Since its creation by the UN Security Council in 1993, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has indicted 162 people, ranging from political and military leaders to low-level fighters. Unquestionably the most prominent of these was the former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Described by the Tribunal’s Chief Prosecutor as the key figure in the ten years of war that consumed the former Yugoslavia, Milosevic was voted out of office and then handed over to The Hague in June 2001 to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. But the trial of the former strongman of Belgrade, which began in February 2002, was cut short. Milosevic was found dead in his prison cell on March 12, 2006, and thus remains legally innocent. As for his counterparts, the former Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and the Bosnian Alija Izetbegovic are both dead and beyond the reach of any possible indictment.

Over the course of ten years of proceedings, the Office of the Prosecutor has constructed a detailed but partial picture of the policy of ethnic cleansing that swept across the former Yugoslavia. One of the most significant moments was the admission of responsibility by the “Iron Lady” of the Bosnian Serbs, the former President of the Bosnian Serb Republic Biljana Plavsic. In December 2003 Plavsic pleaded guilty after having surrendered to the tribunal. She publicly acknowledged that there had been a plan of ethnic cleansing and charged Slobodan Milosevic with having been its principal architect. But her apparent change of heart remained tainted by nationalist political considerations. At the tribunal she admitted that she had given herself up to prevent the Serbian people from continuing to pay the price of the conflict.

Following in Plavsic’s footsteps, several people involved in the Srebrenica massacre—which the tribunal ruled to be an act of genocide—admitted their responsibility. But despite these confessions, a large part of the Serbian population continued to reject the tribunal’s legitimacy. In June 2005, a video recording of the execution of a group of young men by Serb paramilitaries was shown during the Milosevic trial. Rebroadcast in Serbia, this piece of evidence provoked much debate, but did not in the end really alter public perceptions about Serbia’s role in the Balkan wars. The Tribunal also condemned the policy of ethnic cleansing in serveral trials of the directors or guards at the prison camps of Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje, where many thousands of non-Serbs were held in appalling conditions.

On the Croatian side, several military leaders were charged and convicted, but the problems the tribunal experienced in attempting to get hold of General Ante Gotovina, who had recaptured the Krajina region of Croatia from the Serbs during “Operation Storm,” and who is still regarded as a hero by many Croatians, suggested the country is not yet ready to confront its past. This impression was reinforced after Gotovina’s arrest in December 2005, when it became clear that Zagreb would support his defense in court. Croatia refuses to give credence to the prosecutor’s contention that it was guilty of the same policy for which it believes Belgrade to have been responsible: ethnic cleansing.

As for the Bosnian Muslim army, the prosecutor indicted its former chief of staff General Rasim Delic for murder, cruel treatment and rape by forces under his command, prompting protests in Sarajevo where he is seen as having inherited the mantle of Izetbegovic. Several officers in the Bosnian Muslim army have also been convicted, and their trials shed some preliminary light on the place of the mujahidin in the fledgling army. Finally, the first trial of members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) has also taken place, ending in two acquittals and one guilty verdict. At the beginning of March 2005, the Prime Minister of Kosovo and former member of the KLA Ramush Haradinaj was finally indicted by the tribunal’s current Chief Prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, despite political pressure against the move.

Without its own police force, forced to rely on the cooperation of States, the tribunal has for ten years struggled to gain custody of and bring to trial the people who have been indicted. During the tribunal’s early years NATO was reluctant to take any steps against indicted suspects who remained at large in Bosnian territory, though it has since arrested 29 people.

Incorporated in the Dayton peace agreement as one of the tools of reconciliation, the tribunal has brought more than 3600 witnesses to the stand. These “unrecognized heroes of international justice” have testified to “leave their mark in the history of humanity,” a history “that must be written with several hands” as Carla del Ponte put it in opening the Milosevic trial. “This tribunal will for its part only write one chapter—the most bloody and distressing, that of individual responsibility for those who commit grave breaches of international humanitarian law,” she added.

But after September 11 the international community appeared suddenly to lose interest in the tribunal. Because of financial pressures, states imposed a fixed timetable on the court, which was firmly instructed to wrap up all of its cases by 2010. Courts in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia were invited to take over the responsibility of trying those responsible for war crimes. The Prosecutor’s Office in the Hague has transferred more than 900 cases to the Bosnian special court. For the Prosecutor, the mission of the tribunal remains only partly fulfilled, since the political and military leaders of the Bosnian Serbs have not stood trial. Accused of responsibility for the massacre of Srebrenica and the three-and-a-half year siege of Sarajevo, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic have escaped justice for over ten years.