War crimes.

The Yugoslav tribunal was set up by the United Nations in 1993. It is the first international body for the prosecution of war criminals since the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II. By 1996, it had charged more than 70 Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims with war crimes.

The tribunal's investigations have mainly involved inquiries against Serbs, who investigators say were bent on clearing entire regions of Muslims and Croats. They used murder and rape as weapons in the process of "ethnic cleansing."

The Bosnian disaster included the killing of as many as 250,000 people; 150 mass graves; more than 900 places of detention, where more than half a million are reported to have been held; an estimated 20,000 women raped and 50,000 tortured. One report described it as a pattern of systematic and meticulous barbarity.

Bosnia's victims, Muslim, Croat, and Serb alike, say there can never be lasting peace in the Balkans if those responsible for the slaughter of civilians are not brought to judgement.

Many say the main purpose of prosecuting war criminals is to pin blame for such crimes on individuals rather than whole nations or ethnic groups. As Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the tribunal explains, "it may help people from feeling they have to collectively seek revenge."

Drazen Erdemovic was the first person involved in the recent Balkan conflict to be convicted of crimes against humanity. In May 1996, the 25-year-old rebel Serb soldier was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his part in the massacre of hundreds of Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995.

(After the fall of Srebrenica, a United Nations-designated safe haven, about 1,200 Muslim men and boys who surrendered to the Bosnian-Serb army were taken by trucks to a farm 70 kilometres away at Pilica. They were lined up, blindfolded, and shot in groups of ten, a process that took five hours.)

Drazen Erdemovic was the first war criminal convicted by the UN court since it was set up in 1993. But he was a lowly soldier who acknowledged his guilt from the start.

Most of those accused of committing war crimes are still at large in the former Yugoslavia. Many of them are living openly and comfortably under the protection of their governments. A human-rights group based in Washington, the Coalition for International Justice, has listed the whereabouts of 37 of them on its Internet site.

The court's main challenge is gaining custody of those accused of giving the orders for the sort of atrocities soldiers such as Mr. Erdemovic carried out. Unless the region's people see justice being done, they could continue to take it into their own hands. The ancient cycle of murder and revenge, atrocity and counter-atrocity, will be endless; which is the way it seems in Africa.

In the African city of Arusha, a similar tribunal is collecting evidence about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. It too believes that truth, justice, and reconciliation have to take place before shattered societies can be rebuilt

The UN's International Criminal Tribunal was established in 1994 to deal with Hutu organizers of the slaughter.

In February 1997, one of the leaders of the genocide that killed as many as a million Rwandan Tutsis was found guilty and sentenced to death by a Kigali court. Frodouald Karamira organized the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in 1994. A businessman and former leader of a Hutu extremist political party, he was tried on more than a dozen charges, including genocide, murder, and crimes against humanity. He was the 12th person to be convicted and condemned to death since trials began in late December 1996. Ultimately, hundreds of Hutus could face the death penalty for their part in the massacre.

Some wonder if the death penalty will help or hinder Rwanda's search for healing and renewal. Supporters of capital punishment, inside and outside Rwanda, argue that it answers a need for vengeance and retribution. Others say it will only lead to more violence.

Rwanda has already ruled out the death penalty for most of the killers, provided that they were not organizers of the genocide. Opponents think it should be eliminated completely.

On the same continent, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has gone a controversial step further in its move to pardon those guilty of human-rights abuses.

The Truth Commission is investigating apartheid crimes committed between 1960 and 1993. It has powers to grant amnesty (pardon) for crimes if individuals can prove their deeds were committed with a political motive. In December 1996, Brian Mitchell, described as one of the apartheid-era's most notorious killer policemen, walked free from prison after serving just four years of a life sentence for 11 murders: the commission's amnesty committee believed his crimes were committed with a political motive and in the course of his police duties.

Two months earlier, Eugene de Kock, a former police colonel who described himself as apartheid's most effective assassin, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was convicted after a lengthy trial that exposed damning details about the secret war against opponents of South Africa's racist regime.

At the same time, the former chief of South Africa's police force admitted that he had ordered at least two notorious acts of terror, with the approval of cabinet-level officials. The testimony was a major break-through for the Commission in its struggle to connect top officials in the white-minority governments to past brutalities. It was the first time high-level officials were exposed as being at the root of hit squads that were part of the government's campaign to undermine the anti-apartheid movement.

While the Commission might pardon perpetrators who come forward, it's also felt that, by telling their tragic stories, victims will be able to forgive.

However, some victims' families are concerned that the commission's amnesties could rule out criminal or civil proceedings. They want justice and criminal trials, not hearings by a body that would excuse their victimizers merely for admitting their misdeeds. And, they feel the hearings will rob them of their constitutional right to bring a prosecution.

"They are seeking justice, not revenge," says a lawyer representing some of the families.

Others agree that many victims of apartheid--including whites injured and traumatized in black terrorist attacks--are less interested in revenge than a simple public accounting of what happened.

As one black man told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing in Johannesburg, "... it is important for us to know what happened in the past. Only then can we forgive and go forward together."

Truth and forgiveness may be too much to expect from the Commission. But one theory suggests that, if nothing else, it will at least confront apartheid's supporters, the ordinary whites who continually voted its architects back to power, with facts they do not want to know. Perhaps, that will unearth an understanding of the past, help resolve resentments, and calm hostilities.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. An expert on Latin American politics at American University in Washington has been quoted as saying: "Elected governments are now seen as the only legitimate form of government." Research individual countries and report on what is being done to strip the military of its power and why it is happening now.

2. "Truth commissions have the greatest chance of success in societies that have already created a powerful political consensus behind reconciliation, such as South Africa. In places such as Yugoslavia, where the parties have murdered and tortured each other for centuries, the prospects for truth, reconciliation, and justice are much bleaker." Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Discuss.