DAVID ROHDE
The arrest of Radovan Karadzic on Monday gave badly needed credibility to international war crimes tribunals that have struggled for years to bring fugitives to justice. And the arrest bolstered arguments from tribunal officials that patience, multilateral diplomacy and creativity can make the institutions more effective. ''It's building up piece by piece,'' said Martha Minow, a law professor at Harvard and an expert on war crimes trials. ''This is building up the legitimacy of these institutions.''
Karadzic will be the third high-profile figure to be brought before a UN-backed tribunal on war crimes charges in the last six years, following in the footsteps of president Charles Taylor of Liberia and the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.
For years, supporters of the tribunals have argued that if leaders were brought to trial the courts could serve as a deterrent.
But Karadzic, who remained free for nearly 13 years, made a mockery of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which in 1993 became the first such body established by the United Nations.
Although repeatedly seen in public when American and Nato forces entered Bosnia in 1996, he was not arrested, in part out of fear that seizing him could cause a violent backlash against Nato forces.
Instead, the United States and the European Union tried to use economic and diplomatic pressure on Serbia to force his arrest. Until Monday, the policy appeared to be a failure.
At the same time, other war crimes tribunals established by the UN came under fire. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was criticised by Rwandans as being hugely expensive, based outside Rwanda and largely detached from the country itself. And the establishment of the International Criminal Court _ a permanent tribunal intended to prosecute war crimes globally _ was delayed for years by tortuous negotiations and fierce opposition from the Bush administration. Only last week, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court was criticised for requesting that genocide charges be filed against President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan. Critics warned that the move would complicate peace negotiations for the Darfur region of Sudan and never lead to Mr Bashir's arrest, given the international community's poor track record on arresting fugitives. After Karadzic's arrest, legal experts said his capture brings subtle new pressure to bear on the Sudanese leader.
''When Karadzic was indicted back in 1995, nobody really expected he'd ever actually get arrested,'' said Gary Bass, author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals. ''It's not clear how exactly Bashir could wind up in The Hague, but the Karadzic example has got to make Bashir think hard.''
Privately, officials from the war crimes tribunals have argued that the US and its allies have lacked the political will to make arrests and at the same time failed to use a complex array of diplomatic and economic measures to bring fugitives to justice. The international community has more options than either using military force to arrest a fugitive or doing nothing, they say. Economic sanctions, indictments and travel restrictions all place small but steady pressure on individuals accused of war crimes and on their patrons. Undermining a leader's or regime's legitimacy can also serve as leverage.
Critics point out that the tribunals' track records have, until now, been poor. Karadzic's arrest now does not make up for more than a decade of successful defiance. The amount of time it took to pressure Serbia to arrest Karadzic shows how easy it is for states to defy and divide the international community.
For years, many of survivors of the 1995 massacres in Srebrenica _ for which Karadzic was indicted on genocide charges _ mocked the Yugoslavia tribunal as a toothless and expensive show put on by the international community. They said the court, which is based in the Netherlands and has an annual budget of $150 million, would remain a multimillion-dollar failure until Karadzic and his military commander and co-defendant, General Ratko Mladic, were arrested.
Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist who served as the Yugoslavia tribunal's first chief prosecutor and indicted Karadzic in 1995, said it was critical that Serbian officials also arrest Mladic, who remains free and is believed to be hiding in Serbia as well.
Human rights groups said the arrest of Karadzic had the potential to significantly bolster the clout of the long-maligned tribunals. Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Programme, said that Karadzic had come to ''personify impunity''.
''For international justice, this is a very good thing,'' he said. ''I think it validates that justice has a long memory and a long reach.'' NYT
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