ABSTRACT
Whereas KFOR responded fairly quickly and effectively to the request from Del Ponte, the Prosecutor of the ICTY, to detain indicted war criminals residing in KFOR’s area of deployment,41 their colleagues from IFOR and SFOR in BosniaHerzegovina were much less successful in fulfilling ICTY expectations. Chapters 5 and 6 showed that it was not only factors such as an inadequate mandate that hindered the peace enforcers in this task. In the case of IFOR, the soldiers often encountered indicted war criminals while carrying out their ordinary duties and hence, detaining them would have been within the powers granted by their mandate, but they still did not attempt to detain them. Similarly, though SFOR began to carry out detention operations and managed to complete many successfully, the mission never became fully committed to the task. Thus the experiences of IFOR and SFOR indicates that the involvement of peace enforcement soldiers in such detentions is also influenced by political considerations. This chapter identifies some of the most important of these in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The chapter also discusses the considerations in their temporal and territorial context.
