It took over a year for the tribunal to issue its first indictment, in November 1994. The tribunal’s first sentence was passed in November 1996, sending Drazen Edemovic, a Croat who served in the Bosnian Serb army, to 10 years in prison for his role in the Srebrenica massacre.

Though the tribunal had the mandate to investigate, indict and prosecute war criminals, it had to rely on national governments for arrests. Of the 78 people indicted for war crimes by late 1997, only 10 were in the custody of the tribunal. By 2003, this figure grew to 38, still less than half the number indicted.

Bosnian Serb authorities and officials in Croatia and the rump Yugoslavia generally refused to comply with the tribunal’s requests for arrests. So did the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia (SFOR), arguing that they lacked both the mandate and the capabilities to do so.

After sustained U.S. pressure, Croatia finally persuaded former army General Tihomir Blaskic, indicted for crimes against Croatian Serbs as well as in Bosnia, to surrender to the tribunal in April 1996. But the two most prominent indictees for war crimes in Bosnia, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, continued to move freely in Bosnian Serb territory. Both men exercised power through monopolies on tobacco and fuel, and in early 1997 it was reported that Karadzic himself paid the salaries of most of the Bosnian Serb police officers.

Public outrage at these violations of the tribunal’s writ led to a gradual shift in SFOR’s approach. In July 1997, British troops moved to arrest two men who had been secretly indicted by the tribunal, capturing one and killing the other in a shootout.

The arrests had the effect of making Karadzic and Mladic more circumspect. Mladic took sanctuary in Serbia, and Karadzic holed up in the isolated mountain areas on the Bosnian-Montenegrin border. A small force of SFOR troops swooped into the area in early 2002, but failed to find Karadzic. All they managed to unearth was a small haul of guns, grenades and ammunition.

NATO’s entry into Kosovo in 1999 and the fall of the Milosevic regime in October 2000 altered the situation. Soon after, Biljana Plavsic, the former president of the Bosnian Serb entity and the only woman among the tribunal indictees, surrendered to the tribunal.

Though the new Yugoslav government was divided over whether to hand Milosevic over to the tribunal, the reformist Serbian Prime Minister, Zoran Djindic, prevailed over the nationalist Yugoslav President, Vojislav Kostunica, and Milosevic was arrested by the Serbian police and sent to The Hague in June 2001.

It took another eighteen months for another key war crimes indictee, Vojislav Seselj, to appear before the tribunal. Seselj was given a hero’s sendoff in Belgrade when he left for The Hague in February 2003.

The arrest sent shock waves through Serbia’s criminal elite - who appear to have accepted Milosevic’s arrest as a one-off that implied their own immunity - and eventually cost Djindic his life. In March 2003 Djindic was assassinated with the collaboration of Serbia’s secret services.

Djindic’s assassination, however, spurred internal reform. Following the official dissolution of Yugoslavia and its replacement by Serbia-Montenegro, the new defense minister, Boris Tadic, abolished the military commission that had been set up to help Serbian war crime suspects with their defense. And in April 2003, the new government handed former secret service chief, Jovan Stanisic, over to the tribunal.

By and large, the greatest impact of the tribunal has been in Serbia. Both Croatia and the Bosnian Serb entity have relied on voluntary surrenders that have so far yielded only two prominent indictees, Blaskic from Croatia and Plavsic from Bosnia. In April 2003, Bosnian Serb commander Dragan Obrenovic, accused of the murder of thousands of Muslim civilians during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, was arrested by SFOR troops, but Karadzic and Mladic still remain at liberty.

The arrest of four former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in February 2003, accused of committing war crimes against Serb and Albanian civilians during the 1998-99 conflict aroused widespread anger against the UN Mission in Kosovo.

The tribunal is, thus, still a considerable way from its goal of punishing the individuals responsible for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, and removing the collective guilt that is otherwise foisted upon its different ethnic communities.

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Chapter Contents
			The Balkans Stabilization & Reconstruction
		·	The Dayton Implementation Process
		·	The UN Mission in Kosovo
		·	The War Crimes Tribunal
		·	NATO's Role in Macedonia
		·	The Balkans Stability Pact

Related Texts
·	Tribunal Indictments