Julian Borger at the Guardian has written a long and well-sourced piece about the hunt for Bosnian war crimes suspects. It even quotes me a couple of times (no great surprises for diligent readers of this site).

The key policy dilemma point is here, tucked away in the middle of the article:

While deciding to go after the criminals, the Nato powers had chosen the more cautious course of going after the smaller fry first, on the grounds that they would be less well-protected, a decision many later regretted because it allowed the bigger fish to go into hiding

In most if not all situations there is a spectrum of policy outcome options, ranging from Utterly Awful to Deliriously Wonderful. Politicians and officials know that they really don’t want the former and are unlikely to get the latter, so they settle for a range of options somewhere in the middle.

The thing to understand is that within that range of options (which usually is all about balancing risks and short-term v longer-term likely upsides/downsides of different choices) reasonable people might disagree on where the ‘right’ choice is, but also agree that another point in that range is in itself a reasonable choice, all things considered.

So in Bosnia in 1996 our leaders had a very tricky operational decision to take.

Do they try to arrest the biggest ICTY indictees first? Upside: they deal with the worst suspects immediately, encouraging lesser suspects to surrender. Downside: the biggest fish are well protected and likely to resist – the operation might go wrong and prompt wider protests which could destabilise the peace process itself.

Or do they go for ‘lesser’ indictees, get some easy runs on the scoreboard and then work their way briskly up towards the biggest fish? Upside: less risky, therefore more chance to plan harder operations in the light of experience – unlikely to rock the peace process. Downside: suggests lack of resolve – the biggest fish may go underground and make life very difficult as we try to catch them.

In other words, once it was decided in principle to arrest ICTY indictees, all sorts of non-trivial policy and operational issues then presented themselves.

As Julian Borger describes, the steady-as-she-goes cautious option prevailed (as it usually does): ‘lesser’ indictees first. 

But the predictable (if not quite predicted) result of that was the bizarre spectacle of Karadzic and Mladic evading arrest for a startling 14 or so years, even though they were lurking in the Serbia/Bosnia/Montenegro area.

I don’t recall being consulted about the pros and cons of arresting Big v Lesser ICTY indictees first. My instinct, I think (hope), would have been to go for some pretty Big ones, as that would send a signal of determination precisely because it was more ‘risky’. But I was pleased when the decison was taken to start arresting lesser indictees, and then delighted when the first operation finally unfolded, even though the ICTY indictee concerned, a Serb called Simo Drljaca, died when resisting arrest by the SAS.

This first operation was notable also because the mad Bosniac/Muslim media in Sarajevo quickly denounced it as a typical British pro-Serb plot, designed to rally Republika Srpska opposition to Dayton by making Drljaca a martyr. These ravings played into the background to Robin Cook’s first dramatic visit to Sarajevo in 1997.

Anyway, all ICTY indictees have been taken to The Hague to face justice. The whole process has been staggeringly expensive and in many ways deeply unsatisfactory. 

Yet through ICTY the facts of the former Yugoslavia conflict have been aired and argued about in stunning detail. If anything the unfairness of the process lies in the fact that it was too narrow: many senior Bosniacs and Croats with a case to answer – including Izetbegovic and Tudjman themselves – were never called upon to explain themselves and answer serious accusations against them.

Still. Rough justice better than no justice?