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No court has indicted Simatovic, and as recently as last month, he was still somewhere within Serbia's labyrinthine Ministry of Interior. But that doesn't make war-crimes-tribunal investigators any less eager to investigate him and his unit. Noted an investigator from the Hague: "Frenki's boys are a direct link between Slobodan Milosevic and war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo."
Simatovic is one of dozens of principal coordinators of the bloody wars of the 1990s who remain comfortably at large in Serbia. Their continued freedom underscores the challenges and risks facing those who would bring key Serbian perpetrators of the Balkan wars to justice. While the world awaits the arrest of Milosevic--expected almost any day now--his detention will not be the watershed that international prosecutors hoped for. Despite his indictment by the international war-crimes tribunal in the Hague, he will be tried in Belgrade, most probably for abuse of office and other misdeeds rather than for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and elsewhere. This is not a minor distinction. Local trials do not address responsibility for the worst crimes committed in Europe since World War II, and hence they undermine the landmark U.N.-led effort to hold war criminals accountable under international law regardless of nationality.
And the problem runs deeper than Milosevic. Beneath him and his immediate cronies lies a complex web of officials and erstwhile thugs who are escaping scrutiny for war crimes simply by hewing to the law at home. Some are still pulling the levers of power. The real job of bringing Serbian war criminals to justice has not even begun.
TIME recently spoke to a former Red Beret, now in hiding, who described joining the unit just before it overran his hometown of Mostar in southeastern Bosnia on a cool fall day in 1991: "They took about a hundred Muslim and Croat civilians--men and women--from a shelter and lined them up on the banks of the Neretva River," recalled the heavily scarred Bosnian Serb, now 28. "Standing on the other side, I watched as five of the Red Berets executed them all. Some were shot; others they knifed or bludgeoned with rifle butts as they screamed for mercy. It lasted for about half an hour. Eventually, an excavator came to bury the bodies." Later, he described a visit by Frenki to their camp. "He was wearing sharp civilian clothes and had longish hair and expensive-looking sunglasses. He said that he came as a representative of the state of Serbia and that we were 'Serbian knights,' shock troops in a war against Serbia's enemies, and that the fate of all Serbs depended on us."
Some 200,000 people were killed in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, most of them in Bosnia. No one knows how many died as a result of atrocities. Nor is it known how many of the tens of thousands of Serbs who fought knowingly participated in war crimes, though hundreds certainly did. So far, the war-crimes tribunal in the Hague has indicted 49 Serbs from throughout the former Yugoslavia, 15 of whom are now thought to be at large in Serbia.