Can't see your issue with that second priceless point of mine, Teribus. Your following sentence endorses it completely. The answer to your question about my first priceless point is: The UN should be made to account to the people who lost friends and family - to the people who are now pursuing an action against the UN in the Netherlands. I would have thought that was obvious, but I'm happy to spell it out.

I was using "bombed" in the loose "blew up" sense in my previous post but that was too casual, for which apologies.

Shimrod, I think that yes, you could do that in Pale and not get killed. But there, more so than in most parts of RS, you would almost certainly provoke an argument. People would simply be keen to present another perspective. (I'm not making this up. I have seen just how tolerant people ar about the ignorance of some visitors - most recently a Guatemalan guy who was showoing off what he had learnt from a year at a US military academy.) For my own part I consider gloating distasteful whoever does it and from whatever perspective. But people shouldn't be killed for it.

On my last visit I was variously in Banja Luka; a small village near Bosanski Gradiška, and Prijedor.

The family I stayed with in the village - a widow and her two daughters - are Serb refugees who in 1993 fled from Slavonski Brod, which is on the other side of the Sava in Croatia. The widow had her widowhood confirmed only in March this year when it was established that human remains found near some road workings were those of her husband, last seen in 1993.

A couple of years ago a guy who had been taken away in the same van as her husband testified, in a Zagreb court action against the Croatian police, that he and the others seized had been hung on meat hooks overnight. The damage to his rectum was severe and when he was taken down he managed to reach and break a piece of glass, and slash his wrists. Unaccountably - the witness could not explain it, and the court was incredulous - his captors then took him to hospital. But the hospital produced records that confirmed his account. (The court case was adjourned while recently discovered bodies were examined and is not yet concluded.)

That family, and many others I know, blame Karadzić in large part for the depravities that descended on Bosnia in the 1990s wars. Mladić on the other hand is widely revered as an oustanding soldier who took three appalling decisions - to besiege Sarajevo, bomb Dubrovnik and murder the male prisoners taken at Srebrenica.

In Prijedor many Serbs are ashamed of what went on in notorious detention camps nearby (Omarska and two others). It was a Serb in Prijedor, whose family fled from Sanski Most in 1995 when US-aided Croats ethnically cleansed the Krajina region, who made exactly the comment I mentioned about hanging Karadzić.

Nothing excuses what took place at Omarska but it is at least worth remembering that northwest Bosnia came in for exceptional ravaging in WW2 when the catholic-fascist Ustasha first announced, and then implemented, a genocidal campaign of slaughter on Roma, Jews and most particularly Serbs, in which all but a handful of Jews and hundreds of thousands of Serbs were butchered. Throughout the Tito years, "brotherhood and unity" suppressed all discussion about WW2, let alone any prospect of retribution. This preserved an uneasy peace that lasted just a little longer than Tito himself, but it also fuelled deep resentments.

In Banja Luka - which has replaced Pale as the administrative centre for RS - there is a marked difference in perceptions between refugee Serbs, who make up a large proportion of the population now, and indigenous Serbs. The former survived many horrors inflicted by Croats and muslims and are inclined towards hardline positions. The latter bemoan the loss of the city's mosques, destroyed largely by incoming refugee Serbs, which they regarded as part of their cultural heritage - in particular the Ferhadja, which had been the oldest and finest mosque in Europe. And some resent that they had to surrender property and space to IDPs. The resentment is not against the IDPs themselves of course, but against the politicians who they believe created the mess. That is, politicians in general, because - as the world over - many in the population take no interest in politics at all and simply blame all politicians for everything.

In other words, Shimrod - surprise surprise - Serbs are human beings just like the rest of us. They are as much inclined to be steered by self-interests as the rest of us. And if you cut them, they bleed.