Reflections on the Karadzic verdict
On March 25, I watched the verdict of the United Nations tribunal on Radovan Karadzic, the leader of Bosnian Serbian forces in during the 1992-1995 war. The man was found guilty of 10 major crimes, including "genocide" and crimes against humanity. He mastered the massacre of ''every able-bodied male'' in the town of Srebrenica in 1995, along with the killings of tens of thousands of people in Sarajevo and elsewhere. Hence, he was given a sentence of 40 years in prison.
In my view, Karadzic certainly deserved that sentence ? and in fact much more. I am aware that European law rules out the death penalty, but I personally am for it in crimes against humanity. The Nazis were rightly given death penalties at the Nuremberg Trials, and that is what my consciousness decrees for all mass murderers ? from Radovan Karadzic to, hopefully, Bashar al-Assad and "Caliph" Al Baghdadi.
I had learnt the name "Radovan Karadzic" sometime in the year 1992, when I was a college student. The war in former Yugoslavia had broken out, and had spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina. I, like many other Turks, had suddenly realized that in the Balkans we had fellow Muslims. Moreover, Serbian fascists were killing them by calling them "Turks!"
Today, some Bosnian Muslims blame Turkey for not having helped sufficiently or early enough to Bosnia at the time. But, undoubtedly many Turks, including myself, were sad and angry, moved and motivated, and were trying to help. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina initiated, in fact, a sort of "neo-Ottoman awakening," whose impact would include the rise of Turkish political Islam.
The Bosniaks were targeted by Serbian paramilitary ? also called "Chetniks" ?for merely their religion. Serbs are Orthodox Christians, and that...
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