She got her way last week. The indictments she issued against Milosevic and four other top Serb officials were a victory in a larger battle: how to make international courts strong and independent. In its six years of life, the U.N. tribunal has only seven low-level convictions to show for its attempts to punish atrocities in the former Yugoslavia. But under Arbour, who assumed the post in October 1996, suspects are slowly being indicted and apprehended, largely because of her efforts to force the international community to take the court seriously. On the question of whether the indictments hurt the chances for a peace deal, she contends that suspected war criminals can- not be trusted in a peace negotiation anyway. Asked if the indictment against Milosevic might have come at a bad time politically, Arbour responded coolly: “From the point of view of the accused, actually, it’s never a very good time.”
The 52-year-old Canadian judge has been a strong proponent of a permanent international criminal court. But the tribunal she runs now has often seemed more like a monument to impunity than a threat to the butchers of the Balkans. Its own information has sometimes been embarrassingly sparse. Once a wanted poster described a suspect only as “medium height and build,” and his sibling, also a suspect, as “similar to his brother.” But the bigger problem has been that, without a police force of its own, the court has had to beg NATO peacekeepers to make arrests. When Arbour started two and a half years ago, only seven people were in custody. Now there are 25. Arbour has been more aggressive than her predecessor, South African jurist Richard Goldstone, in proclaiming she would pursue the organizers and commanders of war crimes. But so far most of those now awaiting trial are small fry. Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, both charged with genocide in Bosnia, remain free men.
Even as the champion of international law, Arbour knows that the court can do little on its own. When Kosovo exploded, she began flying from capital to capital, lobbying NATO countries to provide military intelligence that the tribunal could use as evidence. The campaign began to pay off in April, when the Germans turned over aerial reconnaisance photographs that showed mass graves in Kosovo and Yugoslav soldiers stripping possessions and documents from deported Albanians. The British, French and Americans also turned over information that may have been used to build the case against Milosevic. Arbour will need their help even more if she ever hopes to capture him.
