Celebici is a remote gnat of a place. It has a few dozen houses and a church, a couple of hours up a rough road from the ragged Bosnian hills, surrounded by forested peaks. But it generated big enough headlines when Nato-led forces staged Operation Daybreak there in February, 2002, in an apparent attempt to capture Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader who has been indicted by the Hague's war crimes tribunal for helping to lead a genocide in 1992-1995 that killed up to 200,000 people, mostly Bosnian Muslims.
Helicopters disgorged black-masked troops who kicked in doors and blew open locks as they conducted a door-to-door search. They left empty-handed. Operation Daybreak remains the only serious action the west is known to have conducted to try to get Europe's most wanted war-crimes suspect.
Like Osama bin Laden, Karadzic is well-known and physically distinctive. A tall man with a big belly, a dimpled chin and a dramatic gray bouffant, he ought to be difficult to hide. Like Saddam Hussein, he is a genocidal murderer whose most horrible crimes were committed a decade ago. And like bin Laden, the fact that he remains at large is a cause of instability throughout a strategic region.
Eight years after the Dayton Peace Accord began a process that was supposed to lead to reunification - and despite the efforts of hundreds of foreign-aid workers and the expenditure of more than US$5 billion - Bosnia remains fractious. Efforts to create unity and long-term peace have been frustrated by the continued dominance of the ethnic Serbian 'state within a state' known as Republika Srpska by a corrupt clique said to be controlled by Karadzic.
The fate of the entire area holds lessons for other western efforts at democracy and nation-building, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Karadzic's continued freedom gives the huge numbers of ethnic Muslims and Croats who fled Bosnia during the war and who have been slowly returning to their homes a sense that all has not yet been put right. At the same time, his aura of invincibility has grown among the 700,000 Bosnian Serbs.
Perhaps the largest obstacle to finding Karadzic is that the US and its allies have not dedicated enough resources to chasing him down. Many of the Stabilisation Force (SFOR) soldiers - 13,000 troops from 35 countries, down from a peak of 60,000 after the war - share no common language, and those few who can speak to contingents from other countries aren't necessarily inclined to do so. Each contingent has gained a reputation. There are now just 1,500 American troops - all national guardsmen, which means dentists from Ohio and labourers from New York. They're not exactly special forces quality, and tend to stay pretty close to base. Italian and French troops like to live it up and have, perhaps, become too cosy with some locals.
The British are the most enthusiastic about doing something. Given their experience among a hostile, armed population in Northern Ireland, they're the best prepared, and show it through deft use of intelligence and lightning raids. So far, they have apprehended most of the war criminals - half of the 24 arrests officially reported by SFOR have come in their zone.