The Center for Dealing with the Past - Documenta responds to the judgment in the Radovan Karadžić case.

After five years of trial and 18 months of considering evidence and deliberating about the guilt or innocence of the accused, the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) handed down the first instance verdict in the case of Radovan Karadžić, the former leader of the Bosnia's Serb-dominated "Serb Republic" (Republika Srpska).

Karadžić was found guilty and sentenced to a single term of 40 years in prison.

Considering the sentences already imposed by the ICTY in other cases for crimes committed in Sarajevo, Prijedor and Srebrenica - and keeping in mind Karadžić's political responsibility - the victims were expecting that the judicial panel would sentence him to life in prison.

This penalty would be an important factor for the building of trust only if the suffering of the victims is acknowledged by politicians, but also the societies of former Yugoslav countries, including the elected representatives of the Serb Republic in the Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The latter should - instead of completely inappropriately naming the university campus after the convicted war criminal - do everything to compensate the victims' families.

Crimes against humanity

Karadžić was convicted on the basis of individual criminal responsibility, in the context of four related joint criminal enterprises, for genocide, crimes against humanity (all counts of indictment) and violation of the laws and customs of war (on all counts):

• Genocide against the men from Srebrenica.
• Permanent removal of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from areas of the Bosnia and Herzegovina which the Bosnian Serb claimed through the forcible displacement of non-Serbs, the organization of the system of abuse and detention (50 detention facilities), killing on a massive scale, wide looting of non-Serb property, the use of captives as human shields, the destruction of a number of mosques, religious facilities and cultural monuments, consistently providing false information in the context of creating an environment for the systematic conducting of crimes by which the goal was achieved - the overarching joint criminal enterprise.
• Implementation of the campaign of sniping and shelling against the civilian population of Sarajevo, with the goal to spread terror among the civilian population.
• Taking members of the United Nations as hostages in order to force NATO to refrain from air strikes on Bosnian Serb military targets.

The Trial Chamber acquitted Karadžić of charges of genocide in seven municipalities (Bratunac, Foča, Ključ, Prijedor, Sanski Most, Vlasenica and Zvornik) in which, according to the prosecution, the level of crimes escalated to genocide. (The court made the same decision earlier, in the cases Stakić and Brđanin.)

Radovan Karadžić, next to Mladić, was acting also in collaboration with other participants of the criminal enterprises, including: Momčilo Krajišnik, Slobodan Milošević, Biljana Plavšić, Nikola Koljević, Mićo Stanišić, Momčilo Mandić, Jovica Stanišić, Franko Simatović, Željko Ražnjatović, Vojislav Šešelj, Stanislav Galić and Dragomir Milošević. Primarily for direct perpetration, he used political and state structure of Bosnian Serbs, members of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Army of Republika Srpska, Yugoslav People's Army, Yugoslav Forces, Territorial Defense, the Serbian Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Serbian paramilitary forces and volunteer units from Serbia and Bosnia, as well as local Bosnian Serbs - as the Court found beyond a reasonable doubt.

This article is a statement of the organization Documenta.