MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The judicial statement that accompanied Thursday’s ruling concluded that Karadzic’s claim that Bosnian Muslims provoked the international military engagement against Bosnian Serb forces "pale in significance" to evidence indicating the Serbs’ three-year siege of Sarajevo to "pressure" Muslim leaders and the international community "in pursuit of his political goals."
"It is incredible that the court first says that a Bosnian Muslim sniper shot his own fellow citizens in Sarajevo to provoke international intervention against Bosnian Serbs, and then states that the same is done by the Serbs," Luka Karadzic said.
Karadzic was found guilty of one of the two counts of genocide in relation to the July-November 1995 mass murder of Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, and the forced deportations of Muslim women, children and the elderly from the same town.
"The verdict's [accompanying] opinion is incomprehensible. The verdict itself is incomprehensible, but the opinion is just a disaster. If the penalty is determined based on this, it once again proves how the court works," Luka Karadzic asserted.
Biljana Plavsic, who succeeded Karadzic as president of Republika Srpska in 1996, argued that the Srebrenica massacre was the opposite to what the ICTY classified as a genocide.
"Women and children are killed when genocide is committed. I saw that it was in fact the other way around: they were rescued," Plavsic, who was released in 2009 after completing two-thirds of an 11-year sentence for her role in the war, alleged.
The Republika Srpska is one of two administrative entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, established in accordance with the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995 following the war.
Karadzic, 70, became the most high-profile defendant after the death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2006 before his trial concluded. His lawyer told RIA Novosti late on Thursday that the defense team planned to appeal the sentence within the next two years.
