The main square was lit up by flares, and pro-Russian chants filled the air. The former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had been convicted of the Srebrenica genocide but in Belgrade, the Serbian capital, on Thursday night, thousands gathered to praise the “butcher of Bosnia”.
The gathering in Republic Square to hear the ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj – himself indicted for war crimes – condemn the court in The Hague which found Karadzic guilty of responsibility for genocide, was evidence of the tensions that continue 21 years after the Bosnian war, which killed 100,000 people.
“The criminal Hague, the false court of the Western powers, has condemned Karadzic to 40 years,” bellowed Seselj, to boos and whistles from the crowd, at a rally called to commemorate the beginning of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia. “They convicted him when he was innocent, only because he led the Serb people in Bosnia during a crucial moment.”
Seselj compared European prisons holding Karadzic and other Serbs to “Hitler’s camps”, as supporters waved flags with his name and slogans of the Second World War nationalist Chetnik movement. The Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face loomed out of placards and badges. “His conviction is a tragedy,” said one old man as he left the demonstration.
Earlier in the afternoon, Karadzic was found guilty on 10 of 11 charges brought at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. Karadzic was the President of the self-declared Serb Republic [Republika Srpska] in Bosnia from 1992 to 1996, and seen as a leading actor in the war. He was found culpable for genocide during the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed, and the 44-month siege of Sarajevo, during which 11,500 perished.
