WASHINGTON - The blue-helmeted United Nations soldier stood at attention and beside him a snowman, made up like a soldier too, snapping a firm salute.

The scene was in the hills outside Sarajevo a decade ago, in the shaky first days of peace after a war that had ravaged Bosnia and the Balkans for more than three years. Then, the snowman-soldier summed up what had been a mostly symbolic response by the U.N. and world.

Nearly a quarter of a million people had died, some 7,000 of them in a single week in the nearby village of Srebrenica when Bosnian Serb soldiers rounded up every man and boy they could find and systematically killed them all.

Last week, at the 10th anniversary of the massacre, there were signs of more substantial engagement - a region still at peace, reconstruction efforts backed by $5 billion in international aid, and a war crimes tribunal that has so far indicted some 162 individuals, among them former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

Victims' relatives from St. Louis and around the world were on hand in Srebrenica for the anniversary Monday. Most poignant of all, perhaps, was the presence of the current president of Serbia, Boris Tadic.

"He didn't say anything but he was there," said Leila Sadat, a Washington University law professor and also director of the Summer Institute for Global Justice in Utrecht, Netherlands.

"Healing takes a long time but acknowledgment is the first step," she said, noting that without the work of the tribunal, former Yugoslavia Serb leaders like Tadic would still be denying what happened in places like Srebrenica.

Many are in denial still, among them the parliament of Serbia and the Serbian caucus of the Bosnian parliament, both of which recently rejected proposed resolutions denouncing the Srebrenica massacre. The Bosnian Serbs' wartime leader, Radovan Karadzic, remains at large, and so does the general directly responsible for Srebrenica, Ratko Mladic, a full 10 years after they were charged with genocide by the Hague-based tribunal.

Carla del Ponte, the tribunal's chief prosecutor, refused to participate in the Srebrenica commemoration because she believes Karadzic and Mladic are being protected by the governments of Serbia and its allies in the region.

"It's a protest, a way to record to everyone that the job has not been done," said tribunal spokesperson Florence Hartmann in a telephone interview from The Hague. "It's a failure for the tribunal, yes, but also for the international community. It did not succeed in protecting a population (in Srebrenica) that was under express U.N. protection, and now for 10 years it has failed to bring the main culprits to justice."

Handing over the accused

The administration of President George W. Bush believes that after years of resistance, Serbia's government and its Serb allies in Bosnia-Herzegovina are beginning to cooperate with the war crimes tribunal.

A dozen indicted war-crimes suspects surrendered in the past six months, bringing to 152 the number of people charged with war crimes in the former Yugoslavia who are either in custody at the Hague, free on bail pending trial, or already convicted and in prison.

Another 10, among them Mladic and Karadzic, are under indictment but have not yet surrendered or been captured. NATO forces in Bosnia arrested Karadzic's son Aleksandar last month, vowing to hold him until he produced information leading to his father. Mladic is believed to be in Serbia, where officials have said they anticipate an arrest soon.

In June, noting that progress, the administration released $10 million in aid to Serbia that had been suspended last January. But officials stressed that true normalization depends on the Serbian government doing more, starting with the handover of Mladic and Karadzic.

"It's long overdue," State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters at a briefing last Monday. "We want to see them face justice for their crimes, and we certainly hope that the government in Serbia and the governments elsewhere in the region will do everything that they can to see that they are brought to justice and that they are held accountable for the crimes they've committed."

It was outrage over Srebrenica that finally prompted then-President Bill Clinton to approve stepped-up NATO bombing of Serb positions. Within four months, by November 1995, U.S.-sponsored peace talks in Dayton, Ohio produced an agreement under which Bosnia was divided into a Serb Republic and a Muslim-Croat Federation.

The agreement was enforced by 60,000 NATO troops. Initially one-third of them were American. By 2004 most of the U.S. troops had withdrawn; responsibility for security was left with some 7,500 European Union soldiers.

U.S. withdrawal

Yet even as a million refugees returned home, half of those displaced by the war, Bosnia and its Balkan neighbors remained deeply scarred. Some experts on the region worry that the Bush administration, distracted by Iraq and the war on terrorism, is pressing to disengage from the Balkans too fast.

"There is a danger that the United States is withdrawing too rapidly," says a report last month by the Council on Foreign Relations co-authored by William L. Nash, former commander of U.S. forces in Bosnia.

The report notes that U.S. aid to the western Balkans is dropping fast, to $264 million in the current fiscal year from $442 million three years ago. Aid to Bosnia over that period has dropped fastest of all, by 65 percent, to $23.4 million. U.S. troop levels are at roughly 2,000 - some 1,800 in Kosovo and 250 in Bosnia - down from almost 20,000 in 1996.

In the breakaway Serb republic of Kosovo, ethnic Albanians are pressing for full independence while minority ethnic Serbs - some of them complicit in the so-called "ethnic cleansing" that led to U.S. and NATO military intervention in 1999 - say they are now subject to similar mistreatment themselves.

The province's prime minister, former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Ramush Haradinaj, resigned in March and turned himself in to the Hague tribunal after being indicted for war crimes.

R. Nicholas Burns, undersecretary of state for political affairs, has said the United Nations and the European Union should take the lead in talks later this year to determine the final status of Kosovo. Nash's report says the administration needs to do more, that it should join the European Union in pressing for full Kosovo independence but conditioned on guarantees of minority Serb rights.

The report says there should be carrots for the Serbian government too, most notably an acceleration in long-promised negotiations for Serbian membership in the European Union. The report acknowledges, however, that no such talks can begin so long as Ratko Mladic is at large and believed to be in Serbia.

Lingering tensions

In Bosnia and Herzegovina itself there has been considerable progress in the past two years, especially in the consolidation of Bosnian Serb and Bosnian-Croat military units into a single army and comparable integration of the previously separate intelligence services.

The improved security situation is reflected in decreased numbers of external peacekeeping forces - from the 1996 peak of 20,000 to 7,000 today - and the successful hand-off last December from NATO command to European Union.

Yet parallel municipal and educational institutions based on ethnicity remain the norm, a legacy of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. Also the norm: rampant corruption and a moribund economy, with unemployment hovering near 40 percent. In late May, even as preparations were under way for the Srebrenica commemoration, the Republika Srpksa parliament voted to reject the planned integration of its Bosnian Serb police units into a single, all-Bosnia force.

Patricia M. Wald stepped down as chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1999 to serve a two-year term on the Hague tribunal. In an interview Friday, she said no one should be surprised that tensions linger among groups that shed so much blood just a few years ago.

"You have to be realistic about the time frame in which you can ever expect trials to bring about reconciliation," Wald said. That was true even for the post-World War II trials of Nazis in Nuremberg, the standard ever since for international accountability on crimes of war.

"If you look back at the German experience you see that it wasn't that first generation of Germans and it wasn't even the next generation of Germans who took to heart the lessons of Nuremberg," she said. "It took two generations before you got a really deep or profound change in German attitudes."

Wald predicted something comparable from the current tribunal, even if the most senior architects of the Srebrenica massacre have evaded capture so far.

"A lot of evidence has been taken," she said. "A lot of history has been put on the record."

Reporter Jon Sawyer writes about foreign policy and is the chief of the Post-Dispatch's Washington bureau.

Reporter Jon Sawyer
E-mail: jsawyer@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 202-298-6880