After three years of mind-numbing savagery, punctuated by four failed international peace plans, the American media have tired of the war in Bosnia.
So it's time for an update.Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, is the only city enjoying a truce of sorts - often violated by snipers and mortar attacks.
Turkey's president had to cancel a visit Monday because Bosnian Serbs refused to guarantee his safety. They shot up a plane carrying Turkish officials and shelled Sarajevo airport.
The Serbs also have resumed ethnic cleansing in northern Banja Luka. The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees says 200 Muslims have fled in the past few days because of nightly grenade attacks, robberies, rapes and other forms of intimidation.
Banja Luka had a prewar population of 500,000 Croats and Muslims, but Serb persecution reduced that number to fewer than 30,000. The full extent of its horrors were first disclosed in 1992, when U.N. peacekeepers found mass graves and skeletal Muslim prisoners held in concentration camps.
The worst of those camps, Omarksa, spawned indictments against 21 Serbian prison guards by a U.N. war crimes tribunal. But only one of them is in custody in Germany, and he may be the only one brought to trial.
No two events illustrate Western impotence in the face of Bosnian genocide better than the Feb. 14 convening of the war crimes tribunal at The Hague and the Feb. 20 society wedding of Zeljko Raz-na-to-vic, better known as "Arkan," one of Serbia's principal war criminals.
Unlike the post-World War II tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, where the victors prosecuted vanquished war criminals already in custody, the Hague court is attempting to try suspects in an ongoing conflict that has killed more than 350,000 and created some 2 million refugees.
It cannot arrest, extradite or try anyone in absentia. Defendants must surrender voluntarily - not likely - or be surrendered by a foreign government. The Serb held by Germany cannot even be turned over to the U.N. until that country changes its extradition laws.
Arkan is a bank robber wanted by Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. In 1974 he escaped while serving a 10-year prison sentence in Brussels and five years later shot his way out of a Stockholm courtroom.
Back in Serbia, he became a crime lord and, when the war broke out, formed the Tiger militia.
Asked about the atrocities committed by his men two years ago, he boasted that they would not stop until they had rid "Greater Serbia" of the "barbarian horde" - Muslims, Croats, Hungarians, Albanians and U.N. peacekeepers.