Yugoslavia: Witness to the genocide

AT 10AM on Tuesday, history will be made when Yugoslavia's fallen president stands in the dock to face justice before the international war crimes tribunal.

Slobodan Milosevic is the first former head of governmentto have been arrested for war crimes since General Hideki Tojo, the Japanese prime minister at the end of the second war world war.

Prosecutors have long wanted to assign blame to Milosevic for the most heinous crimes committed in Europe since the Nazis. They were prevented from doing so when, for a while, Milosevic appeared to have metamorphosed into a peacemaker, wooed by by the West in the run-up to the Dayton accord of 1995, which ended the wars in Bosnia and Croatia.

Milosevic has so far been indicted only for crimes against humanity in Kosovo. As the province is part of Serbia, establishing the chain of command to Milosevic was relatively straightforward.

Huge rejoicing is expected to greet the announcement of similar charges over crimes committed in Bosnia and Croatia. The human rights abuses that accompanied the Serbs' takeover of 70% of Bosnia and the killing of 200,000 Muslims and Croats which began in early 1992 dwarf anything seen in Europe since Hitler. It is clear that Milosevic, who had prime responsibility, is now unlikely to go unpunished.

Fire-gutted villages; dead women and children scattered in fields; a soldier sobbing and leaning for support against a tree as he finds a piece of his mother's clothing in the mud and realises the bones in the mass grave are hers; the sallow-faced women who trekked out of the fallen United Nations "safe haven" of Srebrenica, leaving their menfolk to be slaughtered behind - miserable ragged shapes clutching babies and young children, tearful, dehydrated, hungry. These are the sights from the Balkan wars that I do not wish to see again.

For those who lost loved ones in the conflicts, the sense of sorrow is still overwhelming; it is too early to dream the nightmare away. But last Thursday night many people in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo cheered and wept when they heard that Milosevic, the man who plunged the Balkans into a decade of carnage, had been flown to the Hague.

Prosecutors are close to making the vital link connecting him to atrocities by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces under the late warlord, Arkan, and by the Bosnian Serb army of General Ratko Mladic. Arkan's Tigers slit throats, strangled and shot their victims in a campaign of terror across Bosnia. He was a friend of Milosevic and his paramilitaries came under the responsibility of the secret police.

The network of Serbian-run concentration camps around Prijedor in northwest Bosnia, where the Serbs first carried out ethnic cleansing in 1992, may also lead to charges against Milosevic.

He has denied responsibility for the camps, insisting that the federal Yugoslav army in Serbia was never involved in the Bosnian war or its atrocities. But the truth is that the federal army played a key role in operating the camps.

At the Kereterm tile factory, terrible crimes were committed. Men were kept jammed so tightly into rooms that they often could not sit or lie down. They were forced to wade through sewage to reach overflowing, filthy toilets. They were beaten regularly with metal bars and rifle butts.

In one massacre Serbs fired machineguns repeatedly into a room packed with prisoners, killing 150-180 men and wounding dozens more.

"When the machineguns opened up, like shooting fish in a barrel, the results were particularly gruesome," said a tribunal prosecutor. "The carnage continued for hours. The bodies of many of the victims were literally shot to pieces."

Those of us who reported on the war came across horror stories like this from every corner of Bosnia. Nothing, however, surpasses the horror of Srebrenica's fall in 1995, to which Milosevic is likely to be linked because the Yugoslav army and Serbian police sent troops to assist Mladic in his assault on the UN enclave.

In the space of a few days, thousands of men were slaughtered, women were raped and children orphaned. Many of the dead were brutally killed, not because of what they had done but for who they were.

The Balkans have had an almost limitless capacity to horrify in the past decade, and establishing the truth about what happened is essential to the creation of a lasting peace.

The Hague tribunal - and the court set up to try to punish those responsible for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which 800,000 people were butchered in three months - represent important steps in the annals of man's savagery to man. Not since the Nuremberg trials of Nazis in 1945-46 has there been such a systematic international effort to document crimes against humanity and bring those guilty to justice.

Nuremberg showed that there are always people who escape punishment. The Nato-led peacekeeping force in Bosnia has arrested a lot of war criminals but has singularly avoided aggressively pursuing either Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, or Mladic.

Nevertheless, much progress has been made with the arrest of Milosevic. Across the Balkans today, the desperately sad exhumation of mass graves continues - an item of clothing here, a cranium or hand exposed there. The efforts being made are huge. War crimes do not become obsolete with time, and the Hague and Rwanda tribunals are intended to pave the way for a permanent world court to deal with gross breaches of international law.

Milosevic's arrest increases the possibility that future dictators may, like him, end up in the dock for their crimes. He will not be able to insist any culpability was the result of obeying orders. He was for a decade the top man in the Balkans. The buck has to stop with him.

With his arrest, justice has come to the Balkans. Sadly it come too late for many. Almost exactly six years ago this month, a young Muslim woman called Ferida hanged herself from a tree in a field at the UN base at Tuzla after her husband was murdered in the enclave.

The picture of her swinging from a noose made out of her belt and shawl symbolised the despair of the war. Ferida's children are 16 and 20 now. This week the man who blighted their lives will stand in the dock in the Hague. But until Mladic and Karadzic answer for their crimes, the healing process will not be complete.