Karadzic appeals genocide sentence

Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic yesterday lodged an appeal against his 40-year jail sentence for genocide, accusing UN judges of "subjecting him to a political trial".

Karadzic, who appealed on 50 grounds before the UN's Yugoslav war crimes court, "was subjected to a political trial that was simply designed to confirm the demonisation of him and the Bosnian Serb people," his lawyer Peter Robinson said in a statement.

Once the most powerful Bosnian Serb leader, Karadzic, 71, was sentenced in March for genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre and nine other charges stemming from Bosnia's bloody three-year war.

More than 100,000 people died and more than 2.2 million others were left homeless in the conflict that followed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia after the fall of communism in the early 1990s.

Judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that Karadzic bore criminal responsibility for murder and persecution during the Bosnian conflict. Almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were butchered and their bodies dumped in mass graves in Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia in mid-July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces brushed aside lightly armed UN Dutch peacekeepers protecting a UN safe area.

The massacre was the largest bloodshed on European soil since World War II.

A long-time fugitive from justice until his arrest on a Belgrade bus in 2008, Karadzic was also found guilty of being behind the harrowing 44-month siege of Sarajevo in which 10,000 civilians died in a relentless campaign of sniping and shelling.