No one who witnessed the war in Bosnia came out of it untouched, and it would be hard to find someone there today whose life was not affected by the master plan of Karadzic and his henchmen. In March, a U.N. tribunal in The Hague found Karadzic guilty on 10 out of 11 counts of war crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity and other atrocities. One of the counts of genocide was related to the Srebrenica massacre, the most notorious of the war. The trial lasted nearly five years, and Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years for his brutality. He will most likely appeal.

Survivors came forward during the trial to give accounts of what they saw and endured. If I had not been there during the war, I would not have believed some of the stories of what happened. A Muslim-Serb couple who snuck away to get married were killed as they ran hand in hand over a bridge separating front lines. They were later renamed “the Romeo and Juliet of Sarajevo.” The city parks were stripped bare of wood so that people could make fires to survive the intense cold. A soccer field became a crowded cemetery, with most of the headstones showing dates of birth in the 1990s.

In the Bosnian town of Foca, the Serbian army established “rape camps.” Bosnian Muslim women were violated dozens of times a day with the purpose of impregnating them with Serbian babies. People in other Muslim towns, like Gorazde and Zepa, were slowly strangled and slaughtered. Villages in central Bosnia were ethnically cleansed, then burnt to the ground. Serbian forces set up concentration camps, where people were starved, raped and beaten.