The jailing of Yugoslavia's former president Mr Slobodan Milosevic yesterday should speed up the arrest of his former henchmen on war crimes charges, senior Western envoys in Bosnia said.
Bosnian Serb leader Dr Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Gen Ratko Mladic, have been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague but have managed to evade arrest with the help of protection from Mr Milosevic.
"I think Milosevic was the key one, he was the key player, the key perpetrator in all of this and the signal to all of them now is, `It's time to give yourself up - if you don't, we are coming after you because people deserve justice'," Mr Jacques Klein, head of the UN mission in Bosnia, said.
Dr Karadzic and Gen Mladic are indicted for genocide for their role in a campaign to clear vast areas of Serb-controlled Bosnia of Muslims and Croats during the 1992-95 war for independence from Mr Milosevic's Yugoslavia.
The two men are also accused of the murder of several thousand Muslims when the Srebrenica enclave fell to Bosnian Serb forces in 1995. Mr Milosevic directed the war in Bosnia.