War Criminals: World's policemen let Bosnia's worst killers walk free

The map on this page, published today by the independent monitoring group Human Rights Watch, graphically illustrates the West's failure in Bosnia. Nato knows the location of over 40 men wanted on war crimes charges, but the S-For peacekeepers have attempted just two arrests since the end of the war. Andrew Gumbel reports on the West's unfinished business in the Balkans.

In the swirling cauldron of rumours, conspiracy theories, whispers and lies that bubble away in Bosnia, no hot tip has surfaced so frequently, or so insistently, as the story of Radovan Karadzic's imminent arrest. Back in July, it was said the former Bosnian Serb president was so scared of being betrayed that he had replaced his entire 50-strong personal bodyguard.

In August, word spread that a commando unit had actually set up a raid on his headquarters in Pale, in the mountains above Sarajevo, but that something went wrong at the last moment. The rumours have intensified since. "He'll be arrested before the onset of winter," they said at one point. "Wait until the Bosnian Serb elections are out of the way, and then you'll see the international community snap into action," is the favoured theory at the moment.

The fact is that Mr Karadzic remains at large, barred from public office but still able to manipulate his political and business interests from behind the scenes. Free, too, are many of his former associates accused of setting up concentration camps and massacring Muslim civilians in their hundreds and thousands - some of them living openly in eastern Bosnia . And free, as well, are a clutch of Muslims and Bosnian Croats who appear on the indictment list issued by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague but whose names have elicited little interest from the international community or the Western media.

What the Human Rights Watch map illustrates is that many of the suspects live within a stone's throw of S-For bases. True, S-For's mandate insists that indictees should be arrested only if encountered in the course of normal duties, but testimony from several different sources suggests such encounters are frequent and even, on occasion, downright chummy. "The map shows that Nato's failure to arrest has nothing to do with its inability to locate indicted persons," said Human Rights Watch spokeswoman Holly Cartner. "It's a grievous failure of political will."

Western officials on the ground argue privately that the issue is more complicated than neglect or lack of nerve. Bosnia, they say, is not a country where Western notions of independent justice stand much chance of being understood, and any arrest is bound to be interpreted as a political act, even if it is not meant that way. The international community has responded in kind, using arrests or the threat of them as a means to achieving progress on other fronts, such as media freedom or dialogue between the former warring factions.

The problem with such an approach is that it confirms the suspicion of Bosnian Serb nationalists that the Hague tribunal is an international conspiracy. And it also risks deferring arrests almost indefinitely. In July, S-For arrested one suspect and killed another in the northern town of Prijedor, but nothing similar has materialised since. According to some sources, Mr Karadzic's arrest was deferred during the summer because of the impending local elections. Then the moment of truth was put off again while international negotiators installed a multi-ethnic council in the disputed town of Brcko. This weekend's Bosnian Serb parliamentary elections and next month's presidential poll may prove to be further excuses.

All this might be fine if arresting war criminals was merely a matter of honour, but there are stronger reasons to act quickly. Many of the worst Bosnian Serb offenders are part of a huge smuggling and extortion racket run by Mr Karadzic and his associates. Prospects for injecting a modicum of democratic pluralism into Serb-held Bosnia depend in part on dismantling this structure and rounding up the ring-leaders.

All sides in Bosnia need to face up to the horror of what happened if they are to soften the nationalist policies which created the conflict in the first place. And there has been progress recently, in spite of S-For's inaction. Some Serb and Croat militia members have recently confessed to horrifying crimes and willingly given themselves up to local courts. And an independent magazine in Sarajevo, Dani, has published detailed reports of murders carried out by Muslim militias against Serb civilians.

Tribunal ready to act

The Hague: The United Nations war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia, created four years ago, is at last fully operational and able to concentrate on prosecutions, the outgoing president Antonio Cassese said yesterday. Addressing international dignitaries, at the swearing in of five new judges, Mr Cassese said the new tribunal heralded the end of a time when people responsible for horrendous crimes went unpunished. "During the next four years, our tribunal will focus on the task of prosecuting the accused," he said.

Vukovar on alert after blasts

Zagreb: Police in the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar, which fell to Serb forces six years ago, have increased security following two bombings and other incidents at the weekend, a UN spokesman said. The bombings, at a school and a municipal building, caused damage but no casualties. After Croatia's secession from Yugoslavia, local Serbs backed by the Yugoslav People's Army took the town on 18 November 1991. The surrounding area has been administered by the UN since January 1996 but is due to be reintegrated into Croatia next year.