Commanders in Court

When war crimes investigators came to the town of Pilica in eastern Bosnia in the autumn of 1996, they knew what they were looking for. Witnesses had told them that on July 16, 1995, Muslim men and boys from the nearby Muslim enclave of Srebrenica had been executed at Pilica's cultural center by units of the Bosnian Serb Army's Drina Corps. Not surprisingly, by the time the investigators arrived, workers at a small telephone exchange housed in the building had conveniently forgotten that it had ever been a cultural center, let alone the site of mass murder.

But behind doors and windows sealed off in badly finished concrete, the investigators found the old movie theater they knew was there. They found the shell casings on the floor of the projection booth. In the cursorily cleaned hall, where some 500 Muslim men and boys were allegedly held, they found blood, hair and skin remnants from the victims staining the walls. They found the biggest blood stains in the crawl space underneath the stage, where desperate captives tried in vain to escape the firestorm of bullets and grenades issuing from the projection slots. And they found a few identification papers, including those of one Ahmet Mujic, born June 5, 1923, and presumably dead on July 16, 1995.

Last week investigator Jean-Rene Ruez coolly laid out this evidence and much more, methodically documented with photos and artless video tapes, as he testified for the prosecution at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. At issue is the most notorious war crime in Europe since World War II: the deportation and mass murder that followed when Serb troops overran the United Nations "safe area" of Srebrenica. "This is a case about the triumph of evil," said prosecutor Mark Harmon; its perpetrators "stained the reputation of the Serbian people" and "shattered the lives of generations of Bosnians."

The defendant, General Radislav Krstic, 52, who was promoted from chief of staff to commander of the Drina Corps of the Army of the Republika Srpska in July 1995, stands accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the customs of war for his command responsibilities over the troops alleged to have done the killing. He has pleaded not guilty. Gaunt and spent, he sat blinking impassively as he watched the prosecution videos: the rows of blindfolds investigators found in a garbage dump near a killing field outside the village of Lazete; the human bones left behind on a dam embankment near Petkovci, where the prosecution alleges hundreds were killed on July 14, 1995.

Earlier this month Croat General Tihomir Blaskic was sentenced to 45 years in prison--the most severe sentence yet meted out--for his command responsibilities during the murderous assault on Muslim civilians in central Bosnia in April 1993. The new Croatian government, though eager to improve relations with the West, has criticized the sentence as too harsh and is stalling its promised extradition of Mladen Naletelic, indicted for his alleged role in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Mostar.

With two generals in the dock in a single month, the Tribunal has reached a level of effectiveness few would have expected in 1993, when the court was established by the United Nations. Since rendering its first judgment in May 1997, it has sentenced 14 individuals and acquitted two others; appeals are pending. And slowly but surely, the Tribunal has inched up the chain of command.

If Krstic is a symbol of how far the Tribunal has come in that process, he is also a sobering reminder of its limitations. For at Krstic's side in Srebrenica on the evening of July 11, when more than 20,000 Muslim refugees were vainly seeking protection at a U.N. compound, was General Ratko Mladic, overall commander of the Bosnian Serb Army. He and his wartime political boss, Bosnian Serb President Radovan Karadzic, were both publicly indicted for their role in the Srebrenica massacre in November 1995. Both are thought to have been living in eastern Bosnia since then, but SFOR troops charged with arresting them have assiduously avoided the physically dangerous and politically sticky job of nabbing them.

"It's unbelievable that the might of the superpowers of this world can't track down these individuals," says Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor at the Tribunal. The recent U.S. initiative to post wanted posters in Bosnia offering $5 million rewards for the capture of Mladic, Karadzic and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, indicted last year for crimes against humanity in Kosovo, reaps no praise from Blewitt. "It's meant to show something to be done rather than doing it," he says.

There are 16 defendants in custody in the Hague still awaiting their first appearances before the court. Proceedings open this week against three Bosnian Serbs accused of enslaving women in the town of Foca and subjecting them to repeated sexual assault. The Tribunal will set important precedents in international law, and no doubt new defendants will be detained, some from Kosovo. But prosecutors in the Hague are most rankled by the shadow of the absent--Mladic and Karadzic. Until they answer the charges against them, the central piece will be missing from the vexing puzzle of forging peace and justice in the Balkans.

With reporting by Dejan Anastasijevic/Vienna and Lauren Comiteau/the Hague