Karadzic appeals against 40 years sentence for war crimes

On Friday former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic filed an appeal against the 40 year prison sentence the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague gave him in March, the Volkskrant reports.  Karadzic stood trial for his role in atrocities committed during the Bosnian War, including the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 during which some 8,400 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered. He was also charged with genocide in seven Bosnian municipalities in the first year of the war (1992). From April of that year the Bosinan Serb army performed "ethnic cleansing" which was accompanied by mass detentions and executions of Bosnian Muslims and Croatians . All in all Karadzic faced 11 charges - five counts of crimes against humanity, two of genocide, and four of war crimes. He was convicted on 10 of them and acquitted of genocide in 1992. During his trial Karadzic always maintained that he knew nothing of the Srebrenica massacre and unsuccessfully tried to show that many of the other crimes were committed by Bosnian Muslims on their own people, thereby trying to make the Serbian army look bad.