By Dale McFeatters
Come next month, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic will have been on trial for war crimes for three years, and no conclusion to the trial appears in sight.
He and his former military commander, Ratko Mladic, are being tried by a special war-crimes tribunal established by the U.N. Security Council in 1993. Both men were indicted shortly thereafter.
Karadzic was apprehended in Serbia in July 2008, hiding more or less in plain sight as a practitioner of alternative medicine. Mladic was arrested in Serbia in May 2011, having been on the run since a 78-day NATO bombing campaign forced an end to the Balkans war.
The pair introduced the term "ethnic cleansing" to the lexicon of atrocities, and thousands still remain missing and unaccounted for from that brutal little war. According to the Associated Press, the tribunal has dozens of former senior political and military leaders awaiting trial for atrocities committed during the period 1991 to 1995.
But the process of trying them is painfully and laboriously slow, unnecessarily so. It is unfair to the defendants and to the families of the victims waiting for some kind of justice.
The trial of alleged war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, the president of Yugoslavia and then, after the breakup of the federation, Serbia, lasted five years. It might still be going on if he hadn't died of a heart attack in his cell before a verdict was reached.
These tribunals are important because they are the only international mechanism for prosecuting war crimes, particularly if the defendant's home country is uninterested or unwilling to do so.
Perhaps there's some hope. The tribunal has just rejected an appeal by Karadzic to start his trial over again from the beginning. There has to be a faster, more effective way of handling these trials without sacrificing fairness and due process.
Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).
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