Erstellt am: 24. 3. 2016 - 14:32 Uhr

40 years of prison for Radovan Karadzic

Guilty of genocide for Srebrenica. Portrait of a convicted war criminal.

The Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was found guilty on Thursday of genocide for the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica and of nine other war crimes charges.

The judgement brings to an end a landmark case against one of the alleged architects of Serb atrocities during Bosnia's 1992-95 war.

Karadzic is the most senior political figure to be convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

He had been facing 11 charges and was acquitted of a second count of genocide in Bosnian towns.

In a statement, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said the verdict shows that no matter how powerful or untouchable people think they are, perpetrators of such crimes must know they will not escape justice.

Before the verdicts had come through, Reality Check's Steve Crilley spoke to our Eastern Europe & Balkans correspondent Nick Thorpe, who reported on the Bosnian war during the 1990s:

AFP PHOTO / AFP FILES

The faces of Radovan Karadzic

Nick Thorpe: This is a man who was one of the most wanted on earth. He was compared to Osama bin Laden in terms of the global search for him, which focussed above all on the Balkans.

He’s a man who has [had] very heavy charges hanging over his neck: for responsibility for the siege of Sarajevo; for responsibility for the war in Bosnia in which over a hundred thousand people died; for the expulsion of 2.2 million people from their homes.

He was very much the supreme commander of Bosnian Serb forces, it was a war which he declared, effectively, on the rest of Bosnia.

Steve Crilley: Nick, you’ve met this man as well – what kind of man is he?

NT: I used to meet him quite often before and at the very beginning of the war, and I was always rather disappointed in him. He would go on and on for a long time, for hours indeed, about the Second World War and how the Serbs suffered.

Of course the Serbs did suffer in the Second World War, especially in 1941, when the Nazi forces occupied Yugoslavia, but somehow one wanted to move on to 1991, which was when I was mainly interviewing him, and he couldn’t really get beyond that obsession with 1941.

I’ve spoken to his former colleagues at work, because he was a psychiatrist at the Kosevo hospital in Sarajevo. I remember one person describing to me an incident when a dangerous psychiatric patient got loose. Dr Karadzic locked himself in a room and left young, female nurses to handle a potentially dangerous male patient while he [Karadzic] was hiding away.

I wouldn’t normally say this about a former interviewee, but I would describe him as rather stupid, as a vain person and as a cowardly person.

SC: What about the importance of this process for the region?
It’s taken a long time. I think he himself is not particularly loved, even by the Serbs. If there is love among Bosnian Serbs for their leaders from that time it’s rather focussed on Ratko Mladic, who after all, for all his crimes – and obviously he’s on trial as well – at least, people say, he led his forces into battle, risking his own life, whereas Dr Karadzic was tucked away in Pale, the village near Sarajevo, which he used as his base.

I think the problem with the trial is that it’s taken much too long. Obviously there were efforts by the War Crimes Tribunal to be seen, and indeed to be fair, to be just. Karadzic played a waiting game, refused to accept official lawyers, tried to delay it all and just generally made the process of justice more difficult. The trial itself took five years, it’s actually eight years since he was arrested in July 2008, so it will bring closure for some people, but I think people in Bosnia have been trying to forget about him for a long time now.

SC: What good do you think a trial like this does, compared to other things that happen after a conflict, like, for example, a truth and reconciliation scenario. Would that have been better here, rather than putting men like Karadzic and Mladic on trial?

NT: It’s very difficult and I think individual people who suffered have the right to answer that question. As an observer who was in Bosnia before, during and after the war, I would say – of course, on one level these trials are very important.

It’s important as a deterrent for future wars that people aren’t seen to get away with murder, as it were, or command responsibility for murder. Of course in Karadzic’s case he’s not blamed of killing anyone with his own hands, but of being responsible for so much suffering. So, it is useful, but I think the real value beyond justice is a sense of truth and reconciliation committees, of people working in their local communities.

Many ordinary Bosnians have said all they wanted was for those who committed crimes against them, who killed their family members, who did atrocious things, just to stand up in front of them and say sorry. Then reconciliation becomes possible. We’re not going to get that, I don’t think, from Karadzic. On a local level, there have been apologies and there will be apologies. I think Bosnia is recovering slowly and painfully from this war.

SC: What about the future of this region, Bosnia, Serbia? It’s presumably in the EU, but how far away are those goals?

NT: Above all there are economic problems which plague the whole region, but especially Bosnia. Huge unemployment, valuable people with education leaving, but staying in contact obviously with their country – there’s a huge Bosnian diaspora across the world now, and across Europe. And for the other countries of the region I think it’s taken too long to get into the European Union. Rather, as I felt, it took Eastern Europe too long to get in.

The enthusiasm of joining a community of countries wanes after a while, and I’ve often felt that the richer countries of Europe could perhaps have made more sacrifices in the name of reunifying Europe, just as West Germany made great sacrifices to reintegrate Eastern Germany. But the region stumbles on – it’s a wonderful place to visit, it’s a beautiful part of Europe, it would be fantastic in future for a bigger tourist industry.

At the end of the day, beyond all ethnic divisions or memories of hatred, people will need jobs. Obviously the EU and all countries of goodwill around the world that have been trying to rebuild Bosnia and other countries in the region suffering from poverty or from war – that process needs to go on so that the Balkans can take their rightful place on the map of the marvellous, beautiful, friendly and hospitable places of Europe.