SARAJEVO: War criminal, president, psychiatrist, poet, and even New Age healer – Radovan Karadzic lived a varied life before being convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
The former Bosnian Serb leader is awaiting a final verdict on the 40-year-sentence he was handed in 2016 for his role in Bosnia’s 1990s inter-ethnic war, which left 100,000 dead and displaced more than two million.
He was convicted of 10 charges in total, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The worst atrocity on the charge-sheet is the slaughter of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern town of Srebrenica in July 1995.
While the Hague-based tribunal will lay down its final judgment of the 73-year-old on Wednesday, Karadzic remains a deeply divisive figure in the court of public opinion.
To the international community and his foes, Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims, he is a monster responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands.
“If Karadzic does not get what he deserves, then this will mean that there is no justice in this world,” Munira Subasic, a president of Mothers of Srebrenica group who lost 22 close relatives in the killings, told AFP ahead of the verdict.
But for many Serbs, he was a hero — akin to those in the epic Serb poetry that inspired him — who stood up for his people in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war as Yugoslavia fell apart.
“Personally, I don’t believe in the legitimacy of this court,” the current leader of Bosnia’s Serbs, Milorad Dodik, said on the eve of the ruling.
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