War on Trial: Justice for Ex-Yugoslavia

Cities under siege, families displaced, prisoners parked in concentration camps: in 1993, while the conflict in the former Yugoslavia had been raging for two years, world public opinion became aware of the atrocities committed. The United Nations set up a special tribunal in The Hague to judge war crimes committed by the belligerents, a first since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. There was talk of ethnic cleansing by the Serbian army, while the Bosnian side itself was guilty of serious crimes. The Blue Helmets dispatched to the area were unable to prevent the massacre of several thousand men in Srebrenica in 1995. This first part looks back at the chronology of the Bosnian war and the beginnings of a long trial.