A vice president of Congo is in custody. Former leaders of Cambodia are in the dock. And the once all-powerful president of Yugoslavia died in a jail cell. The current president of Sudan Hassan Omar el-Bashir is under indictment, accused of ethnic slaughter in Sudan's Darfur non Muslims and crimes against humanity. Bashir could become the first sitting head of state to be charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC). All these seemed so impossible just 15 years ago.
The arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the accused architect of Bosnia's bloody four-year war and of Europe's first genocide since the Holocaust, highlights the long and winding path of international justice. It's a tale of successes along with many teething pains. Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war, evaded arrest for 13 years after he was indicted for the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the U.N declared safe zone of Srebrenica in 1995. Since the creation in 1993 of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a confusing array of war crimes courts have cluttered the legal landscape, all with the declared purpose of punishing the leaders, instigators and planners of mass crime in times of conflict.
