Widows of men murdered in the Srebrenica massacre on Thursday slammed the 40 year sentence handed down to former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, saying even decades behind bars would not give them justice.
"He killed so many children and will perhaps live long enough to regain freedom. Where he is is not really a prison. It is warm, he eats, he even looks good," said Bida Smajlovic who lost her husband and brother in the atrocity.
"My pain and my loneliness endure and nothing will change that, nothing can reduce my suffering," she said.
The 63-year-old's husband was one of three brothers who died at Srebrenica.
On Thursday, their wives, including Bida, gathered nervously around a television set to watch war crimes judges in The Hague sentence Karadzic, now 70, who will receive credit for time already spent in detention since 2008.
Almost 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed and their bodies dumped in mass graves by Bosnian Serb forces in the 1995 massacre, the worst bloodshed on European soil since World War II.
Another Smajlovic widow, Sajma, wept as she saw Karadzic on television.
"As soon as I see him it angers me," she said, adding that she had taken tranquillisers to cope with the pain of the sentencing.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Thursday sentenced Karadzic to 40 years in jail after finding him guilty of 10 charges relating to Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, including genocide for the Srebrenica slaughter.
"There is no adequate sentence for him, he will perhaps live long enough to be freed and has already lived for a long time, unlike my Ismet," said the third woman, Vasva Smajlovic, 73.
"The best sentence would be to kill him on the spot, for the world to see him decompose. The fact I have lived to see him condemned brings me some comfort."