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| July 22, 2008 |
Dr Radovan Karadzic was arrested yesterday In Serbia. Dr James Smith, of the Aegis Trust, stated: "This is a great day for international justice and sends a warning to genocide suspects everywhere that their future lies in the courtroom."
Wartime President of the self-declared Republika Srpska in Bosnia, Karadzic is accused of massive atrocities including the massacre of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, in July of 1995. Indicted the same month by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Karadzic disapeared into hiding in 1996. Ratko Mladic, his military commander, is still on the run.
"When I heard this news I actually didn't feel any sense of jubilation; I thought it was about time," stated Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia. "It should have happened twelve years ago, but there are so many reasons why this is a positive outcome. This is not just about justice for the victims. This is far more important than that, especially with what is going on in Sudan, in Darfur. This is about the rule of international law."
Are you listening Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir? And Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe?
And what about George W. Bush, and Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice, Ashcroft- the whole bunch of them? ls their excuse, "we thought there were weapons of mass destruction", pure (criminal) incompetence or something far more sinister? I think they deserve a fair trial. The charge of course is crimes against humanity. Let them hire fleets of the finest lawyers, but will they, in a court of law, be able justify the deaths of some 600,000 Iraqi civilians and the destruction of their country? Can that lame excuse justify the agonizingly pointless deaths and mutilations of our own American soldiers? And what about the devastation of our economy , not to mention the squandering of whatever credibility and respect the US once had within the international community? They must be brought to trial.