Special edition: The prosecutor and the war criminal

A key witness at the international tribunal for the war in the former Yugoslavia — and a war criminal himself — testifies in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

The World

April 25, 2022

By Chris Harland-Dunaway

Bosnian Muslim women, and survivors of the Srebrenica massacre carry photos of relatives and display a banner with names of missing relatives, during a peaceful protest walk, in Tuzla, 72 kilometers north of Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, April 12, 2010. Survivors of war crimes committed during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war say the victims of ongoing human rights abuses in Ukraine should learn from their experience of fighting for justice, but that they must first make peace with the fact that reaching it will inevitably be a lengthy and painful process. It took decades to arrest and try the wartime Bosnian Serb leaders, and three decades since the start of that war more than 7,000 people remain unaccounted-for.

The effort to document war crimes in Ukraine has gotten strong international support and the International Criminal Court is currently on the ground investigating. But what does it actually take to put a former leader on trial at The Hague? Before the International Criminal Court existed, there was the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The marquee case was the trial of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, the so-called “Butcher of the Balkans.” The World’s Chris Harland-Dunaway tells the story of two men from the court: a prosecutor and an insider who flipped on Milosevic.