War crime chief Arbour resigns

LOUISE ARBOUR, fresh from her indictment of Slobodan Milosevic as a war criminal, resigned on Thursday from the International War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia to return to her native Canada.

The tough-minded chief prosecutor, who will sit in Canada's Supreme Court, won praise for her insistence that the tribunal, established in the Hague in 1993, must actively pursue perpetrators of atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and bring them to justice.

Under her term of office since 1996, key figures suspected of carrying out grisly massacres of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the Serb-run detention centres in northern Bosnia were snatched by peacekeepers and flown to the Netherlands.

Another catch was Slavko Dokmanovic, ex-mayor of the eastern Croat town of Vukovar, accused of presiding over the killing of Croat hospital patients when the town fell to the Serbs in November 1991.

Ms Arbour, 52, indicted Mr Milosevic for the murder of 340 Kosovars and the forced expulsion of 700,000 others.