(24 Mar 2016) Radovan Karadzic, who was born in Montenegro in 1944 to a rural family, went on to become an amateur poet and a psychiatrist by profession. He moved to Sarajevo in the 1960's and entered politics in 1989 when he was elected president of the Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia. Karadzic, 52, long maintained an uncompromising stance marked by hyperbolic threats against the West and contempt for international peacemaking efforts after he assumed the presidency of the self-declared "Republika Srpska" in January 1992. Karadzic has led a pyrrhic Serb bid for secession for more than four years with an obsessive determination to create his own state, leading Serbs during a ruthless war with Bosnia's Muslim-led government which saw the Serbs cast as international pariahs. Indicted for crimes against humanity in relation to the conduct of the war, and for genocide in relation to the Srebrenica massacres of July 1995, Karadzic has found his mobility limited and his authority challenged by colleagues who began to regard him as an embarrassment in the changed situation. In May, he announced he was delegating all dealings with the international community to Plavsic, but it rapidly became apparent he was continuing to pull the strings.
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Serb nationalists in Bosnia have put up large roadside posters declaring Radovan Karadzic "a Serb hero" hours before their political leader and commander in chief during the country's 1992-95 war is sentenced by a United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague for his role in the conflict.
Karadzic will hear the verdict on March 24th at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on 11 charges, including two counts of genocide.
He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted.
Among other crimes, Karadzic is charged with orchestrating a deadly campaign of sniping and shelling during the 44-month-long siege of Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb forces and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.
However, Karadzic is still considered a hero in Serb-controlled parts of Bosnia.
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Bosnian Serbs reacted with disappointment on March 24th following the sentencing of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic at the Hague.
A United Nations court convicted Karadzic of genocide and nine other charges on March 24th and sentenced him to 40 years in prison for orchestrating Serb atrocities throughout Bosnia's 1992-95 war that left 100,000 people dead.
Bosnian Serb leaders disagreed with the verdict of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) but urged their people to remain calm.
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Several thousand Serbian ultra-nationalists rallied in Belgrade on March 24th in protest against the 40-year prison sentence handed to the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic by a United Nations war crimes court.
Far-right supporters of the former Bosnian Serb leader claimed Karadzic was convicted only because he was a Serb.
Nationalist leader Vojislav Seselj, who is also awaiting a war crimes judgment next week, said the verdict against Karadzic was a "verdict against the entire Serb people."
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Karadzic guilty of genocide in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were slaughtered in Europe's worst mass murder since the Holocaust.
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