Karadzic appeals 40-year genocide sentence

THE HAGUE: Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on Friday lodged an appeal against his 40-year jail sentence for genocide, accusing UN judges of “subjecting him to a political trial.”

Karadzic, who appealed on 50 grounds before the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes court, “was subjected to a political trial that was simply designed to confirm the demonisation of him and the Bosnian Serb people,” his lawyer Peter Robinson said in a statement.

Once the most powerful Bosnian Serb leader, Karadzic, 71, was sentenced on March 24 for genocide for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and nine other charges stemming from the Balkan country’s brutal three-year war.

Judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia ruled that Karadzic, the most high-profile figure convicted over the wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart, bore criminal responsibility for murder and persecution during the Bosnian conflict.

Almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were butchered and their bodies dumped in mass graves at Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in mid- July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces brushed aside lightly armed UN Dutch peacekeepers protecting a UN safe area.

The massacre was the largest bloodshed on European soil since World War II.

A long-time fugitive from justice until his arrest on a Belgrade bus in 2008, Karadzic was also found guilty of being behind the harrowing 44-month siege of Sarajevo in which 10,000 civilians died and a relentless campaign of sniping and shelling.

But Robinson said Karadzic did not receive a fair trial and that UN judges “presumed him guilty and then constructed a judgement to justify its presumption.”

“Having spent eight years in a UN prison and gone through a fiveyear trial... Karadzic is convinced that international justice is a failed project,” he said. — AFP