Ratko Mladić’s death last week at eighty-three in The Hague—where he was serving a life sentence for committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as the commander of the Bosnian Serb forces during the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995—is a reminder that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia was the most effective instrument the international community has devised since the tribunal at Nuremberg to hold accountable those responsible for great crimes. Indeed, in certain respects it went beyond the precedent that Nuremberg set. Where that tribunal had brought to justice only defendants from a defeated nation, the ICTY tried, convicted, and sentenced perpetrators from all parties to the conflicts that took place across the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999.

When the war in Bosnia began in April 1992, I was the director of Human Rights Watch. In late July, HRW released a book-length report documenting the crimes committed in the first four months of the conflict. We also proposed the creation of an international tribunal—the first time we had sought the establishment of such a body. Two factors made Bosnia different from previous conflicts we had monitored. The first was that it involved three states: Bosnia, Croatia, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (then consisting of Serbia and Montenegro). Other conflicts we had documented took place within a single country and were considered internal in nature. Under international law at that time, the concept of war crimes only applied to international armed conflicts. The second factor was the similarity between the crimes being committed by Bosnian Serb forces and those of the Nazis during World War II. Serb forces had coined the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe their displacement of Bosnian Muslims and of Croats, and had established several camps in Bosnia that evoked comparisons to Buchenwald and Dachau. A tribunal similar to that at Nuremberg seemed an appropriate response.

Our report appeared at a moment when the mainstream press had just discovered the torture, rape, and other gross abuses being committed by Bosnian Serb forces in camps such as Omarska and Keraterm, and so the proposal for a tribunal caught on quickly. Yet when the ICTY was established by the United Nations Security Council, it was derided by many. István Deák, a prominent historian of central and eastern Europe, wrote in the pages of this magazine that while “the Nuremberg court was created after the enemy had been defeated in a total war lasting almost six years,” the ICTY “is being set up without the slightest intention of defeating and apprehending the criminals.” He also criticized the UN for simultaneously working with the new Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, “a primary candidate for indictment in the proposed war crimes trial,” to secure a peace agreement in Bosnia, arguing that “the entire affair of a tribunal smacks of cynicism and hypocrisy.” When I wrote a lengthy letter to the editors defending the effort, Deák reiterated that he believed states might “use the international tribunal as a face-saving measure and a substitute for action.”

Several years later I got a letter from Deák, who died at the age of ninety-six in 2023, saying that he had been mistaken. The tribunal, he acknowledged, had proved its value. I responded, confessing that when we debated I was not yet sure how the ICTY would develop. But I thought that only by defending it could I give it a chance to fulfill my hopes.

In the years that followed, the successes of the ICTY—and the somewhat more limited achievements of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that it inspired—helped lead to the creation of the International Criminal Court, which began operating in 2002. That body was envisioned as a global and permanent version of the ICTY and the ICTR, a court that could hold the most terrible of criminals to account for the gravest of crimes. It is still finding its way: it began with what some thought was a disproportionate focus on Africa, and has had difficulty gaining custody of defendants.

Yet today the United States is engaged in a campaign to destroy the ICC, seemingly motivated, as I have previously written in these pages, by the desire to absolve the US’s ally Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu—who is now running for reelection—for Israel’s crimes in Gaza. The Trump administration has imposed sanctions on personnel of the court, which it has called “corrupt and fatally politicized.” All of this raises the alarming possibility that Mladić’s present-day counterparts, of which there are a number, may not have to fear that they will suffer his fate.

The ICTY faced considerable hurdles, both in its creation and in carrying out its mission. By October 1992 the UN Security Council had established a commission to collect evidence of war crimes. But President George H. W. Bush was reluctant to speak out on international affairs while running for reelection against Bill Clinton, who made the economy his focus (“it’s the economy, stupid”). Only after Bush’s defeat did Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger—a former ambassador to Yugoslavia who was sometimes known as “Lawrence of Yugoslavia”—endorse the establishment of a tribunal. Clinton’s designated ambassador to the UN, Madeleine Albright, then devoted herself to the body’s creation; she liked to be known as “the mother of the tribunal.”

After the Security Council voted in May 1993 to establish the ICTY, a battle ensued over who would serve as its chief prosecutor. Some nominees were rightly rejected because they were not qualified, but others were vetoed for political reasons. Russia blocked any nominee from a NATO country. An outstanding jurist, Soli Sorabjee, who had served as India’s attorney general, was blocked by Pakistan, then a member of the Security Council. At long last, in July 1994, the council approved another very fine lawyer, Richard Goldstone of South Africa. A strong opponent of apartheid, he had been appointed to his country’s Constitutional Court by Nelson Mandela, who agreed to grant him a two-year leave from that post so he could join the ICTY. Russia, which was protective of the Serbs, did not impede the appointment because it wanted to be on good terms with Mandela.

When Goldstone began at the tribunal, there was only one low-level detainee in custody, a former guard at one of the camps. The prosecutors who had been hired before Goldstone’s appointment were busy pursuing indictments against other low-ranking figures, approaching their task as if they were building a case against an organized crime syndicate, in which plea bargains would be used to get foot soldiers to testify against the bosses. They did not seem to understand that the tribunal needed to show that it could take on those with the highest level of responsibility for the most serious crimes. It took Goldstone time to reorient the prosecution, but by July 1995 he had indicted Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb political leader, and Ratko Mladić, the military leader.

Karadžić and Mladić were charged for such crimes as the shelling and sniping from the hills surrounding Sarajevo that killed about 10,000 civilians and injured many thousands more. I still vividly recall what it was like to move about that besieged city, which I visited several times during the war, always trying to stay out of the line of fire by making sure that I did not cross streets at places that could be seen from the hills. At the Holiday Inn where I stayed, I only took rooms without a view. (I was grateful that the US ambassador lent me his bulletproof car for one trip to the airport, which was controlled by UN forces. Another time, I made that trip inside an armored personnel carrier.) 

Unbeknownst to Goldstone, around the time he obtained the indictments of Karadžić and Mladić, Bosnian Serb forces executed roughly eight thousand Muslim men and boys captured from the town of Srebrenica. The massacre was discovered some weeks after it took place, exposed by a journalist for The Christian Science Monitor, David Rohde, and by satellite photos that the US government made public. Goldstone responded by indicting Karadžić and Mladić again for these additional crimes. The two sets of indictments made it impossible for them to travel to Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995 to take part in negotiations to end the war in Bosnia. The Bosnian Serbs empowered Milošević to represent their interests at Dayton, and it was he who signed the peace agreement. (Milošević himself was subsequently indicted for crimes committed during the war in Kosovo, but died before his trial was completed.)

Under the Dayton agreement, about 60,000 NATO troops were deployed to Bosnia to enforce the peace. Although these troops were furnished with photos of the accused war criminals indicted by the ICTY, they did not make arrests even when they encountered them, apparently fearing retaliation from Serbs. All this began to change after Tony Blair became prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1997 and appointed Robin Cook as foreign secretary. Cook was intent on cooperating with the ICTY, and under his direction British troops in Bosnia started making arrests. When the British forces suffered no retaliation, American troops and those from some other countries began to follow suit. Over time the ICTY was able to obtain custody of all 161 surviving indictees, many of whom were handed over by the governments of the countries of the former Yugoslavia under strong pressure from the European Union.

Karadžić and Mladić were among the last to be taken into custody. Karadžić was captured in Serbia in 2008. Trained as a psychiatrist before he entered politics, he had been living in the Belgrade area under an assumed name since the end of the war, heavily disguised and apparently earning a living as a practitioner of alternative medicine. Now eighty-one, he is serving his life sentence in a British prison.

Mladić was not captured until 2011. He, too, had been hiding under a different name, but otherwise had lived openly at the home of a family member in northern Serbia. On at least a couple of occasions he took part in activities that must have attracted public attention, as when he attended a football match in Belgrade. Perhaps he felt safe in the knowledge that many of his fellow Serbs regarded him as a hero for his military exploits. It seems likely, however, that the Serbian government facilitated his arrest, which was an essential condition of the country eventually securing EU membership. When he was arrested he offered no resistance, perhaps recognizing that his capture was inevitable.

Many human rights advocates hoped that the ICTY’s performance would inaugurate a new era for international justice, in which the world would understand that the kinds of abuses that took place during the wars in the former Yugoslavia would be punished—and in which they would therefore, ultimately, be deterred. There have been some successes. For example, the west African countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone benefitted greatly from a Special Court for Sierra Leone—established jointly by the United Nations and the Sierra Leonean government—which, among other things, convicted former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor in 2012 for his many crimes. He is currently serving out his fifty-year sentence in the United Kingdom.  

This fall the former president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, will go on trial at the International Criminal Court for the extrajudicial killings of many thousands of suspected drug users. Duterte is the highest-profile defendant to be tried by the ICC to date. Meanwhile, the courts of a number of countries, particularly in Europe, have invoked principles of “universal jurisdiction” to hold accountable perpetrators of grave abuses apprehended outside their own countries. Universal jurisdiction was the legal basis many years ago when Israel apprehended Adolf Eichmann and tried and executed him for his central part in carrying out the Holocaust. A more recent case involved the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter by the armed forces of El Salvador. Decades later a Salvadoran official implicated in the murders, Inocente Orlando Montano Morales, was discovered living in the US by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability and extradited to Spain, where several important universal jurisdiction cases have taken place. A Spanish court convicted him and sentenced him to 133 years in prison.

Yet overall, it is impossible to say that the cause of international justice has advanced in the manner that the ICTY seemed to herald. Great crimes have been committed in recent years, or are continuing to be committed, in countries like Syria, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Turkey, and Yemen, by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, by China against the Uyghurs, and by others elsewhere, without a meaningful prospect that the principal perpetrators will be brought to justice. With the ICC under threat from a rogue US administration, universal accountability seems still remote. In hindsight, the ICTY appears not as a forerunner to a new era but as a great exception in the history of world affairs.