Bosnia's victims' associations expressed strong concern and frustration over the appearance of convicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic in a public debate in Montenegro by phone, said a letter that Mothers of Srebrenica and Zepa Enclaves sent to the registrar of The Hague-based UN's court.

Karadzic, who was convicted to life imprisonment in March this year for genocide and other war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1992-95 war, addressed a public debate in a Montenegro over the telephone from his prison cell in the Netherlands, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) carried on Monday.

“As we learned in media, convicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic spoke on the phone from The Hague and took part in a debate in Montenegro led by another war criminal Momcilo Krajisnik. Karadzic said there that ‘a state and children are born in blood’ after which criminal Krajisnik told him ‘to stop lying around there and come back here’,” said the victims’ association.

This disturbs the victims and mocks on The Hague tribunal, warned the association gathering survivors of the genocide. They ask for adequate measures to be taken to prevent such media appearances from happening in the future.

“While not disputing the rights of sentenced persons, we believe that convicted war criminals’ rights do not include the use of warmongering rhetoric for the purpose of offending the victims and calling for new conflicts through media,” said the letter that the association sent to Olufemi Elias, Registrar of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).

The Mechanism earlier acted upon the appearance of former Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladic in a live broadcast on a Serbian TV station from his prison cell.