Radovan Karadzic when he was arrested for “industrial crimes” in November 1984.
Amid all the madness in the world today, we have this little ray of hope, a step toward a more just and civilized world:
A former Bosnian Serb leader was found guilty of genocide and other charges 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 including genocide in connection with the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Srebrenica enclave near the close of a three-year war….
It’s a small step, very tentative and absurdly delayed. This happened more than 20 years ago, and we’ve known who was responsible from the start. Gen. Ratko Mladić has yet to stand trial.
We have a long way to go to preventing such barbarity.
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A friend of mine was in Tuzla just after the conflict. They were attempting repair a dam whose sluice stopped returning water and sent divers in to investigate. Corpses, nothing but corpses. He still has nightmares about it.
I hate passing judgement, but what happened there is something we can’t simply forget. When I hear young people mention it, they bristle, and seem to think the entire incident was nothing but US interventionism/imperialism (while in the past we did nothing but fear that Clinton was enabling Muslim retaliation against the Serbs).
Those young people are nearly 180 degrees from being right. What it was was a LACK of effective western interventionism. The Dutch peacekeepers were right there, but ineffective in stopping the massacre.
We eventually helped put a stop to the horror in the former Yugoslavia, but we took too long to do it.
People who think powerful, liberal nations should stand by while things like this are happening are completely lacking in a moral sense when it comes to world affairs…
Actually, though, I’m surprised that you know young people who even mention it, however garbled their understanding…
Is the penalty for genocide still death? Or are the Europeans going to sentence him to 10 years in a minimum security detention facility?
I honestly though don’t know what society should do with such a monster. There really is no just punishment.
He got 40 years.
Victims say that’s too little, while plenty of Serbs still think he’s a great guy. Here’s a story about it.