War In The Balkans: One tiny woman against the war criminals

FATE HAS presented Louise Arbour, a Canadian judge, with the biggest and the most complex job in the world today.

Is it humanly possible to enter a devastated landscape of inaccessible mountains and remote valleys, containing scores of burnt-out and deserted cities, towns and villages and treat it like one vast, self-contained crime scene? Can you hope to question thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of people who have been brutalised beyond description and are even now being scattered to the far corners of the earth? Where do you start to dig for the secret burial pits of uncountable victims of summary execution in a score of regions?

And even when you have done all that, in a process that could take months and even years, will you ever be able to launch investigators up the long, secretive and murderous chain of command of a marauding army of gangsters and looters and end up delivering an indictment alleging genocide at the door of a head of state?

That is the task facing Ms Arbour, a Canadian appeal judge who years ago was brave, or foolish, enough to take on the job of War Crimes Investigator for the former Yugoslavia for the International War Crimes Commission at The Hague. And, in a feisty and somehow deeply moving performance here yesterday, you felt the faint stirrings of hope that somehow, this time, she just may do it. And somebody will have to pay for all this. Her very presence in Skopje, just a few miles from Kosovo, felt like the first fresh breeze blowing through an abattoir - the firststep towards peace, with the added possibility of justice.

The cynics, and those who demand instant miracles, sneer at Ms Arbour and her pitifully small team of people. They point out that only a handful of low-grade thugs and military nonentities have ever been brought to trial after the bloodbath years of Bosnia and Croatia. They say that she talks a good fight, but delivers little.

There is some truth in this. Crazed generals and gang bosses who run private armies still strut the streets of Belgrade and Pale in Bosnia to this day, despite hundreds of public and secret indictments for their arrest for mass murder, rape and crimes against humanity. But the cynics miss the point.

Ms Arbour and her people have always done their job in the construction of a mountain of evidence. The Canadian judge cannot go out with a gun and arrest these people herself. She has repeatedly stated that the continuing freedom of such men is an affront to human decency and amounts to cowardice on the part of the peace-keeping forces, who now have both the power and the weaponry to arrest them.

And this time, she says, in the matter of Kosovo, things are vastly different. This time the crime scene is largely uncontaminated. The witnesses are giving clear accounts of the madness that fell upon them. Each atrocity can be collated, corroborated and cross-checked. The graves have already been identified. The bodies, and the bullets inside them, are still fresh. And most important of all she has been promised the unlimited manpower, the money and unfettered access to the hundreds of crime scenes in Kosovo.

She has always been a single-minded and forceful juristbut yesterday there was an icy certainty in her words, a steeliness in her manner. Ms Arbour is on a roll, and she knows it. What was once a pale shadow of the great war crimes apparatus that prosecuted the criminals of the Third Reich is now growing in size and judicial power. "I am very, very pleased with what people have been saying to me," she said. "I have been promised unprecedented state co- operation with the investigations into Kosovo.

"We are now a fully mature institution," she said. "And, when the peace- keeping force, in whatever form it takes, enters Kosovo we will be an integral part of it, able to carry out a real-time criminal investigation on a very large scale."

All this is undoubtedly true. In the past week she has swept through half a dozen national capitals and she is being promised everything she demands. Enormous sums ofmoney, the best forensic scientists from the biggest law enforcement agencies, all the sophisticated search and analysis equipment she needs - and, most of all, the right of first access to the crime scenes.

"We must find a way of obtaining credible, usable courtroom product," she said. "The crimes include genocide and crimes against humanity, and there will be extensive homicide investigations and the examining of other crimes like rape, torture, enslavement, deportation and persecution.

"We have to make judgement calls on the amount of detail we can cover - but we must try to be true to history."

She did not try to hide the fact that some of the minor figures involved in the scouring and rape of Kosovo may escape. The actions of individual soldiers or freelance thugs may be impossible to prove. Often such atrocities were committed in darkness, behind the doors of apartments and houses, out in the forests. But the acts themselves form the starting point.

The movements and operation zones of many of the assault groups, especially involving identifiable Serbian army units, are known to intelligence experts - as are the names of their individual commanding officers. And tons of this material has now, for the first time, been given to her.

From this, the trail leads upward. All the way to the top of the heap. And this is the key to the task facing Ms Arbour.

"We will point our efforts all the way up the chain of command," she said. "We will ascertain where the highest level of responsibility is among the political and military structures. We cannot bring charges against governments or organisations, but we can indict people who are part of both of these things. And the charges will be the highest possible, concerned with genocide and crimes against humanity."

The judge bristled at the very suggestion that all of this - all the bloodletting, and bombing, and shattering of an entire race and way of life - could end in the ultimate obscenity, that President Slobodan Milosevic and his cadre make a deal, walk away free, and turn their attention on other places, like Montenegro or Macedonia.

"There will be no deals," she said. It was almost a snarl. "There cannot be deals that would exonerate anybody. We will bring the appropriate charges, framed appropriately, singly and jointly, on the basis of the evidence as we analyse it, and as soon as we are ready. And this will be completely independent to any ongoing discussions related to any peace deal."

She did not mention Mr Milosevic by name. But everybody knew to whom she was referring. A few miles up the road, where about 150,000 Kosovo refugees sweated and waited in the great tented rubbish heaps of the camps, they could not hear her words. But within seconds they were flashing up the wires to Belgrade. Ms Arbour is on the case.

As she strode out of the room disappearing into a media melee, a cameraman who had just finished shooting film of a nine-year-old girl with a three- inch bullet hole in her side, punched the air with delight. "I just want to hug that lady," he said. So did we all.