Radovan Karadzic is in custody, but despite massacres in Sudan, above, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir is still free.

By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON - Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you are Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, sitting in Khartoum and likely to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity from the International Criminal Court for the last five years of bloodshed in Darfur.
You’re watching CNN International, and what comes on the screen but Radovan Karadzic, the notorious Bosnian Serb leader, apprehended after 13 years in hiding and about to be hauled to the United Nations-backed tribunal in The Hague on war-crimes charges.
Now what, Mr. Bashir?
A) Do you get really nervous at this peek into your future and decide to do what the international community has been telling you to do, sign a peace deal and let peacekeeping forces into Darfur?
B) Or do you figure that you have some options and decide that you might as well forget the peace deal and give the Janjaweed even freer rein to attack civilians and maybe even a few relief workers?
The dueling war-crimes cases of July - first Mr. Bashir is told that a prosecutor is seeking a warrant for his arrest , and then Mr. Karadzic gets arrested in Belgrade, Serbia - received two very distinct reactions from the international community. The reason may lie in the two pathways that Mr. Bashir could choose .
Just about everyone except a few very nationalistic Serbs appeared to cheer the arrest of Mr. Karadzic, who was indicted for the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica in which Bosnian Muslim men were slaughtered. But curiously, the request by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, for a warrant for Mr. Bashir’s arrest was greeted with ambivalence .
Gary Bass, a professor at Princeton in New Jersey who wrote a book on the politics of war-crimes tribunals, said human rights advocates worry that an indicted Mr. Bashir might think he has no option but to continue waging war; if he makes peace, he could still end up in The Hague. “From a human rights perspective, what’s more important? Mr. Bass asks. “Delivering justice for people who’ve been victimized, or preventing future victimization?
There are some within the human rights community who say that warcrimes indictments should be used only after a conflict is resolved to avoid extending the length of the conflict. Advocates of this view point to the case of Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, the guerrilla group that has fought the Ugandan government since 1987. During peace negotiations in 2005, the I.C.C. issued arrest warrants for Mr. Kony and his deputies, charging them with crimes against humanity that include murder, rape, sexual slavery and the enlisting of children as combatants.
Mr. Moreno-Ocampo met with some human rights advocates before issuing the warrants; the advocates said they urged him not to do it. Mr. Kony’s advisers said they would never surrender unless they were granted immunity from prosecution . A tenuous peace is holding right now in Uganda, but human rights advocates point out that Mr. Kony remains at large and fighting could flare up again .
International justice advocates say the don’t-indict-until-the-conflict-is-over argument is bogus. “What they miss is what an indictment does to change the internal debate,” said John Norris, executive director at Enough, a group that seeks to end genocide. “It’s a big thing when the international community stands up and says ‘this guy is reprehensible and we’re not going to do business with him.’
Mr. Norris worked for the American State Department during the Clinton administration. He said he was in Moscow for negotiations in 1999, while NATO forces were bombing Serbia, when news came that the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, had been indicted for war crimes. Russian negotiators, Mr. Norris said, “saw this indictment as a disaster.
But, he argues, the indictment didn’t change Mr. Milosevic’s calculations. In fact, it was only a week later that Mr. Milosevic gave in to NATO’s demands and the war ended.
Why? For one thing, Mr. Milosevic had endured a fierce bombing campaign. For another, he believed - rightly - that he had other options. Indeed, it wasn’t until two years after he was indicted, in 2001 - after he had lost elections - that he was forced to surrender to Yugoslav security forces. He was then transferred to United Nations custody and eventually to The Hague, where he died two years ago, his trial incomplete.
Mr. Karadzic’s case is even more striking. After the Bosnian war ended in 1995, he lived as a fugitive for 13 years. It wasn’t until Serbia elected a new government more interested in joining Europe than in nationalism that the authorities arrested the Bosnian Serb leader.
Those cases suggest that one way warcrimes indictments are useful is not so much to obtain justice, but to help shape the postwar behavior of a country: its new leaders may need a way to re-engage the outside world.
Professor Bass of Princeton said that while he was not sure indictments were always advisable during a conflict, he did think they sometimes emboldened a country’s opposition, making a despot’s reign more tenuous. And, he added, there’s something to be said for justice.
“Does finding out the truth mean something? he asked.