ICTY now uses NT servers and workstations all around, running on switched/shared 100BaseT ethernet through an ATM backbone. Several services are run on Linux or SCO Unix servers, and there are a handful of Sun Sparcstations and Power Macs in use. In the near future, Tribunal IT staff expects to incorporate an IBM-donated AS/400 server (see Corporate Donations to the War Crimes Tribunal Get Stuck in Red Tape).

Real-Time Law Enforcement
The crimes that the Tribunal was charged with prosecuting had, for the most part, occurred before the Tribunal's foundation, though the fighting continued until 1995 (and then broke out again last year). Investigators often had to return to the scenes of the crimes after witnesses had scattered and sites had been purposely altered or shattered by subsequent battles and bombing.

Still, investigations have yielded massive amounts of information as well as 91 indictments and 37 detentions to date. The Office of the Prosecutor's (OTP's) plan during its pioneering stage was to have a document management system in which every page of every document seized as evidence would be scanned and coded with a unique number. Whenever a document was copied or photocopied, this number would show where it came from, its source and whether it had been used in another case. It proved too expensive for the Tribunal to purchase a ready-made system that could do all that, so it developed its own document management system as well as indexing databases and relational databases. Blewitt notes that they've fallen short of the ideal of cataloging every document. "We might go out and execute a search warrant, for example, in Bosnia, and come back with literally hundreds of thousands of pages," he says. A small percentage of OTP's document holdings are in the database, selected with input from the trial teams who indicate which material they need for particular cases. "The database grows and grows but doesn't have everything in it," laments Blewitt. "We've always been playing catch-up."

In the spring of 1999, the tenuous peace of the Dayton accord dissolved when fighting broke out between Serbs and ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Blewitt says that after the fighting, "Kosovo was one huge crime scene; you can't calculate the number of crimes committed." In that environment, and with the prosecutor's small staff of investigators—only 85, and many of those still working on cases stemming from the fighting in Bosniait would clearly be a challenge to gather evidence.