Letdown as a butcher is sentenced

The Butcher of Bosnia has been sentenced to 40 years in prison—but Bosnians expected more, said Dnevni List. Radovan Karadzic headed the breakaway Bosnian Serb Republic during our nation’s brutal 1992–1995 war, and led a devastating military campaign to wipe out all Bosnian Muslims and ethnic Croats from what he considered Serb territory. The United Nations rightfully calls him “the architect of destruction and murder on a massive scale.” The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia convicted Karadzic last week of genocide for ordering the July 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the city of Srebrenica, and of crimes against humanity for other atrocities. It’s a historic judgment and a fitting one, yet some Bosnians are asking why Karadzic did not also get a genocide conviction for the lesser-known slaughters in Prijedor, Zvornik, and Vlasenica, where thousands were murdered and tens of thousands were driven from their homes. They also wonder why Karadzic didn’t get a life sentence for his heinous crimes. Now 70, he will surely die in prison before his 40 years are up, but a life sentence would have sent a powerful message to other genocidal leaders around the world. We expect more convictions and a longer sentence on appeal—otherwise, Bosnians will be “disappointed.”