"As if nothing happened." --WALL GRAFFITO IN BELGRADE
Even war has its rules. Slobodan Miljkovic, called "Lugar"--the Gamekeeper--would not have been thinking about that when, as eyewitnesses allege, he had 50 Croat and Muslim Bosnian civilians lined up against a wall and took part in shooting 16 of them, when he sliced an old man's throat with a broken chair, when he clubbed and shot another Bosnian man to death, or when he savagely beat a Croat priest and five others with a police baton, a metal wrench and a car jack. From April 17 until Nov. 20, 1992, the witnesses say, Lugar terrorized thousands of non-Serb residents of Bosanski Samac in northern Bosnia until they either fled or died. He stopped only when Bosnian Serb authorities jailed him--unjustly, he huffs--for torturing 11 Serb allies and killing one in a quarrel over loot. Lugar, 34, claims he did not do anything wrong. "I was just a military policeman," he tells TIME, "carrying out normal duties."
For such "normal duties" Lugar has been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at the Hague, charged with crimes against humanity. Dozens of witnesses say he committed terrible acts as platoon leader of a Serbian paramilitary unit known as the Gray Wolves. Yet today Lugar is free, if not living particularly well, back home in Kragujevac, a grimy industrial city 60 miles southeast of Belgrade.
Six months after the U.S.-brokered Dayton accord said war criminals would be arrested and tried at the Hague, hundreds of Balkan triggermen who carried out atrocities and scores of high-ranking apparatchiks and politicians who ordered the genocide go about their lives as if nothing has happened. National leaders who presided over the savagery remain in power, including the indicted ringleaders of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Only three of the 57 accused war criminals formally charged--46 Serbs, eight Croats, three Muslims--are in custody in the Hague, though the Bosnian government just arrested two of the Muslims and plans to hand them over this week. It could take years to prosecute even a handful of the suspects.
As it has taken months for the first trial to begin. Dusan Tadic, a Serb accused of abusing and murdering some of the 3,000 civilians at Omarska camp, finally goes before the court this week after delays caused, his lawyers say, by the Serb government repeatedly hindering efforts to collect evidence and interview witnesses.
Bosnia's victims, Muslim, Croat and Serb alike, plead that there can never be lasting peace in the Balkans if individuals who raped and pillaged and slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians are not brought to judgment. But the obstacles are formidable. Despite a recent show of cooperation from Croatia's Franjo Tudjman and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, the two Presidents have largely stonewalled the tribunal. Both have deeply vested interests in preventing investigations and trials that could incriminate their political apparatus or themselves. Western powers sit down and do business with them because both men are needed to make the fragile Dayton agreement work.