In the autumn of 1991, a Serbian politician named Vojislav Seselj arrived in the city of Vukovar, on the Croatian side of the River Danube. Serbian militias were attacking Vukovar, intent on expanding the borders of their state. Under Yugoslavia’s communist regime, Seselj (pronounced “Sheshel”) had been imprisoned for his nationalist views. Now, as the Yugoslav Federation split and ethnic nationalism became the guiding principle of politics, he had become a hero. He’d come to Vukovar, then being “cleansed” of Croats, to raise morale among the Serbs, to make speeches and to enrol members in what would come to be called the Serb Radical party, which he would come to lead.

This much is undisputed. Everything else is. And it’s the everything else that is now grinding its way through a big grey building in the diplomatic quarter of The Hague, the Netherlands’ seat of government. The building is the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It is the place where former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was tried, and where – in a prison nearby, in March 2006 – he died of a heart attack. It is also where wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whose arrest was announced this week, is expected to be tried. The ICTY is the expression of a great, end-of-communism hope: that justice could be international, and that evildoers would have no hiding place.