The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger, book review: Tracking down the tyrants

In July 2008, a flustered old man with a bushy beard and snow-white hair was taken off a number 73 bus heading out into the suburbs of Belgrade. Known as Dragan Dabic, he had spent the past three years earning a living in the Serbian capital as a New Age mystic and healer.

So well disguised was he that the Interpol woman living across the hall in a Belgrade high-rise apartment block never recognised him as Europe's most wanted man. Nor did the patrons of the bar he frequented, where his picture hung on the wall.

The old man's real name was Radovan Karadzic. Leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia, he was indicted for war crimes and genocide after the conflict ended and then spent 12 years on the run. How he and other indictees evaded capture for so long, but were eventually tracked down, is the subject of Julian Borger's gripping book.

Karadzic, his military chief Ratko Mladic, and the Serbian supremo Slobodan Milosevic, all get chapters to themselves. But drawing on a wide variety of sources, many of them anonymous former members of special forces and intelligence agencies, Borger throws his net far wider, recounting multiple episodes in what he says eventually became "the world's most successful manhunt".

Of the 161 indictments handed down by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), every single individual was eventually accounted for, although there were only 65 arrests. Some of those were hard-won. Mladic spent time in an impregnable underground bunker. Others were laughably easy, like the trap set by leasing a property from a suspect and simply arresting him when he came to collect the rent. Yet others were highly imaginative, like the attempted Delta Force ambush using a man in a gorilla suit and a stun grenade.

But what ended as a success included many failures along the way. Not only were the kingpins protected for many years by agencies such as the Serbian army and secret police, but at first, even the Western powers withheld backing for the ICTY, partly for fear that the Dayton Accords might unravel.

For almost two years after Karadzic's indictment, Nato troops turned their backs when his convoy drove brazenly by. That only started to change in the dog days of the Clinton presidency and after Labour's 1997 victory, although even then, the Pentagon's aversion to casualties hampered operations.

Later, more amenable governments in the Balkans played an important part in bringing the last fugitives to justice.

Much of the book reads like a pacy thriller, but Borger's concerns go beyond mere story-telling. The ICTY, he points out, has set several legal precedents, including defining rape as a crime against humanity and holding heads of state to account, as well as providing the basis for the (so far relatively toothless) International Criminal Court.

In the former Yugoslavia itself, the justice it has dispensed helped establish a sustainable peace, even though Borger warns that nationalist sentiments are again on the rise. At worst, he says, in what is a rather sad indictment of our times, the manhunt and subsequent trials ensure that no one can deny that genocide was committed.

Other Press, £17.99. Order at £15.99 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop