War crime hunters have head start

By Tony Wall

A New Zealand police detective now leading the hunt for war criminals in the former Yugoslavia believes his organisation is better placed to investigate atrocities in Kosovo than it was in Bosnia.

Steve Upton, formerly a detective senior sergeant with the Otahuhu police, took leave to become an investigation commander with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

He is in charge of investigating war crimes committed in Bosnia during the early '90s and has seconded some of his investigators to look at the Kosovo crisis.

Two other former Otahuhu detectives, Paul Basham and Brett Simpson, are also with the tribunal. Mr Basham is in charge of the file on Goran Jelisic - known as "Adolf the Serb" - who is standing trial for genocide.

Mr Upton said this week that he and Mr Simpson were due to fly to Bosnia from their base at the Hague in the Netherlands to continue investigating military and political leadership cases. He said investigators were in a better position to investigate incidents from the Kosovo crisis, although it would be an enormous task.

"We know how to do it now. I think Bosnia has been a training ground for us. We started three years behind the ball there and we're still playing catchup ... Even in the last year we're still finding out things that happened in Bosnia that we never knew before."

But Mr Upton said that in Kosovo, investigators were on the ground while the conflict was at its height.

The international community was providing investigators with a lot of good information, and that included media organisations. "As the information comes off the television we can expect to be informed quickly, and even receive videotape."

He said the enormity of the situation in Kosovo, with potentially hundreds of thousands of people as either victims of or witnesses to war crimes, was daunting.

"Everyone is a potential source of information for us. The major difficulty is working out systems to locate and interview the relevant witnesses to specific acts, and then working out systems to find out where they'll be in six months."

He said it would be relatively easy to track witnesses if they went back to Kosovo, but if they were shipped off around the world it would be a "massive logistics problem." But the advantage in speaking to witnesses in far-away countries - which in the past had included New Zealand and Australia - was that they felt safe to talk about what they had seen.

Mr Upton said parts of Bosnia were still extremely volatile and he and his staff had to be careful.

"[In some places] it's very, very dangerous and difficult ... We have to be very careful about where we go and which roads to go down and which ones not to go down."

He said the war crimes investigators could not do their work without the support of Nato forces as escorts.