ANALYSIS:Karadzic's years on the run show international lack of will in the pursuit of war criminals, writes Chirs Stephen
RADOVAN KARADZIC, the former Bosnian Serb president arrested on charges of genocide this week and due to be transferred to The Hague Tribunal, is a symbol of the schizophrenic attitude of the outside world towards war crimes justice.
When he was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity in 1995, images of his deeds were seared into the world's psyche: the siege of Sarajevo; the death camps where thousands of Muslims perished; and the massacre of 8,000 men and boys at Srebrenica.
But with the end of the Bosnian war, the world turned its back: one spring day in 1997, I stood chatting with his bodyguards a few hundred yards from where Mr and Mrs Karadzic lived in a handsome villa near Sarajevo.
Nato, based 20 minutes away, could have arrested him at any time but chose not to, citing fears of civil unrest. While I waited, his guards waved as an Italian army patrol cruised by, making no attempt to stop.
Later that year, stung by the shame of it all, Nato was galvanised into action, with commandos making a series of swoops on war crimes suspects across Bosnia.
But by then Karadzic had fled into hiding, dodging at least a dozen Nato raids for 11 years until, incongruously, he was arrested this week by Belgrade police apparently while on a bus. In between times, war crimes justice flourished, only to be once more cut off at the knees by lack of international concern.
Giant strides were made after 1997 in jailing more than 30 top Bosnian war criminals and setting up new UN courts for Rwanda, Sierra Leone and East Timor.
But these efforts were dealt a crippling blow by the decision of the Bush administration, following 9/11, that the War on Terror had precedence over international law.
Against a background of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the Bush administration cut aid to nations that joined the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was created 10 years ago as a permanent replacement to the existing UN courts.
And when Belgium enacted war crimes legislation of its own, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld threatened to move Nato's HQ out of Brussels unless the laws were revoked.
This lack of commitment has been most marked with the ICC's involvement in Darfur. In April 2005 the UN Security Council, reacting to public opinion, ordered the ICC to investigate Darfur war crimes. But when Sudan refused last year to hand over two officials charged by the court, the security council decided against punitive action.
Last week China, which buys most of Sudan's oil, went further, criticising ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo for indicting Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir with genocide, despite overwhelming evidence that he has a case to answer. There are now suggestions that China may ask other security council members to agree to freeze the ICC charges in perpetuity.
War crimes courts have meanwhile struggled to make their own case. The trial of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's former president, dragged on so long that he died of heart failure in 2005 before the case could finish.
And the lack of legal safeguards in the trial of Iraq's Saddam Hussein saw proceedings turn into farce, the defendant being hanged with indecent haste.
This lack of support is not confined to the West: Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni called in the ICC to investigate the murders and rapes of the Lord's Resistance Army and as a result four guerrilla commanders have been indicted.
But with the war in northern Uganda now over, Museveni is calling for the ICC to withdraw the charges in the interest of peace talks and has refused to co-operate in efforts to get the fugitives arrested.
ICC judges have ruled out dropping the charges, but as with Sudan, have received scant support from world leaders for whom political expediency and international justice remain awkward bedfellows.
In this atmosphere, the arrest of Karadzic has been greeted in The Hague with something approaching jubilation.
The former Bosnian Serb president is second only to Milosevic in terms of notoriety, blamed for orchestrating horrors that cost 200,000 lives and created two million refugees.
And Hague prosecutors are being careful to learn the lessons of past mistakes, in particular the decision in the Milosevic trial by former prosecutor Carla Del Ponte to "throw the book" at the defendant.
Milosevic was charged with crimes in three separate wars - Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo - resulting in a whale of a trial that was already into its fifth year when Milosevic died.
The new UN prosecutor, Belgian Serge Brammertz, is unlikely to make the same mistake with Karadzic.
Having already headed the UN commission investigating the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri, he knows the political pitfalls of running an unwieldy trial.
Karadzic's charge sheet covers horrific crimes, but is less than a third the length of Milosevic's. Brammertz's greatest asset is not the lukewarm support given him by the outside world, but the fact that the system he uses has been shown to work.
Karadzic will face a court that, despite some major mistakes, has proved that it can translate the Hague, Geneva and Genocide conventions into workable laws.
Starting from the premise that a commander is responsible for the actions of his subordinates, Hague prosecutors have painfully, and expensively, spent the past decade building cases that combine advances in DNA testing, satellite photographs, eye witnesses and Bosnian Serb military records to win a string of high-profile convictions.
Among the most successful have been a chain of cases against Bosnian Serbs for the Srebrenica massacre of 1995, an atrocity that is now the world's best-documented massacre.
African jurists have made similar strides with the Sierra Leone Special Court, who's star defendant, former Liberian president Charles Taylor, is also beginning a trial for war crimes in The Hague, at premises rented from the ICC.
The accusations against Taylor match those against Karadzic for horror: under the guise of plundering Sierra Leone for so-called conflict diamonds, Taylor is blamed for orchestrating massacres, rape camps and the mutilation of thousands of innocent civilians.
Both former presidents are likely to lose the argument that their high office gave them immunity, thanks to the precedent set in 1999 when Britain's House of Lords ruled that no such immunity should be accorded former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet.
If the Karadzic and Taylor prosecutions, set to take place in courtrooms a few miles from each other, are successful, they will do more than jail two of the world's most notorious tyrants.
With luck, they will provide very public proof that the war crimes process can work, and that war criminals, no matter how senior, can be held to account for their crimes, no matter how long some have been on the run.
• Chris Stephen is the author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic(Atlantic Books, 2004)