More than 20 heads of state from around the world gathered in Stockholm yesterday to consider the lessons of the Holocaust against the background of a national awakening in Sweden to its own murky wartime record. He was charged in April the following year and found guilty of war crimes in 1996. In July 1997 he was given a 20-year sentence, which was increased two years later on appeal to 25 years.His defence argued that the the court was making Tadic a scapegoat for the crimes of his superiors, some of whom are still at large, and said that he was a mere “tadpole in a pool of sharks”.Yesterday the court recommended Tadic serve at least 10 years of the sentence from the time of his conviction in 1997.. But it was his role in the torture and killing at “White House” in the Omarska detention camp that confirmed his notoriety.Although yesterday’s judgment should end Tadic’s long trial, his defence could gain one final chance to review the case on a technicality, depending on whether Tadic’s former counsel, Milan Vujin, is found guilty of contempt of court on Monday by the appeals chamber.Tadic was arrested in February 1994 when he was recognised in Germany by former refugees. Dusko Tadic, the first man to go on trial for war crimes committed since the Second World War, had his sentence reduced to 20 years yesterday as he exhausted the appeals procedure of the international tribunal in The Hague. Dusko Tadic, the first man to go on trial for war crimes committed since the Second World War, had his sentence reduced to 20 years yesterday as he exhausted the appeals procedure of the international tribunal in The Hague.
The tribunal ruled that Tadic’s 25-year sentence had been “excessive” because the Bosnian Serb was at a low level of command when he took part in the murder and torture of Bosnian Muslims at the Omarska detention camp in 1992.Judge Mohammed Shahabuddeen said that, while Tadic was guilty of “incontestably heinous” crimes, he was not one of the most senior architects of ethnic cleansing among the Bosnian Serb leadership.A former leader of the Serb Democratic Party, a police reservist and karate instructor, Tadic was indicted for his part in a two-day attack on Kozarac in which 800 civilians were killed by Bosnian Serbs.

Under the present system, the unions help to run a nationwide allocation of teaching posts, which often means that the least experienced teachers are sent, in inadequate numbers, to sink schools. The minister will propose, once again, today to “decentralise” this system and allow local school authorities more control over recruitment This will, once again, be bitterly resisted by the unions.. Teachers and parents say that school principals and local education officials prefer to disguise and tolerate violence, rather than gain a bad reputation.Mr Allÿgre is known to place part of the blame privately on teaching unions. “There are parts of this country where the police do not go,” he said “But there is no part of the country without a school. Schools are in the front line.”Critics point out that many of the schools where there have been violent outbreaks recently – including the technical lycée in Longwy where the teenage boy was tortured by classmates – are not classified as troubled schools.

In a series of interviews earlier this week, the Education Minister said it was important to put the violence “in context”. Of the 75,000 state-run schools in France, only 39 were classed as “seriously violent” and 300 as “somewhat violent”, he said.Mr Allÿgre said that the numbers were still unacceptable but the first stage of his anti-violence programme had improved the position in at least two of the nine target areas (Lyons and Marseilles). Although there have been no incidents as extreme as those listed above, pupils, teachers and parents complain that life in the school has sunk into a daily routine of beatings, theft, protection-rackets and food fights.Teachers at another college, at Stains in the north-east suburbs of Paris, went on strike on Monday after a cleaning lady was beaten up by children in the street, in revenge for an earlier “insult”. She had refused to allow them into school before the appointed time.Marie-Pierre, a recently trained history and geography teacher at the college, told the newspaper Libération laconically that the favourite game at the school was throwing chairs out of windows during class.”Of course, they don’t open the windows first because it’s more spectacular that way.”There have also been, in recent days, strikes against pupil violence by teachers and staff in Lyons, Roubaix, Beauvais, Senlis and in the north-west suburbs of Paris. His measures will include hiring an extra 20,000 young people as “assistants” and playground monitors and imposing a nationwide code of graded punishments for aggressors.He has also asked Zidane, the star of France’s victory in the football World Cup in 1998, and Depardieu, by far the best- known French movie actor, to visit troubled schools to give lectures on civic behaviour Both men had deprived childhoods. Zidane, whose parents were born in Algeria, is a hero with French teenagers from ethnic Arab backgrounds.The announcement has, however, already been rejected as inadequate by some teachers and parents campaigning against violence in schools.

She escaped serious injury only because she was wearing a thick anorak.The anti-violence programme, to be announced by the Education Minister, Claude Allÿgre, is the second part of a campaign begun, with some success, in 1998. At one school in Montpellier in the south of France, the Collÿge des Aigurelles, teachers and parents have been “on strike” and occupying classrooms for two weeks. In the southern Paris suburbs, a 15-year-old girl was burnt on the face with a cigarette lighter and stabbed in the chest with a craft knife after she resisted a protection racket run by another girl. The footballer Zinedine Zidane and the movie star Gérard Depardieu will be mobilised by the French government today in a campaign to reduce the disturbing level ofviolence in schools.
The announcement coincides with a series of brutal attacks on pupils and staff, and protests by teachers and parents, in towns all over France.