WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL

The first person to be tried and convicted of war crimes by an international criminal court since the end of World War II was sentenced earlier this week to 20 years in prison. Judges at the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in the Hague convicted Bosnian Serb Dusko Tadic in May of crimes against humanity for his role in the ethnic persecution of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the Prijedor region of northwest Bosnia.

Taped Excerpts:
• Justice Gabrielle Kirk MacDonald hands down the decision against Dusko Tadic.
• Pacifica producer Lauren Comiteau, with a radio interview in the Hague. Justice MacDonald describes what it was like to hand down the decision.
Guests:
• Derek Bell, a professor at New York University and the author of numerous books on racism, including most recently Gospel Choirs: Psalms of Survival for an Alien Land Called Home (Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1996). He was the first black tenured law professor at Harvard Law School, but left to protest the lack of diversity at the school.
• Nancy McDonald, the sole American and one of two women judges at the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands. Justice MacDonald is a former civil rights attorney who worked for the NAACP in Mississippi in the 1960s. She was only the third black woman appointed to the Federal bench.