For war-crimes tribunals, 'justice' is a relative term

Sometimes they would arrest people and then demand money from relatives for their release. Another son found himself in that predicament twice.

"They decided to swoop in and catch as many young people as possible. But when I saw they had gathered 300 boys, I calmed down and said, 'surely they will be released soon,' " the elder Salwari says.

But two weeks later, Talib Shah's body was returned to them. He had been packed into an airless storage container, along with several hundreds of others, where he died of suffocation.

Author Ahmed Rashid, in his book "Taliban," documents hundreds of deaths that took place in this manner. Like the Khmer Rouge, whose files show orders to club victims to death rather than waste bullets on them, the policy appears to be deliberate - a sort of low-tech gas chamber. "The use of containers was particularly horrific, and they were to be used increasingly as a method of killing by both sides," Mr. Rashid writes.

Some 700 Hazara from this area died this way, the Salwaris say, about 300 of them on the day their son was arrested. Today, the idea of justice seems remote.

But "when the court is established to try those people, I know that I will have some evidence to give them, because I can point them to the people who had a hand in killing my brother," says Said Arabshah Salwari.

The Khmer Rouge trial was to be a hybrid tribunal, one that would include international as well as Cambodian judges, and it would be held in Cambodia. At Cambodia's insistence, there would be one more local judge, giving it, not the UN, ultimate control over the outcome.

Moreover, the hybrid trial was to be held in Cambodia, to help people see and feel the process of justice - and help instill still-absent respect for law. "This case belongs to the public, not the Cambodian and UN officials," says an exasperated Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which is beseeching the UN to come back to the negotiating table.

War crimes experts say that does not bode well for countries that need to bring accountability after atrocities - but which haven't got nearly as much attention as the Balkans, in part because the concept of genocide in Europe haunted the West more than it did in, say, Rwanda. There, the trial process has been so slow - and the number of cases so overwhelming - that they are now being referred topre-colonial tribal courts. In Sierra Leone, the government has been able to come to an agreement with the UN - largely based on the formula worked out for Cambodia - but funding for the tribunal has been difficult to secure.

An important possibility for future trials is the creation of an International Criminal Court, which only needs eight more signatories to go into effect. For member states, this would eliminate the need to secure funding and negotiate agreements for each ad hoc tribunal, streamlining the process. But this only applies to crimes committed after the creation of the court, unless decided otherwise by the UN Security Council.

"Its jurisdiction is fairly limited," says Diane Orentlicher, professor of law at American University. "After a period of atrocity there has to be some form of justice to regain entry to the international community, but also for a country to get itself on a solid foundation," she says. "The notion of an international tribunal is a symbol of that, but I don't think it makes sense to assume that it's the best approach for all countries," she adds, pointing to the alternative such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. "An international tribunal is never the right approach when a local government can do it."

But in Afghanistan, where provincial governors have already made amnesty deals, there is skepticism that a fair tribunal could work without foreign help.

"After my son's death, my heart is broken, and I don't go anywhere," says Salwari. "If all the trees of Afghanistan were pens and all the water of the rivers were ink and all the plains were sheets of paper, it still wouldn't be enough to explain what the Taliban did to this country."

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