatia went on. Don't think that you won't take Bosnia and Herzegovina into hell and the Bosnian Muslim people perhaps into extinction. Because the Bosnian Muslim people cannot defend themselves if there is war here,” said Karadžić on that day standing in front of the entire parliament of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
These were words after which no one could even imagine what would follow, and what did were almost four years of a bloody war in which the most violent crimes in the modern history of Europe were committed.
(FENA) S. R.
