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AMSTERDAM — The former president of Liberia is on trial. A vice president of Congo is in custody. The former leaders of Cambodia are in the dock. And a key figure in the Bosnia war is now in custody.
It all seemed impossible 15 years ago, when the creation of the first war crimes tribunal since World War II was being discussed.
The arrest Monday of Radovan Karadzic, the alleged architect of Bosnia's bloody 1992-95 war and of Europe's first genocide since the Holocaust, highlights the long path to create a system of international justice, with its successes and its many teething problems.
Karadzic, the leader of Bosnian Serbs during the war, evaded arrest for 13 years after he was indicted for the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the U.N.-declared safe zone of Srebrenica in 1995 and other alleged atrocities.
Since the creation in 1993 of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, an array of war crimes courts have sprung up, all with the declared purpose of punishing the leaders, instigators and planners of mass crime in times of conflict.
Dozens of people, mainly ethnic Serbs from the former Yugoslavia and Hutus from Rwanda, have been convicted.
In the process, the courts have refined international law.
Heads of state are no longer immune. General amnesties are no longer accepted unquestioned. Using children in war is outlawed. Rape has been defined as a weapon of war, and abusing women or forcing them into marriage are punishable crimes. Looting and plunder — the age-old prize for warriors — adds prison time.
"The cornerstone has been laid for another 100 years worth of jurisprudence, which has faced down this beast of impunity that has nibbled on the edges of civilization for a century," said David Crane, a law professor at Syracuse University and the then-U.N. prosecutor who indicted former Liberian President Charles Taylor for his role in West Africa's upheavals.
The threat of prosecution also is meant to deter others. That goal has been met, with measured success.
Michael Scharf was working for the State Department during the debate over creation of the Yugoslav tribunal by the U.N. Security Council. He says most of his colleagues believed it would be a symbolic court that pursued only low-ranking officials and soldiers.
"People are really beginning to think of these tribunals as an effective deterrent. That is just now happening," said Scharf, director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University.
Ethnic slaughter still rages in Sudan's Darfur region and Congo, and conflicts continue in a dozen other places — from Iraq to Sri Lanka to Colombia to the Middle East.
But both Scharf and Crane believe the risk of prosecution was a factor that prompted a settlement in Kenya's election crisis this year and in the promise by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to end a campaign of violence against his political opponents.
"Mugabe is hearing the footsteps behind him," said Crane.
The tribunals are still in development.
Judges presiding at the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic allowed him to manipulate and delay the proceedings — until he dropped dead in his jail cell of a heart attack in his trial's fifth year in 2006.
The case against former Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, the first to go before the new International Criminal Court, was on the verge of collapse because of contradicting rules that let the prosecutor keep some evidence confidential while also requiring that he turn over all material that could help the defense. The judges are working on a compromise that will allow the trial to begin.
But the most serious flaw in the tribunals is outside the courtroom: They may be instruments of justice, but they are creatures of politics.
The long delay in arresting Karadzic and his top military commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, who is still a fugitive, is largely seen as a deliberate political act by the Serbian government.
"There is a change of political will" in Belgrade, said Florence Hartmann, the longtime aide of former Yugoslav tribunal prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.
Karadzic's arrest came only after the previous government was ousted in elections. "Europe has changed its mind and convinced Belgrade that it was the best way to go, and I think together they have made a big step," Hartmann said.
Africa provides more illustrations. Leaders on the continent barely criticized the killings and beatings during Zimbabwe's disputed elections and refused to call Mugabe to account. Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir was defended by his peers after the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court linked him to genocide in Darfur and asked for his arrest.
"It always boils down to politics," Crane said. "The legal aspects may be relatively clear, but turning over senior government officials or a head of state is purely a political decision."
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Associated Press writer Gaelle Faure in Paris contributed to this report.
