WANTED! FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

DICTATORS USED TO BE ABLE TO KILL AND TORTURE THEIR OWN PEOPLE WITHOUT FEAR OF PROSECUTION. NOT ANYMORE.

After Antonio Ozimica was arrested in the fall of 1973, he was hung from his wrists and left that way for hours at a time. His captors, the soldiers of Chilean President General Augusto Pinochet, dunked him repeatedly in a tub of water. As he gasped for air, they pulled him up by his hair and smashed metal plates against his ears until blood poured from them. The violence left him nearly deaf and with no feeling in his right hand.

His crime? He had been a low-level accountant in the government of Chile's previous President, Salvador Allende, the elected head of state whom Pinochet's troops had killed in a coup a few weeks earlier. Unlike thousands of other victims of the Pinochet (peen-oh-shet) regime, the shattered accountant managed to escape with his life. But, he says, "the torture made me hate life."

In the past, torture victims like Ozimica had little hope of ever seeing their attackers brought to justice. But in a recent sea change that has shocked longtime observers of the international scene, a new movement to hunt down dictators and bring them to justice has quietly gathered momentum. International courts, the United Nations, prosecutors in numerous countries, and human rights groups are flashing a giant "Dictators Beware" message around the world.

"This is extremely powerful," says Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas section of Human Rights Watch, a human rights watchdog group. "Here you are targeting the rulers themselves. This is serious business."

Both current and former dictators have been targeted by these modern-day bounty hunters. Pinochet himself was held under house arrest for a year and a half in England on torture charges lodged by a Spanish judge. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic (mee-LOH-suh-vitch), has been charged by a United Nations tribunal with war crimes committed last year during his army's invasion of Kosovo. And former Indonesian President Suharto, whose troops have been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, is now under investigation for stealing billions of dollars from the Indonesian treasury during his reign.

STOPPED AT THE BORDER

Until recently, the hunt to put dictators behind bars always stopped at the border--no country wanted to interfere in another country's internal affairs. But that began to change after World War II, when Nazi Germany's mass murder of 6 million Jews and 3 million other civilians shocked the world into action.

In the late 1940s, the victorious Allies tried Nazi leaders for war crimes. The United Nations adopted two agreements in 1948: the Genocide Convention, which outlaws genocide, the systematic destruction of any ethnic or religious group, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that torture and persecution violate basic human rights.

But international law still had no teeth. Only in the 1990s did a combination of news headlines, pressure from international rights groups, and changes in international law add a bite to its bark.

The news headlines came from Yugoslavia and the African nation of Rwanda, where government forces attacked rival ethnic groups, killing hundreds of thousands and creating millions of refugees. Under pressure from rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, the United Nations set up war-crimes tribunals to arrest and prosecute those responsible in both cases.

ETHNIC CLEANSING, PART 2

When Yugoslav forces launched a new campaign of "ethnic cleansing" last year by ejecting 800,000 Kosovo Albanians from their homes and killing 4,000 or more, the war-crimes tribunal indicted, or charged, Milosevic for the expulsions and murders.

Human rights law is still imperfect. Because no nation has been willing to invade Yugoslavia to arrest Milosevic and bring him to trial, he remains in power. But his indictment has badly damaged Yugoslavia's international position, and Milosevic cannot travel outside Yugoslavia without fear of arrest.

Maverick Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon opened another front in the war on dictators a year and a half ago. Using a Spanish law that outlaws political torture and murder, whether they happen on Spanish soil or not, he asked Britain to arrest Pinochet when the general flew to England for surgery late in 1998. That began a year-and-a-half-long legal battle that ended March 1, when Pinochet was allowed to fly back to Chile for health reasons.

A BIG CASE

But whether or not Pinochet is ever prosecuted, Geoffrey Bindman, a lawyer representing the human rights group Amnesty International, calls his arrest "the most important case in human rights law this century." Because many nations have adopted the UN conventions against torture and genocide as part of their national laws, dictators will no longer be able to order mass killings or torture without fearing punishment for their crimes.

Not everyone agrees with the new ways of treating heads of state. Some critics say that only leaders of less-powerful nations need fear such prosecutions. Otherwise, they say, why shouldn't prosecutors charge President Clinton with killing civilians in the U.S. bombings of Iraq in 1998, or with the estimated 500 civilian deaths during the Kosovo bombing campaign?

Furthermore, critics say, the threat of punishment afterward could make it even harder to dislodge a current dictator from power. And from Indonesia to Chile, some people complain that putting dictators on trial for past abuses just reopens a country's old wounds.

But for the victims of political violence, the truth about past abuses leads to freedom. After Pinochet was charged with his crimes, Viviana Uribe, now 48 and a human rights worker, revealed to her daughter for the first time the rapes and electrical shocks she suffered at the hands of Pinochet's henchmen. "Ever since I heard Pinochet would be judged for his crimes," she says, "it has been a tremendous relief for me."

SLOBODAN MILOSEVIC

Yugoslav President

Slobodan Milosevic won't go away. For his role in the Yugoslav invasion of Kosovo last spring, he became the first sitting head of state ever indicted on war crimes. He has led his sad, beleaguered country into three wars in the last 10 years, losing each of them, most spectacularly in Kosovo, when NATO war planes left Yugoslavia's infrastructure in smoking ruins. Yet he stays in power.

"Milosevic remains the master of the political game," says one of his opponents in Belgrade, "We should be able to beat him easily, but he manipulates and discredits us."

A strong Serbian nationalist, Milosevic rose to prominence when he became President of Serbia in 1989. Serbia was a part of Yugoslavia, which was then starting to unravel. In 1991, when the Yugoslav republic of Croatia declared its independence, Milosevic backed Serb rebels there. In 1992, when the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina voted for independence, Milosevic unleashed an effort to kill or expel the region's Muslims in a brutal policy known as ethnic cleansing. Serbia was forced to agree to a peace plan with Bosnia and Croatia in 1995.

In 1997, Milosevic declared himself President of Yugoslavia (now with only two republics left, Serbia and Montenegro) and that year attacked the Serbian province of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians had organized an independence revolt. The result: an estimated 800,000 Albanians were driven from their homes, and 4,000 or more were killed.

A 72-day U.S.-led NATO bombing attack forced Milosevic to recall his troops, but not before he was indicted on charges of murder and the forced eviction of thousands from their homes. But few observers think the crafty Milosevic, with his hand firmly on the rudder of state, will face the charges anytime soon.

AUGUSTO PINOCHET

Former Chilean President

When Britain's Scotland Yard detectives arrested General Augusto Pinochet in London a year and a half ago on charges of torture and murder, the elderly Chilean general was indignant. "I am being humiliated," he grumbled. "I am a general, 64 years' service, I'm a gentleman who knows about honor."

To his supporters, Pinochet is an unfairly harassed hero. When he helped lead the coup that overthrew the elected government of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973, a coup in which Allende was killed, his supporters say he stopped Allende from creating a Communist regime in Chile.

A CAREER OF KILLINGS

But to his detractors, he is the corrupt general responsible for the torture of 40,000 Chileans and t he murder of another 4,000 during his 16-year rule. Lawyers for human rights groups called the charges against him "some of the most serious allegations of crime ever to come before English criminal courts."

In 1973, fearful of Allende's plans to socialize Chile's economy, Pinochet, then the commander of the armed forces, overthrew Allende's government. He quickly arrested Allende's supporters, torturing and murdering thousands. In 1988, under international pressure, Pinochet allowed free elections and was promptly voted out of office. He finally stepped down in 1990, in exchange for having himself appointed senator for life, a position that guaranteed immunity from prosecution in Chile's judicial system.

But when Pinochet traveled to England for back surgery late in 1998, British authorities arrested him on murder and torture charges lodged by a Spanish judge. British judges ruled that Pinochet didn't have immunity from Spain's prosecution, but on March 1, after doctors declared him medically unfit to stand trial, Pinochet, now 84, was sent back to Chile.

Although he left England a free man, his arrest strengthened the opposition at home. Thousands of protesters have marched to demand his prosecution, his senate seat is in jeopardy, and a Chilean judge has found a way around Pinochet's immunity and will try to prosecute him there. Pinochet may never spend a day in jail, but he faces months, if not years, of legal battles trying to stay out.

SUHARTO

Former Indoneasian President

A wave of student-led protests brought Indonesian President Suharto down in 1998, after 32 years of dictatorial rule. But when he turned power over to his hand-picked vice president, he never thought he would be prosecuted for any of his excesses.

However, in elections last fall a rival politician, Abdurrahman Wahid, won the presidency--and Suharto's cloak of invincibility has started to fray.

Suharto, who like many Indonesians uses one name, came to power in 1965 when, as an army general, he put down a coup attempt. The government blamed the revolt on Communists, and in the aftermath, Suharto's military massacred more than 300,000 people, including suspected Communists or their sympathizers.

In 1975, Suharto ordered an invasion of East Timor, a neighboring island province. During the next decade, Indonesian military oppression there, ranging from executions to tortures to forced evacuations and famines, resulted in the deaths of some 200,000 Timorese.

So far, Suharto hasn't been charged with any of those killings. But the United Nations has investigated the abuses in East Timor, and Suharto could be indicted if he travels outside Indonesia.

The Indonesian government also has begun investigating his financial abuses. Suharto is suspected of conducting a breathtakingly large scheme of graft and corruption by which he enriched himself and his family by billions of dollars. To get an idea of its scale, consider that his youngest son once splurged $40 million to buy the Lamborghini sports-car company.

Suharto's lawyers say that at 78, having suffered a stroke last year, he is too ill to face prosecution. But Wahid's government doesn't seem sympathetic.

Says Wahid's new attorney general, Marzuki Darusman: "We will not tolerate any monkey business anymore."