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The three-year-old Hague tribunal is hampered by a shortage of funds and staff. Watertight legal cases are difficult to construct, and no one has uncovered the kind of paperwork that helped convict Nazi offenders at Nuremberg. Most of the suspects remain safe from arrest at home, and NATO's Implementation Force in Bosnia is resolute against mission creep that might ask its soldiers to hunt them down. "Oh, we hope for justice," says Alija Dedajic, a survivor of Sarajevo, "but we do not believe in it."
So almost all the men suspected of perpetrating the most barbaric acts in Europe since World War II remain at large. To learn more about who they are, how they live and how they answer the charges against them, TIME tracked some of them down. Of course each one denies he is guilty, but long conversations with them provide a glimpse into the minds of men who may have been responsible for Bosnia's atrocities. By some of their accounts, the trail of culpability leads directly to Milosevic, the man the U.S. is relying on most to make the peace hold.
Lugar looks ready to bolt as he steps into a dingy workingman's cafe in Kragujevac. The man who helped arrange the meeting, a shark-faced lawyer in a purple suit, nods in reassurance, but Lugar stares truculently at two TIME journalists, unsure if we are who we say we are. His jacket stretches tightly across his burly chest, barely hiding a bulletproof vest; he keeps a hand on a briefcase that contains a pistol. He has good reason to take precautions. Since he returned from Bosnia, he has been shot at twice, bashed with an iron bar and slammed with a shovel; he has been repeatedly arrested for petty crimes and is fighting a long prison sentence for extortion. He suspects everyone: Bosnians out for vengeance, NATO forces who he fears will deliver him to the Hague, Serb secret police determined to hush him up. "There are so many refugees, agents, spies," he says. "I'm just an easy target."
While Lugar stares at his hands, the lawyer pitches a tale of innocent patriotism at odds with the cold, brawler's face of his client: how a good-hearted truck driver trying to make ends meet for a wife, two daughters, a sick mother, six cats and two parrots, gave up everything to defend his brother Serbs in Bosnia; how he never did anything but "stand guard" and "carry out ordinary military orders"; how in return for risking his life, he is broke and jobless, his children are shunned and his own government is trying to make him a scapegoat. "I didn't go there to kill other people's kids," says Lugar, "but to defend kids just like my own from our enemies."