Justice is still not being served while Mladic and Karadzic remain at large, writes Karen Coleman
The conviction and jailing this week of two Bosnian Serb officers found guilty of war crimes in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia go some way to striking justice for those killed in that horrific act of savagery.
But their convictions are not enough and are far short of the kind of justice that needs to be delivered to prevent another such massacre occurring on European soil again.
On Monday the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague found that Vidoje Blagojevic was guilty of "complicity in genocide" in the Srebrenica massacre. He got 18 years. His co-conspirator, Dragan Jokic, got nine years for aiding and abetting murder and persecution in the same massacre.
But, although it is right these two thugs are now behind bars, they were lower down the chain of command. The two chief war leaders accused of ultimate responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre, in which up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered, remain at large. This is despite the massive presence of Nato troops on Bosnian soil in the years following the war.
The former Bosnian Serb general, Ratko Mladic, and the wartime Bosnian Serb political leader, Radovan Karadzic, still enjoy freedom despite being indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal for genocide and other war crimes.
Both men are implicated in the Srebrenica massacre. Their continuing liberty makes a mockery of the so-called mightiest armies in the world which used to have soldiers posted down the road from Karadzic's former stronghold in the Bosnian Serb village of Pale.
During my time reporting for the BBC in Bosnia I travelled many times to Pale, a picturesque skiing village about 15 kilometres from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.
Far from being an impenetrable fortress and a forbidding deterrent to foreign soldiers, at that time Pale should have been a relatively soft target for Nato forces who were crawling all over the place following the end of the Bosnian war.
Despite their significant presence Nato soldiers never caught Karadzic. After the 1995 Dayton Agreement for peace in Bosnia was struck, Karadzic was reported to have periodically driven past Nato soldiers adroitly avoiding arrest. No doubt this psychotic wartime leader was smirking away in the back of his black-windowed Mercedes as he ducked some of the world's best-trained forces.
At the time Nato's weak and unacceptable excuse was that its mandate did not allow its soldiers to "go after" war criminals. They could only arrest them if they came across them in the course of their daily work. Nato soldiers' interpretation of this spineless policy meant Karadzic and Mladic were never arrested.
After the Dayton Agreement was struck, Nato commanders were reluctant to order the hunting down of war criminals, fearing that such aggressive tactics could lead to a backlash from the locals, particular from the Bosnian Serbs.
In fact the reality was arguably totally different. The Bosnian Serbs, on the whole, were cowed by their defeat in the war. Weary of fighting and conscious of their pariah-like status in the world as they were, it is unlikely they would have revolted in the way Nato suggested.
It is also ironic, given the current death toll of US and British soldiers in Iraq today, how protective the military were of their forces then.
The shadow of Srebrenica still haunts Bosnia and the world. It remains the biggest single act of genocide in Europe since the second World War. Its legacy continues to stain the reputation of the United Nations whose forces failed abysmally to protect Srebrenica's Muslim population.
In July 1995 Srebrenica was a Muslim enclave in hostile Bosnian Serb territory. About 600 lightly armed Dutch soldiers were supposed to be protecting the town. In early July that year Serb forces began shelling Srebrenica. When the town's Muslim men asked for the return of weapons they had handed in to the Dutch, the UN forces refused. The UN's subsequent inability to protect the town sealed the fate of thousands of the male population.
Despite Dutch pleas for air support the UN command in Sarajevo was slow to react and failed to send in the air power necessary to bomb the Serbs back into submission.
At the time the Bosnian Serbs had captured about 30 Dutch soldiers in the area and were holding them hostage. That prevented a deployment of sufficient air fire to force the Serbs to pull back from Srebrenica.
In the end thousands of Muslim men were rounded up when Mladic entered the town on July 11th.
A year after the massacre I travelled to Srebrenica to report for the BBC on the exhumation of a mass grave believed to contain the bodies of some of the Srebrenica victims.
I drove with colleagues up a narrow country lane surrounded by fields to a mass grave site about 15km from Srebrenica.
In a less sinister setting it would have been the perfect spot for a summer picnic. But on that day the macabre sight of the blackened corpses turned our stomachs as the grisly task of exhuming the bodies took place in the boiling sun.
Many of the corpses' skeletal hands had been tied behind their backs with wire. It seemed they had been rounded up like a herd of animals, with their hands painfully bound, and shot dead by their captors.
As international physicians deftly handled the remains it was difficult to comprehend that such a massacre had taken place in the heart of Europe at the end of the 20th century. What an indictment on all of us if those ultimately responsible for the Srebrenica genocide never face justice.