And it's really much more confusing than that.

In 1993 the U.N. set up ICTY, instructing it to "prosecute persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991."

And in February 1997, Kate Greenwood, whose education is in both law and IT, came to ICTY from the office of the attorney general of Australia. Now ICTY's chief of information and evidence, she says, "My international law lecturer in school said, 'International law isn't really law; no one ever goes out and arrests anyone under international law.' But my first year here, they did just that," taking into custody nine indicted war criminals and bringing them to trial.

The U.N. provided some procedural guidance in a formal document outlining the duties of the Tribunal, but, for example, the section on the process of investigating a crime and obtaining an indictment takes up less than half a typed page. Christian Chartier of France, ICTY's head of public information, recalls, "Early on, one judge said to me, 'I feel like a pioneer; this is the forest. We're facing a huge territory and have to find out where the borders are.'"

Deputy Prosecutor Graham T. Blewitt, also from Australia, who was appointed in February 1994, remembers the Tribunal's early days. "It was really a question of determining where to start. The judges had already been appointed. They were here and wanted to hear cases, and of course the prosecutor had the mandate to do the investigations and to bring the cases. But until there were indictments, the judges were sitting there twiddling their thumbs, so they were putting the pressure on." And until enough information and evidence could be gathered to support accusations, there could be no indictments. When ICTY started its work, the fighting was still intense, as Croatia and Serbia trampled over Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Tribunal's small original staff had to set up all its organizational procedures and operational processes, hire enough people to get going and determine what technologies were needed to support their work. Blewitt, adds, "There were no guidelines; there were no precedents." Not to mention no money for consultants. "We had to create something from nothing, and do it in a very skeptical world, but in a world that was demanding action."

The initial technology decision was to have as paperless an office as possible. "Rightly or wrongly, we decided to go on a networked PC basis," recalls Blewitt. "And we chose what was considered the best way to go, namely a Windows platform. We started with 386s, the best that was available, but we were never able to keep up with the advancing technology." Only recently has the Tribunal upgraded to Pentium processors that can run Windows NT.