The West has appeared to signal it will go all the way in its struggle against Yugoslavia, with the indictment for war crimes of its president, Slobodan Milosevic.
The indictment yesterday by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal means in effect that there can be no negotiating with Mr Milosevic on any peace settlement at the end of the present Kosovo crisis. In effect, he must go for Serbia to come to a peace table.
Pressure from the United States and other powers helped persuade the tribunal, which is funded mostly by Western nations, not to indict Mr Milosevic for war crimes during the Bosnian war, allowing him to negotiate the Dayton Peace Agreement which ended it in 1995.
While the tribunal is supposedly independent, its officials have complained of pressures put on them to indict some people and ignore others. This indictment comes after some intense lobbying from the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Canadian Ms Louise Arbour.
She toured NATO capitals last month urging members to grant her the budget to launch a major investigation of war crimes committed in the Kosovan conflict. Her officials said she was worried that if NATO decided on a compromise, it would not want war crimes indictments levelled against the people wit whom it wanted to sign a deal. Ms Arbour however appears to have come out smiling, with aids to the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, publicly supporting her after a meeting on April 30th.
More indictments are likely against leading Serb officials, meaning that any "normalisation" of relations with Serbia, which will be desperate for reconstruction finance in the years to come, will depend on a clean-out of the people who run the country. The indictment comes with the Anglo-Americans apparently growing in confidence after a shaky few weeks of watching NATO partners call for a halt to air strikes amid embarrassing bombing mistakes.
Yesterday, the US Deputy Secretary of State, Mr Strobe Talbott, reinforced the hard line, insisting that NATO's original conditions for a halt to bombing could not be watered down. This, plus Mr Mil osevic's indictment, will give Russia little room for manoeuvre as it seeks to broker a peace plan for Kosovo - officially, they, as UN members, should probably not be meeting with an indicted war criminal.
Whether Mr Milosevic will ever be arrested is another matter. More than half the 78 Bosnians, mostly Serbs, indicted for war crimes in 1995 remain free, inclu ding the former commander of the army, Gen Ratko Mladic, and Bosnian Serb president Mr Rado van Karadzic.
Sending NATO troops into Belgrade to arrest Mr Milosevic will fill commanders with horror, but the failure to "hand him over" may see Serbia cut off from aid for many years.
AFP, Reuters add: Belgrade's ambassador to the UN last night said the UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia's indictment of Yugoslav leader President Slobodan Milosevic was "politically motivated". Mr Vladislav Ivanovic told BBC television in an interview from New York that the tribunal was "engaged in demoni sing the president of a sovereign country" who was resisting NATO "aggression in a very heroic way".
"This is motivated to help turn the population against our president and the government, as some warmongers in Washington, London and Brussels are still toying with the idea of provoking an uprising," he said.
Meanwhile, the chief prosecutor for the UN Yugoslav tribunal, Ms Louise Arbour, seemed to be headed for a new job earlier this month, but now finds herself at the centre of a case involving one of the court's most wanted men.
Two weeks ago the Canadian Prime Minister, Mr Jean Chretien, said Ms Arbour was a leading candidate to join the Supreme Court of Canada and might soon want to leave her post in The Hague. She has worked tirelessly for the past three years, pursuing some of Europe's most reviled figures as chief prosecutor for the UN tribunal.
Canadian Foreign Affairs Department spokesman Mr Jim Wright said Ms Arbour had shown "true grit". "She has stood up to Yugoslav authorities, she has stood up to Bosnian authorities, she has stood up to Croatian authorities, and she has turned the court into a very, very effective court for international justice." Ms Arbour, then 49, took over in 1996 as head of the UN mission to bring to justice those responsible for genocide and massa cre in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, replacing Judge Richard Goldstone, who returned to South Africa's constitutional court.
She saw the Yugoslav tribunal, the first international body for the prosecution of war crimes since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the second World War, as "the most important chapter in the history of criminal and international humanitarian law".
Acutely aware of mounting frustration at delays in arresting indicted war criminals, she promised tougher action. "There is no single issue more important to the survival of this tribunal . . . than the actual arrest of indicted war criminals. That will be my very top priority," she said before her appointment.