Champagne on hold until big fish served up

Tuesday April 4, 2000

No one was breaking out the champagne at the Hague war crimes tribunal yesterday, but Nato's capture of Momcilo Krajisnik is a real achievement that will raise hopes that the big fish of Bosnia's war may finally face justice.

Mr Krajisnik, the former right-hand man to Radovan Karadzic - who is still at large - is the most senior suspect to face the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia nearly seven years after it was set up.

But his arrest is only the latest in a string of successes which has focused attention on the former insurance company premises in a leafy suburb of the Dutch capital - and hugely bolstered the reputation of the UN court.

In courtroom number one, flanked by guards in blue UN uniform and facing judges from Portugal, Egypt and the US, the Bosnian Serb general Radislav Kirstic is in the fourth week of his trial.

Gen Kirstic, seized in December 1998, is accused of genocide for his part in the Srebrenica massacre, when 7,500 Bosnian Muslims were systematically killed in July 1995 - in a UN "safe area" - in Europe's worst atrocity since the Holocaust.

Two other generals held responsible for the brutal Serb siege of Sarajevo, Momir Talic and Stanislav Galic, are also in custody. But their commander, Ratko Mladic, was seen recently at a Yugoslavia-China soccer game in Belgrade.

Next door to Gen Kirstic, three low-ranking Serb soldiers from the once-idyllic Drina valley town of Foca are facing unprecedented charges of crimes against humanity for serial gang-rape, torture and sexual enslavement.

The prosecution says these men and their appalling personal brutality made possible the larger project of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia's three-and-a-half year war.

Not only Serbs are facing justice. Croatia, newly embarked on the path of democracy, has just handed over the ailing warlord Mladen Naletelic, accused of murder and torture in Mostar. A few days before the tribunal passed a 45-year sentence on another Bosnian Croat, General Tihomir Blaskic.

In all, 39 people are being held in the Dutch prison nearby at Scheveningen.

Yet if these are exciting times for the tribunal, too little happened for too long, largely because Balkan governments ignored their obligations under the Dayton peace accords and international law.

The recent successes are attributed to the practice of issuing sealed indictments, under which an investigation is mounted and evidence submitted to one of the court's 14 judges, who then accepts a prosecution request for non-disclosure.

Pioneered by the Canadian prosecutor Louise Arbour, this method reaped rewards after the first Nato snatch operation in July 1997. The tribunal was helped by the fact that governments, in cluding Britain's newly-elected Labour one, started to hand over classified intelligence, such as communications intercepts.

Croatia's cooperation is one highly significant improvement, but recently even the justice minister of Republika Srpksa visited the Hague.

But it is not clear - in the light of the Kosovo atrocities before Nato's intervention - that there has been much of a deterrent effect.

"Getting hold of Krajisnik makes this a very good day for us," the tribunal spokesman, Jim Landale, said last night.

"But we still haven't landed any of the very biggest fish. Maybe when we get them we'll break out the champagne."