Graham Blewitt--with 29 years' experience as a federal prosecutor in Australia--is not given to exaggeration or emotional outbursts. As chief of an Australian Nazi war crimes investigations unit from 1989 to 1994, Blewitt, 48, thought he knew all there was to know about genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. When he joined the new International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the Netherlands, in early 1994 as its deputy prosecutor, he thought it would just be more of the same. It wasn't.

"I still shake my head when I come across these stories of these seemingly normal people murdering their neighbors," says Blewitt in an uncharacteristically choked-up voice. "I can't imagine sitting there at a barbecue drinking a beer or two with your neighbor one day and then the next day you're murdering or treating that person in the worst way."

The fury of the neighbor-on-neighbor violence-perpetrated largely by the Bosnian Serbs against Muslims as part of a campaign of "ethnic cleansing"--is one of the mysteries of the Bosnian conflict for international spectators. Even the Nazis, Blewitt points out, killed their victims in a cold, efficient manner; rape and torture were the exception, not the rule: "But the atrocities here, this is blood lust."

This blood lust is not just about territory; it's about centuries-old hatred that has boiled over into a cycle of atrocity and revenge. What happened to the European Jews 50 years ago at the hands of the Nazis is happening to Bosnian Muslims at the hands of the Serbs right now.

For three-and-a-half years, Serbs have thumbed their noses at international attempts to resolve this war on their Muslim neighbors. The world powers have wrung their hands, their peacemaking and diplomatic efforts in the former Yugoslavia not only failing to end conventional war-making--armed soldiers killing armed soldiers on a battlefield-but failing also to deter the commission of war crimes. The Serbs, by far the biggest perpetrators, have not been forced to answer for these crimes, and so they have not.

But in November--after two-and-a-half years of battling its United Nations paymaster for funding and overcoming the nightmarish logistics of collecting evidence in a war zone--the tribunal is scheduled to try its first defendant, Bosnian Serb Dusko Tadic, in front of three judges and a worldwide television audience. 1

It may be the most important criminal trial in this century. More important than the treason trials of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and of East German spymaster Markus Wolf. More important than the Watergate trials, the Rodney King case, the Chicago Seven trial, and, yes, even O.J.

Not because the alleged crimes--132 counts related to rape, murder, and torture--are necessarily worse than those committed by the thousands of war criminals who now range freely in Tito's former domain. And not just because the case will forge new international legal precedents.

Tadic's trial will likely be the most significant criminal trial in this century because it is a chance, finally, for the world to redeem the international rule of law and prove it learned something from the horrors of World War II. Unlike Nuremberg, the Tadic trial will unfold in the middle of the war for the former Yugoslavia. While Nuremberg came too late to help the Nazis' victims, the Tadic trial and those that follow at least have a chance of deterring Serbs and others from continuing to commit war crimes.

Most of us have grown accustomed to, even bored by, that far-off conflict between Serbs and Bosnian Muslims and Croats. The daily tales of atrocities are just that--too daily, too regular to sink in. Sure, we may flinch when faced with a photograph of an injured child or a corpse. Yet we turn the page or change channels, and the images vanish. That apathy--that conclusion that war, murder, rape, even genocide are out of our control--is why the Tadic trial is so important.

The Tadic trial itself will not bring peace. That must ultimately come from the participants. But no peace will last unless the victims see that some form of justice is meted out to the perpetrators. And if the prosecutors are even half right, Dusko Tadic (pronounced DOO-shko TAH-ditch) is a perpetrator of the worst sort.

Tadic's alleged crimes make even a seasoned war crimes prosecutor like Graham Blewitt blanch. Tadic, a 39-year-old former café owner in the Prijedor opstina, or district, in northeastern Bosnia is charged with committing war crimes and crimes against humanity for the part that prosecutors say he played in 13 deaths, a rape, and several torture incidents in Bosnia and Herzegovina in May through August 1992. Among his more gruesome alleged exploits: forcing one prisoner to bite off the testicle of another, who subsequently died as a result.

Most of the allegations against Tadic--including the castration charge- -relate to his activities at the now-notorious Omarska concentration camp, where hundreds if not thousands of the Bosnian Serbs' prisoners--nearly all Bosnian Muslims, civilians and soldiers, men and women--were horribly abused and often killed by their captors. What makes Tadic's crimes even more heinous--if true--is that he was neither a commander nor a guard at the camp; he was one of what prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal call "camp visitors," outsiders who only visited the camps to participate in and direct the sadistic treatment of the prisoners--many of them their former neighbors.

Tadic has pled not guilty and claims he was not at the camps when the crimes were committed. In November, if everything goes as scheduled, the world will find out if he's telling the truth.

And if all goes as planned, those tuning in to the trial will see well- prepared advocates from both sides before experienced judges in a gleaming new courtroom--the epitome of smooth-running international justice.

But the road to Tadic has been a rocky one. As you will read, for those at the tribunal who have made the journey, who have made personal and professional sacrifices in an attempt to bring the rule of law back to Bosnia, Tadic represents the end of a tortuous two-and-a-half-year odyssey. "There's always been a great sense of urgency, [a sense] that the tribunal's future depended on getting results," says Blewitt.

END-RUNNING THE U.N.
The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is in a four-story sand-colored building in a quiet suburb of The Hague. A yellow brick drive sweeps past a reflecting pool dotted with modern sculpture, its surface mirroring the crescent-shaped tribunal building. Only a tiny sign confirms the tribunal's existence. From the outside, little activity is apparent on a midsummer's day.

Inside, it's a different story. Nine teams, each with four to seven experienced lawyers and investigators, are working furiously to put together cases and indictments. In the course of five days of interviews at the tribunal in late June, chief prosecutor Richard Goldstone and his deputy, Blewitt, are everywhere, poking their heads into offices, buttonholing people in the hallways, rushing off to strategy sessions.

With 21 indictments issued in February and March and the Tadic trial looming, the tribunal has suddenly become a factor in the Bosnian quagmire. Will the prosecutors' actions affect the peace process? Are they prolonging the war or shortening it?

The war crimes prosecutors don't care about those issues. In late July they raised the stakes even higher by indicting Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander, General Ratko Mladic, for genocide and crimes against humanity "arising from atrocities perpetrated against the civilian population throughout Bosnia- Herzegovina, for the sniping campaign against civilians in Sarajevo, and for the taking of U.N. peacekeepers as hostages and their use as human shields," according to a tribunal press release. They also indicted Croatian Serb leader Milan Martic for ordering the shelling of Croatia's capital, Zagreb; 15 guards, camp commanders, and visitors to the Luka and Keraterm concentration camps; and six local Serb politicians and paramilitary leaders for directing the ethnic cleansing of a town called Bosanski Samac.

The tribunal's spate of pretrial proceedings, indictments, and deferral proceedings appear to be the result of a coordinated, well-funded effort by the U.N. and the tribunal staff. The prosecutor is chasing, catching, and trying the bad guys, just as prosecutors do the world over.

But these recent highlights cannot obscure the tribunal's painful road to maturity. After all, the crimes with which Dusko Tadic is charged were allegedly committed in the spring and summer of 1992, three- and-a-half years ago. The U.N. and international community were well aware from press reports that summer that war crimes were being committed in the Bosnian conflict and that death camps had reappeared in Europe for the first time since 1945. From the beginning, however, the international response was anemic; it took a handful of determined people to push toward a fully operational international war crimes tribunal.

The first was law professor Cherif Bassiouni of Chicago's DePaul University. In October 1992 the U.N. Security Council established a five-member commission of experts to collect evidence of alleged atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. It was a meager start: The U.N. covered only the salary of the chairman and five staff members and the expense of traveling to the former Yugoslavia. The U.N. did not cover the enormous cost of conducting on-site investigations, and collecting and recording that evidence in a central database.

But it was a start, and Bassiouni, an international law expert who was a member of and later chaired the U.N. commission, worked tirelessly to collect evidence while it was fresh, recruiting scores of volunteers and experts lent to the commission by the governments of such countries as Canada, Norway, and the Netherlands, and private groups like Physicians for Human Rights. The governments of Austria, Germany, and Sweden interviewed dozens of refugees in those countries on behalf of the commission, and the commission itself conducted 35 field investigations.

Bassiouni says that from the beginning it was obvious to him that certain powerful member states of the U.N.--such as Great Britain and France--had no appetite to pursue war criminals. "But I found a way to end-run the pattern of delay the U.N. was engaging in," he says. When the U.N. declined his request to set up a database collection operation in Geneva, he set one up right at his own university in Chicago. When funding dried up, he drummed up more by convincing certain countries to kick in to a voluntary trust fund he says the U.N. set up at his behest.

Even at this early stage, the alleged deeds of Dusko Tadic did not escape the attention of the war crimes investigators. On October 18, 1992, Newsday published a story by Roy Gutman--one in a series that won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize--on the notorious Omarska death camp.

Among the dozens of survivors' stories Gutman recounted was one involving the castration of a man named Emir Karabasic. Prosecutors would later determine that the victim's name was Harambasic, but the facts alleged were the same. According to Tadic's February 1995 indictment, "The group of Serbs, including [Dusko] Tadic, severely beat the prisoners with various objects and kicked them on their heads and bodies. After Fikret Harambasic was beaten, two other prisoners, "G" and "H," were called out. A member of the group ordered "G" and "H" to . . . sexually mutilate Fikret Harambasic. "H" covered Fikret Harambasic's mouth to silence his screams and "G" bit off one of Fikret Harambasic's testicles. . . . Harambasic died from the attack."

Press reports were an important source of information for the commission. That castration-murder described in Newsday was entered into Bassiouni's growing database-an incident that would later be cross-referenced to dozens of others involving Tadic, a café owner and karate teacher turned alleged camp terrorist.

Tadic had become an important blip on the embryonic tribunal's radar screen.

ELEVEN JUDGES, NO PROSECUTOR
The Security Council officially established a war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia May 25, 1993, shortly after the U.N. had received the experts commission's first interim report. It took another four months for 11 judges to be confirmed by the U.N.: three from Asia, two from Europe, two from Africa, two from North America- including one of only two women on the panel, former Houston federal district judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, who will also be hearing the Tadic case--and one each from Latin America and Australia.

Italy's Antonio Cassese was elected by his fellow judges as the tribunal's president, or chief judge. He administers the chambers, including assignment of judges to cases, and is himself the head of the five-judge appeals chamber. (There are two trial chambers and one appeals chamber at the tribunal.)

Interviewed in his football field-sized office at the tribunal, Cassese, 58, is a small, expressive man who takes his job seriously. Should he lapse into lightheartedness, he has only to glance up at his walls; four large color photos depict the dead and walking wounded in the former Yugloslavia, and a fifth is of wasted, hollow-cheeked inmates at Omarska. But don't all these photos of Muslim victims give the appearance of anti-Serb bias? "No, no, no," he exclaims, his hands chopping the air for emphasis. "It doesn't matter to me what side of the conflict they are on. These are just to remind me of the job we have to do here."

When he arrived at The Hague to be inducted as a judge in November 1993, Cassese, an international law professor at the University of Florence who has written extensively on war crimes, was stunned by what he found. "There was zero!" he exclaims. "Nothing! We had four secretaries, a few computers, and the U.N. had rented a meeting room and three small offices in the Peace Palace. The rent was paid for two weeks."

Eager to fulfill his mandate, Cassese convened the first working session of the tribunal shortly after the judges' induction ceremony. He has apparently never let up. "Some of us were saying, 'Let's go slow,' " recalls U.S. tribunal judge McDonald. "But to be frank, [Cassese] wanted us to accomplish something quickly."

The criminal procedure rules were hashed out in two plenary sessions that resulted in a first draft in February 1994. (By contrast, it took a committee of American judges and law professors four years to draft the federal Rules of Criminal Procedure in the early 1940s.) Since most of the judges and the acting prosecutor were from common law countries, the code is skewed toward that adversarial model, but it has clearly defined elements from civil jurisdictions as well, such as allowing judges to call and question witnesses of their own accord.

Next, unperturbed by what had already become a fiscal tug of war with his U.N. masters, Cassese found bigger, more expensive space to house the tribunal-its prosecution office, chambers, and a courtroom. He commissioned construction of a custom-designed, state-of-the-art courtroom. An expert on detention, Cassese toured several prisons to determine the most humane, sophisticated design, then oversaw the construction of a modern 24-cell detention center for the tribunal's accused that was built in the center of a Dutch prison in The Hague, where the Dutch prison's former courtyard once was. Prisoners have their own TV, radio, and shower, but security is extremely tight. Visitors, for example, must go through first the Dutch prison's checkpoints and then the U.N.'s before reaching the cells housing suspected war criminals. By May 1994 the court had also issued comprehensive rules governing the detention of accused war criminals and the assignment of defense counsel.

"We had to invent and take a fresh approach to everything," Cassese recalls.

Despite Cassese's forceful leadership, a key component of the tribunal was still missing: a chief prosecutor. The Venezuelan who had been appointed in October 1993, Ramón Escobar-Salom, quit in February 1994 to take a position as minister of interior relations with his government-without having done any significant work as prosecutor. "I thought, 'You let us down,' " declares Cassese. "We asked him to at least recruit a deputy before he left."

WE HAVE A POPE!
Fortunately, a thousand miles away, Graham Blewitt was casting about for a new position. After 24 years as a prosecutor, Blewitt had spent the last five as the director of the Nazi war crimes investigation unit of the Australian equivalent of the FBI, known as the National Crime Authority. (The Australian government had disbanded that unit after their third prosecution wound down in late 1993.)

Blewitt remembers the chill he felt upon reading of Serbian "ethnic cleansing" in 1992. That precise term had been used by the Nazi- backed Croats in their vicious campaign against Serbs during World War II; Blewitt's war crimes investigations required him to travel to the former Yugoslavia to interview witnesses and to the Ukraine to exhume graves. Now the witnesses were young and the graves fresh. He sent a query letter to the U.N. in early 1994, interviewed with Escobar, and was offered the job of acting deputy prosecutor a few days after he returned to Australia.

When Blewitt joined the tribunal in late February 1994, "there were hundreds of applications from people volunteering their services," he says. To his chagrin, however, while there were many lawyers eager to join the tribunal as either prosecutors or investigators, few veteran investigators had applied, and they were crucial to the next stage of the tribunal's work. The massive final report of Professor Bassiouni's commission of experts was due to arrive in late April, including 68,000 pages of documentary evidence and some 300 hours of video evidence. Using that report as a "blueprint," explains Blewitt, investigators could begin to develop the tribunal's cases.

Blewitt says he started calling potential investigators throughout the world and over the next two months convinced a handful to come. Fate intervened at that point: The United States lent 22 lawyers, prosecutors, FBI agents, and other experts on its payroll directly to the tribunal for as long as they were needed. "It's worth saying that without that contribution at that time we wouldn't have started to investigate as soon as we did," says Blewitt.

Meanwhile, the U.N. Security Council continued its search for a big- name prosecutor who could lead the tribunal toward indictments and trials. It was a ridiculous effort that highlighted the council's inability to act on crucial global issues. According to Professor Bassiouni--who was nominated by U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali in August 1993 but failed to get enough votes in the Security Council--it was individual member states of the council that caused the delay in appointing a prosecutor.

The council considered both formally and informally half a dozen candidates for the office between August 1993 and the summer of 1994. These included a high-ranking Scottish prosecutor, the attorney general of Kenya, a Canadian war crimes prosecutor, a former attorney general of India, a Swiss vice-president of the European Commission on Human Rights, and a high court judge from Mauritius. Some didn't want the headache of the job; others were nixed by Security Council members. (A single member could veto any candidate.) Covington & Burling partner Charles Ruff, a former U.S. attorney, was pushed by the U.S. delegation and the White House, says Bassiouni. But Russia reminded the U.S. of an informal agreement among Security Council members not to nominate candidates from any permanent members of the council, who were deeply involved in the peace negotiations and peacekeeping activities in the former Yugoslavia. Ruff's name was withdrawn. (Ruff confirms he was a candidate but says he does not know why his name was withdrawn; State Department legal adviser Conrad Harper declines to comment on the appointment process. A senior U.N. official concedes that there is "no question that time was lost," but attributes the delay to political wrangling within the Security Council and an unfortunate choice in Escobar.)

Cassese says he grew desperate; the rules of procedure specified that only the prosecutor was authorized to conduct investigations and file indictments. "I was so dejected I said, `Why don't we resign en masse to show the public we cannot go on?' " says Cassese. Instead, he took matters into his own hands. Throughout June he called lawyers and judges around the world that he knew from his years on international commissions and human rights organizations, soliciting candidates. One name popped up more than once: South African judge Richard Goldstone, darling of the antiapartheid forces.

Goldstone had just completed his work as chair of the Goldstone Commission, a massive, controversial three-year probe into the causes of the South African political violence that had left scores of black South Africans dead or wounded since 1991. On July 4 Cassese informally approached Goldstone. Would he take on the job as the tribunal's chief prosecutor?

Goldstone says he was interested but was concerned about leaving South Africa at "an exciting and important time in its history." When he first consulted with the new minister of justice, the difficulty of his decision was compounded: He was told that he was one of four judges that soon would be unanimously appointed to South Africa's new 11- judge Constitutional Court. By taking the two-year stint as prosecutor, Goldstone would lose the opportunity to participate in seminal cases in South African constitutional history. "It'd be like missing a chance to write Marbury v. Madison," says Vernon Grigg III, Goldstone's former clerk, now at San Francisco's Keker & Van Nest.

Mandela, however, had a solution: Goldstone would do both. "President Mandela thought it was important for South Africa to accept the first prominent international job offered to a South African since our readmission to the world," recounts Goldstone. In fact, George Bizos, Mandela's personal lawyer, says Mandela felt indebted to the U.N. for its role in obtaining his release from prison. So it was set: Goldstone would go to the tribunal and Mandela, by pushing through a constitutional amendment, would hold open Goldstone's spot on the high court until his return. (The new court's judges are appointed to seven-year terms; Goldstone will return to serve out the five years remaining in his term.)

For two days, says Cassese, he tapped his fingers and paced, waiting for an answer. On July 6 he had it: Goldstone accepted.

An ebullient Cassese rushed out faxes to the tribunal judges with a traditional message from the Vatican heralding papal succession: "Habemus papum! "

We have a pope!

THE POPE ARRIVES
Richard Goldstone, 56, can be a charming, thought-provoking conversationalist and host. He is well-traveled, reads prodigiously-- favoring thick biographies of politicians, lawyers, and civil rights leaders--frequently dines out (as in South Africa, with a squad of bodyguards poised nearby), and is a world-class wine connoisseur. But when it comes to his work, Goldstone, a short, stern-faced man with a piercing gaze and an unflappable demeanor, is all business.

In fact, Goldstone's straightforward style is probably the perfect counterbalance to that of more emotional members of the tribunal, notably Cassese. Upon arriving in The Hague in mid-August of 1994, Goldstone recognized that his was a big-picture diplomatic role and that the hands-on prosecution work could be pushed down to experienced prosecutors and investigators like Blewitt--at least for the time being.

"I felt that my first goal was to turn around the credibility crisis," recounts Goldstone. "The international media had become very antagonistic because of the delays in getting going. They had determined there was some sort of conspiracy, that the U.N. set up the tribunal only as a conscience salver, as a bargaining chip in the peace process."

Goldstone says he gave two dozen interviews and press conferences during his first month at the tribunal. He got out the message that the tribunal was in business and was not conspiring to dawdle while the war criminals got away with murder. It was a comfortable role; after all, Goldstone had made daily appearances on South African TV while he chaired the eponymous commission that routed out the causes of South African violence and paved the way for the 1994 elections there.

Still, the media and cynics like Cherif Bassiouni-who had had his fingers burned by the U.N.'s seeming apathy to his work on the experts commission-quickly put Goldstone's patience to the test.

On October 2, six weeks after he joined the tribunal, CBS television newsmagazine 60 Minutes ran an unflattering story about the tribunal called "An Exercise in Hypocrisy." While the tribunal and Goldstone were not faulted for the court's failure to indict, much less try, any war criminal to date, Professor Bassiouni, former secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, and John Fox, a former State Department official who had been monitoring the former Yugoslavia, lambasted the "hopelessly complex U.N. bureaucracy . . . intent on throttling the tribunal's every effort," in the words of Mike Wallace.

Goldstone, recognizing that good press required tangible results, began his own push for progress. The tribunal was still operating on a quarterly budget; every three months the tribunal had to reapply to its U.N. paymaster for the next quarter. "Imagine how hard it is to attract good people with that kind of job security," says Blewitt. And new hires were subjected to the U.N.'s time-consuming, paper-intensive vetting process.

Goldstone made numerous calls and two trips to New York in the fall of 1994, ingratiating himself with the various U.N. policy wonks who control funding, working the maze of power and pettiness. He asserts now that he discovered that the U.N. had not been consciously tugging at the new court's purse strings. "It took a while to sort out," he says, "but it was not a question of the U.N.'s ill will. They simply had great difficulty fitting a judicial body into the U.N. structure." A senior U.N. official concurs with Goldstone's assessment, adding that the general assembly has made "a real effort" to accommodate the tribunal's financial needs: "We won't pretend this was all done impeccably, but this is the first time anything like this has been done."

Still, it wasn't a pleasant task. "Dealing with [the U.N.'s] bureaucratic rules was extremely frustrating and time-wasting," Goldstone recalls.

But Goldstone managed to convince the U.N. funding committee to give his new hires guaranteed one-year contracts, allowing him nearly to double the tribunal from 45 to 80 employees by the end of 1994, and to grow to its current size of some 250. (In 1994 the tribunal's budget was $11 million. For the first half of 1995 the tribunal requested and received quarterly installments of an unapproved $28 million annual budget. That budget was finally approved on July 18.)

Goldstone also played diplomat, forging critical relationships with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and the U.N. Protection Force in Bosnia (UNPROFOR). The UNHCR and ICRC monitor the shifting Muslim and Serb populations in the wake of the Serbs' ethnic cleansing campaigns and interview victims and witnesses to alleged atrocities. UNPROFOR, among other things, maintains reports on the shelling of civilian targets, conducts its own investigations of alleged war crimes, and provides protection and access to the tribunal's investigators when they conduct investigations in the former Yugoslavia. "Without our own police force we must convince others to perform forensics tests, etc., for us," says tribunal investigator J.J. Du Toit, a prosecutor who worked for the Goldstone Commission before joining the tribunal. "[Goldstone] opened the doors to get that information back to the tribunal."

All this shuttle diplomacy to New York, London, and Geneva took Goldstone away from the tribunal during his first two months on the job. But it was worth the payoff. "He ensured the tribunal's survival," says senior prosecuting trial attorney Grant Niemann, the veteran Australian prosecutor who will prosecute Tadic.

With money and staffing concerns allayed, Goldstone turned next to the tribunal's mandate, prosecuting war criminals. With no potential defendants in custody, Goldstone considered the next best possibility, an indictment.

NO NUREMBERG
As with everything having to do with an international tribunal that attempts to meld people from 29 different cultures into a single cohesive unit, putting together a simple indictment can take ages. The lawyers are dealing with unfamiliar crimes committed in a foreign country, interpreting a brand-new code of evidence, working with unfamiliar people. Their primary targets--the Bosnian Serbs--are the victors rather than the losers of this conflict so far. And the Serbs, unlike the meticulous Germans in the last world war, have kept no detailed accounts of their deeds. So suspects and evidence are hard to come by. "There's no question that this is no Nuremberg," concedes senior prosecuting trial attorney Minna Schrag.

When Goldstone started looking for someone to indict in the fall of 1994, the office's best evidence concerned Serbian ethnic cleansing activities in the Prijedor district in northeastern Bosnia, where the Keraterm, Trnopolje, and Omarska concentration camps were located. The commission of experts report had concentrated on that region, concluding that the prewar population of some 53,000 non-Serbs in that region had been reduced to approximately 2,500 by May 1994 through forcible eviction. But was there enough evidence to indict? It depended on whom you asked.

Tribunal investigator Jean-Pierre Getti, a well-known French investigating judge who conducted the war crimes investigation of former Nazi collaborator Paul Touvier, recalls that a healthy debate broke out at the tribunal over the standard for indicting.

The civil law view, Getti explains through an interpreter, is to require "serious and corroborated" evidence, while the common law interpretation is stricter: evidence sufficient to establish a "prima facie" case.

The prosecutors went with the more conservative common law interpretation, delaying the first three indictments somewhat, Getti says. For the last five indictments, says Getti, the prosecutors settled on a standard that falls somewhere between the two interpretations.

The culture clash over evidentiary standards was hardly the first dispute among the tribunal's disparate, polyglot assemblage of lawyers, investigators, and judges. (French and English are the official languages of the tribunal; English is the de facto working language.) Even the smallest details continue to be debated--and slow the pace of the proceedings. "What form should the interviews [of witnesses] take?" queries prosecutor Minna Schrag, now on leave from New York's Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn, where she is a litigation partner [In the News, April]. "What should an indictment look like? None of the indictments we've issued has looked the same, and the next indictment won't look like any of the previous indictments."

Another member of the tribunal defends its deliberative style. Patricia Viseur Sellers, a former Philadelphia public defender, is the tribunal's legal adviser on gender-related crimes, namely rape. (Rape has long been categorized as a war crime or crime against humanity under the Geneva Conventions. But the Tadic trial will be one of the first times, say prosecutors, that rape, used as a systematic tool of terror and intimidation against a civilian population, will be prosecuted as a war crime.) Sellers asserts that prosecutors simply want to do things right the first time around because they "know every step might be historically important, that they are on a world stage."

Nonetheless, through a process of trial and error, the kinks--for the most part--have been eliminated from the tribunal's system of investigations and indictment, which now works something like this: The nine investigation teams assemble proof of the underlying crimes- evidence that includes depositions, reports by military observers, press reports, photographs, maps, charts, autopsy reports, etc. Each team has a data analyst to organize and ensure the chain of custody of evidence. The teams or portions of the teams may travel to the former Yugoslavia and other countries to depose witnesses and victims, and collect other evidence both as to the alleged crimes and on any suspects that have emerged. (In 1994 20 three-member teams conducted field investigations; 45 teams are expected to conduct such investigations this year, each for an average of two weeks per month.)

The legal adviser assigned to each group works with one of the three senior prosecuting trial attorneys to determine under which article of the tribunal's authorizing each alleged crime falls. (Those trial attorneys, Australian Grant Niemann, American Minna Schrag, and Swede Eric Ostberg, will lead the prosecution teams at trial.) A rape, for example, may be a crime against humanity (Article 5) and a war crime (Article 3). An indictment is then crafted by those attorneys that ties the acts alleged to the charge under the statute. Commander William Fenrick, a Canadian expert on the laws of war, is often consulted at that stage about the finer points of fitting the alleged acts into a military context. Those preliminary indictments and the offers of proof--often hundreds of pages of documents and testimony--are then reviewed by deputy prosecutor Blewitt, who in turn forwards it to chief prosecutor Goldstone for final approval.

While the system sounds simple, even the smallest detail takes far more time and resources than would be necessary, for example, in a federal criminal investigation in the United States. Consider a simple victim or witness statement, as described by American prosecutor Schrag. First investigators have to locate a witness to a particular crime. Many witnesses are in refugee camps or otherwise transient and difficult to reach. Once the witness is contacted, he or she has to agree to speak against the perpetrator. Many with families in occupied areas fear retaliation and will not testify; others, particularly victims, are too scarred by their experiences to do so. "These are badly damaged people," says Tadic prosecutor Niemann.

If they do agree to speak, an interpreter and two investigators must travel from the tribunal to wherever in Europe the witness is located. As one investigator questions a witness, the interpreter translates the Serbo-Croat into English and vice versa while another investigator takes notes. Those notes are later typed up into a statement in English that is then read back to the witness in Serbo-Croat for oral approval. The witness makes adjustments, and then the final statement, in English, is signed by the witness.

In spite of these logistical obstacles, the tribunal rumbled along through the fall of 1994 and finally, on November 7, Goldstone issued his first indictment, of Susica camp commander Dragan Nikolic.

POTEMKIN TRIBUNAL?
Nikolic was probably not the best choice for the first indictment. He had some command responsibility for a small group of guards, and had allegedly participated in multiple murders and torture. But he could not be charged with genocide, the crime of crimes, and was not accused of rape--a little prosecuted international war crime that prosecutors hoped to showcase at the tribunal as a crucial means of deterring more rapes from being committed during the conflict. He was not even within the investigators' main region of concentration, the Prijedor district. He also was not in custody.

Did that first indictment relieve the pressure on the tribunal to get results? "Not very much," Goldstone admits. (At press time Nikolic remained at large; the prosecution has filed no further proceedings concerning him since his indictment.)

In fact, in an interview with The American Lawyer shortly after the indictment was issued, Professor Bassiouni, the former head of the commission of experts, voiced his concern about the tribunal's ability to carry out its mandate.

"You should call your story the 'Potemkin Tribunal,' " fretted Bassiouni last November. "They have a magnificent building in The Hague, a great prosecution team. But in the end when you look behind that to see what's there, the answer is 'not much.' "

Bassiouni suggested then that despite the Nikolic indictment, the tribunal was still merely a facade behind which the U.N. could hide when criticized for botching its so-called "peacekeeping" mission in the Balkans. The U.N., he posited, had no intention of letting its own tribunal muck up the peace that some of its more powerful members, namely France and Great Britain, were then brokering with the Serb leaders--leaders who had been identified as probable war criminals way back in December 1992 by then--U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.

"Even after you achieve something, people just want more," sighs Goldstone. More, however, was just around the corner.

In February 1994 German police had arrested Dusko "Dule" Tadic in Munich, where he had been hiding out at his brother's apartment. Refugees from the Serbian death camps now living in Germany had spotted their tormentor and identified him to German authorities as a Bosnian Serb who participated in a series of horrific crimes against his former Muslim neighbors in the Prijedor district of Bosnia. (Germany arrested and charged Tadic under international war crimes laws with aggravated assault and murder, or crimes against humanity, as well as genocide.)

Graham Blewitt had heard of Tadic's arrest long before Goldstone's arrival and had been keeping tabs on the German proceedings. Shortly after Goldstone came on the scene in August 1994, though, Goldstone locked in on the bird nearly in hand, shifting a team of 20 investigators, lawyers, and analysts to Tadic and others who allegedly committed atrocities at the Omarska concentration camp in mid-1992.

On November 8, the day after Nikolic was indicted, Goldstone formally asked Germany to defer prosecution of Tadic to the tribunal. (In addition to the practical effect of granting the tribunal exclusive jurisdiction, deferral proceedings are a potent public relations tool, permitting the prosecution to air unsubstantiated charges against individuals prior to their indictment and signaling the tribunal's imminent indictment of those accused in local war crimes proceedings.) The tribunal supported its request with 13 pieces of documentary evidence-such as maps, newspaper clippings, and photographs-and 19 statements from witnesses scattered throughout Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. But it took nearly six months for the German parliament to pass a law permitting the transfer of the case to the tribunal.

Meanwhile, pressure on the prosecutors to act came from a surprising new quarter: the tribunal judges. On February 1 president Cassese issued an odd press release on the judges' behalf in which they "wished to express their concern about the urgency with which appropriate indictments should be issued," and that went on to state that the judges "were anxious that a programme of indictments should effectively meet the expectations of the Security Council and of the world community at large."

The release is pure Cassese: prickly, brazen, impassioned. But it also betrays Cassese's civil law roots, where the prosecutor and the judges are often more or less on the same side, as well as perhaps the hubris and inexperience of a law professor turned judge.

Prosecutors who had been in the trenches for months weren't pleased. "They were impatient and frustrated," says Blewitt. "But we were already aware of the urgency of getting some results. We thought it was a useless statement."

Indeed, two other judges interviewed for this article, McDonald and Malaysian judge Lal Vohrah--both from common law countries--say they do not believe it is their role to tell the prosecutor how to do his job. "We want to work, to try cases," says Vohrah, 61, a thoughtful, articulate jurist who gave up a spot on what is now Malaysia's highest court to join the tribunal. "But who is to be prosecuted is not our responsibility." (Vohrah, in fact, says he does not remember if he discussed Cassese's release before it went public.)

Goldstone is diplomatically taciturn on the topic, noting only that he had spoken to Cassese before the statement was released and agreed that issuing indictments of the leaders with command responsibility as soon as possible was a goal. He declines otherwise to comment, noting that the relationship between the prosecutors and the judges was a "sensitive one that was not a matter for public debate."

Cassese makes no apologies. "Nikolic was small fry," he contends. "Allegedly he killed a few people. Minor thugs who rape or kill, without command responsibility, should be [handled] by the state courts." (The indictment does specifically refer to Nikolic's command responsibility as camp commander; and includes eight counts of murder.)

The tension between the two men and their departments now seems to be subsiding. But Judge McDonald's delicate assessment? "Let's just say that relations between the office of the prosecutor and the judges have not been as close as they were in the past."

Whether or not it was Cassese's doing, the tribunal did blast into action shortly after this intramural spat.

THE TURNING POINT
On February 13 the tribunal indicted Tadic and his 20 death camp colleagues--the commander, guards, and several Serb visitors to Omarska. In April Germany turned Tadic over to the tribunal in The Hague, where he became the sole occupant of Cassese's twenty-first- century detention center. The tribunal finally had a defendant in custody.

In May Goldstone dropped two bombshells. First, he expanded the tribunal's prosecutorial scope by requesting Bosnian authorities to cease their own prosecution in the Lasva River Valley investigation. That investigation--into the April 1993 slaughter of some 114 Muslim women, children, and old men from the village of Ahmici, Bosnia, in front of scores of survivors and other witnesses--targeted Bosnian Croats. Previously, all 21 of those indicted by the tribunal were Bosnian Serbs. It was a carefully calculated move by Goldstone: "It's crucial that the mechanism is perceived as fair by all sides" to the conflict, he explains, in order to "break through the endless cycle of atrocity and revenge."

Goldstone had again taken a page from his South African experience investigating the causes of political violence. "He recognized that the credibility of the tribunal depended on demonstrating we would go after Croats, Serbs, and Muslims alike," says deputy prosecutor Blewitt.

Then, a week after the Lasva Valley deferral application was filed last May, Goldstone filed a controversial deferral application with the Bosnian war crimes commission related to the Bosnian Serb leadership--namely Karadzic, General Mladic, and former police chief Mico Stanisic. (Bosnia has set up its own war crimes commission and was then in the process of investigating the Bosnian Serb leadership.) The application specifically mentioned investigating their command responsibility for "genocide, other serious offenses against civilians, and destruction of cultural and historical monuments," as well as the "protracted siege of Sarajevo and the unlawful attacks upon civilian members of humanitarian agencies, members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces, aid convoys, and aircraft at Sarajevo."

The peace negotiators instantly expressed their distress at Goldstone's timing. "This decision could damage the peace efforts in the Balkans," warned a spokesman for the Russian foreign ministry. A cease-fire was on the verge of expiring; negotiators now faced the prospect of making a new deal with named war crimes suspects. To add insult to injury, Goldstone announced that the suspects would likely face indictments by the end of the year.

At an April 24 press conference, according to a wire report from Agence France-Presse, Goldstone had a simple response to the supposed political inconvenience of his announcement: "We're not politicians, we're lawyers."

With the Tadic arraignment, the deferral applications, and nine investigation teams churning toward more indictments, the image of the tribunal as a do-nothing Security Council lapdog has been vanquished, possibly forever. Even Professor Bassiouni voices cautious optimism on the future of the tribunal: "I think there is a momentum building in world public opinion, a moral drive by the media, [the human rights] community, and scholars to give legitimacy and credibility to this tribunal."

Since April, in fact, the tribunal has had enough activity from Tadic alone to keep up a steady trickle of good press. In June the trial chamber heard motions on the protection of victims and witnesses in the case. In July the court heard a defense motion challenging its jurisdiction; on August 10 the tribunal denied the defense motion. The court will soon hear defense motions to exclude testimony obtained from the German prosecutors and on double jeopardy. (The defense claims that because German authorities had commenced judicial proceedings against Tadic, the tribunal is precluded from trying him.)

On July 25 the tribunal indicted the Bosnian Serb leadership, Karadzic and General Mladic, for their command responsibility for the commission of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. (Karadzic, Mladic, and 43 other war crimes indictees are still at large in Serbian-held areas of Bosnia or Croatia. Not surprisingly, Karadzic does not recognize the tribunal's competence and has said he will not turn over his citizens to stand trial.) Decisions, appeals, and perhaps more indictments can be expected to keep the tribunal in the public eye sporadically until November. With no other suspects in custody, prosecutors may also consider filing a Rule 61 proceeding for some of those indicted, such as Susica camp commander Dragan Nikolic.

Rule 61 of the tribunal's code of criminal procedure is the common law answer to trials in absentia. It permits the prosecutor, after trying and failing to get jurisdiction over an indictee, to put on his entire case against that suspect, in public, before the tribunal. Witnesses may be called and evidence entered. If there are reasonable grounds for concluding that the accused committed the crimes indicated, the tribunal says so and issues an international arrest warrant. "It literally turns those indicted into international fugitives," says Goldstone.

If a U.N. member state refuses to turn over the subject of the arrest warrant, the matter is referred to the Security Council, which may consider imposing sanctions against the offending state.

The net effect of Rule 61 is to air allegations and, more importantly, to restrict the accused to their own country. If they travel to or through any of the 185 U.N. member states, they are subject to arrest. "Sooner or later we will [get custody of more alleged war criminals]," says Minna Schrag, the American prosecutor. "Because we keep getting information on people who travel."

But for now the tribunal has a far more interesting proceeding to pursue: the Tadic trial.

ALLEGED BLOOD LUST
Dusko Tadic would have been cut from the first casting call to play a war criminal in the 1961 movie Judgment at Nuremberg. The somber, shifty-eyed man in the dock during the pre-trial proceedings (a Dustin Hoffman look-alike) looks more like an insurance or car salesman than a war criminal.

Yet court papers and press reports paint a picture of Tadic as a thuggish part-time karate instructor and café owner in the town of Kozarac, who rose to power in the local Serbian Democratic Party as pan-Serb nationalism exploded in late 1991. Even the photographs of Tadic taken prior to his arrest suggest a burlier, more dangerous person than the cowed man in the button-down shirts now appearing at the tribunal.

He was described by one Muslim refugee as an arrogant, vengeful man who liked to show off his martial arts skill. "He was known around Kozarac as gratuitously violent, ready to beat up those who had slighted him," The New York Times Magazine reported last October. "And he was financially vulnerable, in debt to Muslim acquaintances."

The stage was set, then, for Tadic to strike back at his perceived enemies when the Serbs seized control of Kozarac and other towns in the Prijedor area in early 1992. According to the declaration that war crimes prosecutor Michael Keegan filed in Tadic's November 8 deferral proceeding (which summarized the testimony of dozens of witnesses and several documents), "although [Tadic] had very good relations with the Muslim population prior to 1992, at the start of the tensions in the area, he banned Muslims from his café."

When the policy of ethnic cleansing was instituted to rid the Prijedor region of non-Serbs, Tadic became one of its chief proponents. "Eyewitness accounts identify Tadic as being personally involved in the forced removal of Muslims from the Prijedor area and the looting and destruction of Muslim homes," Keegan attested.

Prosecutors claim Tadic, a married father of two, became his former Muslim neighbors' worst nightmare.

According to Keegan's declaration, Tadic had served as a local policeman and was an officer in the reserve militia. After the conflict broke out, he assisted local Serb commanders who were compiling a death list of the area's intellectuals, civic leaders, and prominent Muslims. When the death camps like Omarska opened in early 1992, many of their first prisoners were on these lists and were allegedly killed or have since disappeared.

In May 1992, according to Tadic's indictment, Serb forces rounded up all Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the Kozarac area and marched them into the city of Prijedor, where they boarded buses for the various camps that had been set up in the Prijedor opstina.

In a similar incident in June, Tadic allegedly forcibly removed 13 unarmed non-Serb men from their homes, made the victims "lie on the ground, beat them with thick wooden sticks, kicked them, and then took them from the village to an unknown location," according to the indictment.

The Keegan declaration alleges that the worst of Tadic's sadistic activities took place at the Omarska death camp, which he visited "almost daily (or nightly)." Omarska was an abandoned iron ore complex. The 5,000 prisoners who reportedly passed through lived in inconceivably inhumane conditions. Many were held in an open ore pit, with no shelter, no toilets, and little food or water. Tadic held no rank in the Bosnian Serb army and was not part of the camp's Serbian staff. Yet he allegedly often wore a camouflage uniform (and occasionally a black mask) and directed the activities of the men who accompanied him and the camp guards. "Tadic was also seen in the presence of the camp commander, giving directions to camp staff on the arrival of new prisoners," alleged Keegan.

The Keegan declaration claims that Tadic "beat and tortured prisoners on a daily basis and is personally responsible for the murder of more than ten prisoners. . . ." The indictment zeroes in on six incidents in which Tadic is accused of raping one woman, murdering 13 men, and torturing those men and scores of others. And then, of course, there is the alleged castration incident.

According to the indictment, in late June 1992 Tadic and other Serbian camp visitors entered a large building at Omarska known as the "hangar" and called five prisoners out of their rooms by name. The Times Magazine noted that three of those men were supposed rivals of Tadic for women or karate championships. One, according to a report in Newsday, may have been a policeman with whom Tadic had had a run-in prior to the war.

Tadic and others then "severely beat the prisoners with various objects and kicked them on their heads and bodies," the indictment charges. After Fikret Harambasic was beaten, two more prisoners, identified in the indictment as "G" and "H," were allegedly called out. What happened next, as asserted by G himself, was a spectacle so traumatic, so nauseating, that it "shattered camp morale," according to the Times Magazine.

One Serb, the indictment continues, "ordered G and H to lick Harambasic's buttocks and genitals and then to sexually mutilate Harambasic. H covered Harambasic's mouth to silence his screams and G bit off one of Harambasic's testicles."

The versions of the story contained in the Times Magazine, the Newsday account, Keegan's declaration, and the indictment vary in minor details. But the end result is uncontroverted, at least among these accounts, which Tadic denies. Harambasic was castrated; he and two other prisoners who had been beaten unconscious with metal rods, truncheons, and knives died from their injuries.

Tadic has pled not guilty to all charges and claims all these accounts of his activities are untrue. "His main defense will be the defense of alibi, that he was not at the places at the times alleged," says his lead defense counsel, Dutchman Michail Wladimiroff.

The prosecutors, led by senior prosecuting trial attorney Grant Niemann, expect to put 50 to 60 witnesses on the stand who will testify otherwise. "The evidence is quite good," says Niemann.

POST-TADIC?
Grant Niemann, 45, is well-suited to prosecute the first international war crimes case in 50 years. One of the first prosecutors to arrive at the tribunal, in June 1994, he immediately began working on the prosecution of ethnic cleansing and the war crimes committed in the Prijedor section of Bosnia, where Tadic allegedly committed his crimes.

A stocky, ruddy-complexioned Australian with wavy white hair tucked back behind his ears, Niemann comes off as a pugnacious prosecutor but also a compassionate advocate for the war crimes victims. That soft center is perhaps unsurprising for a lawyer who spent his early years representing aboriginals in their land claims against the Australian government. And the gruff exterior can likewise be traced to his past: as the equivalent of the U.S. attorney in Adelaide from 1985 to 1994, Niemann tried two Nazi war crimes cases and assisted on a third. (The first ended in an acquittal; the second was adjourned for lack of evidence and the third was terminated after the defendant suffered a heart attack and was deemed unfit to stand trial.)

According to Niemann, the decision to indict and try Tadic was, in one respect, an easy one. In stark contrast to the 21 other indicted war criminals, Tadic was in custody. It didn't hurt that the Tadic files were fairly complete. "The Germans had done a very good and very thorough investigation themselves and turned their material over to us," says Niemann.

Still, Goldstone has repeatedly said that the tribunal's resources do not permit it to go after low-level players. Where does Tadic fit into that grand scheme?

Goldstone admits the obvious: You have to start somewhere. "Witnesses can only implicate those they came into contact with on a local level," he explains. "Some of the leaders are saying that the events were random and unplanned. We need to establish a pattern of activity." And, he adds, go after people involved at a local level, like Tadic.

The Tadic case, Goldstone and Niemann acknowledge, may not exactly open the judicial floodgates; at press time he was the sole defendant in the tribunal's custody. And the trial of a single man is, of course, only a small step toward justice and accountability in the Balkans. "It'd be nice to know what happens after the first case ends," says Niemann. "It'd be nice to have them lined up."

But if Tadic is the only trial, it will be that much more important. Because at the very least "we expose those who committed the crimes to public scrutiny," explains tribunal president Cassese. "And with the international community so totally impotent to deal with these crimes otherwise, this result is not so meager."

And more importantly, the Tadic trial, beamed throughout the world by satellite, could send a message to the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians-- and for that matter, citizens of every country--that war crimes will not be tolerated, that whether it is next week or ten years from now, those who step over the bounds of acceptable behavior may end up being held accountable for their actions.

As Judge McDonald succinctly puts it: "We are here to tell people that the rule of law has to be respected."

(The American Lawyer is an affiliate publication of Court TV.) Copyright 1995, American Lawyer Media.