After 30 years, the first of five members of the Khmer Rouge began answering for alleged crimes against humanity this week in Cambodia.
Charged with the murder of thousands during the 1975-79 reign of Cambodia's Communist Party, former prison head Kaing Guek Eav is the first to face charges in connection with the slaughter of 1.7 million people.
Meanwhile, Western intelligence agencies have begun working with local officials in Serbia to find Ratko Mladic, the former leader of the Serbian Army wanted for genocide in the killing of Bosnian Muslims, in the hope of getting him to appear before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
All this while the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center evaluates the findings of a recent investigation conducted by The New York Times and Germany's ZDF television that claimed the Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim, deemed Dr. Death for his surgical mutilations of Holocaust prisoners, died in 1992 while hiding out in Cairo. It had long been believed Heim was alive and in South America.
Arguably not since the Nuremberg Trials have alleged war criminals drawn such interest from all corners of the globe. But as demonstrated by these cases and others, especially that of Radovan Karadzic – the former Bosnian Serb leader who was captured last summer after 13 years living in disguise as a Serbian doctor – bringing some of history's most notorious war criminals to justice is usually a long and arduous process.
The list of the world's most wanted war criminals also includes Omar Hassan al-Bashir, former president of Sudan, accused by the ICC of the ethnic cleansing of more than 35,000 people in Darfur.
Then there's Joseph Kony, leader of Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Bosco "The Terminator" Ntaganda. Both are wanted for the deaths of thousands and for conscripting child soldiers. The list also includes Felicien Kabuga, the Rwandan businessman who reportedly supplied the machetes and other weapons used during that country's 1994 genocide.
Though humanity has been waging war from time immemorial, the notion of a "war crime" is rather new.
Thucydides, arguably the first war correspondent, once wrote that in war "the strong do as they will, while the weak suffer as they must."
The Great Powers of the 19th and early 20th centuries tried to address this recurring problem with a series of treaties that lay the groundwork for what now constitutes a war crime: mass murder, the torture and murder of prisoners of war, the killing of hostages, the destruction of cities, and any unnecessary devastation.
While war crimes were clearly defined at the 1907 Hague Conference, the practice of trying alleged war criminals wasn't really instituted until after World War II, when the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials saw the victors try leaders of the defeated axis powers for crimes against humanity.
But high-profile perpetrators of such atrocities as the Nanking Massacre and the Holocaust escaped the noose with the aid of friends and family in Germany, Japan and elsewhere.
The most famous of these is probably Adolf Eichmann, who instituted the "final solution" to shuttle Germany's unwanted citizens to concentration camps where they were systematically executed. He managed to escape to Argentina after the war, to be tracked down by Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter, and members of Israel's secret service, who smuggled Eichmann to Israel, where he was tried and executed for war crimes in 1962.
Subsequent Nazi escapees were found living in Latin America, the Middle East, the United States and Canada.
To their atrocities have been added those of history's more contemporary tyrants.
Bounty hunting has also been largely usurped by the establishment of the ICC in 2002, which was set up to try all alleged war criminals in the same court.
That said, many countries, including the United States, Russia, Israel and China, refuse to join the ICC, thereby leading many to argue that Thucydides' assertion remains as true today as it was 2,400 years ago.
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