ONE PEACEFUL SUMMER'S day in July 1997, two years after the end of the Bosnian war, a policeman called Simo Drljaca went fishing by a lake near Prijedor with his fourteen-year-old son. Suddenly he heard a rustling in the bushes, and saw a group of soldiers running towards him, brandishing their weapons. He instinctively reached for his gun and fired off a shot, grazing one soldier's thigh; in an instant, a sniper took aim and killed him. Two helicopters arrived at the scene, and the bereaved adolescent boy was bundled in next to his dead father's body.

The soldiers involved were members of 9 SFOR and had been sent to arrest Drljaca and bring him before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to be tried. Shockingly, the ICTY's chief prosecutor, Louise Arbour, reacted to the murder of a suspect, which should have been a