It is silent and glides uphill carrying huge loads of compost, stones, manure, grandchildren, grass-cuttings, logs - it can carry anything with no effort needed from the pusher, giving the gardener's back a new lease of life. We have often wondered about the advantages of a small tractor for pulling loads of manure uphill to the kitchen garden, but have resisted the purchase on the grounds that there are very few places that it could negotiate on our awkwardly vertical site Price and noise also make tractors unappealing. Meanwhile, the widows of Srebrenica - the daughters, sisters, and aunts of the thousands who died - exist in limbo, reluctant to begin the process of grieving Most of them will never have a body to bury And abroad, the massacre is a matter for historical debate. The question is whether any government in the former Yugoslavia, and outside it, could have stopped the slaughter. David Rohde, author of A Safe Area, which tells the story of Srebrenica, says: "It's more a conspiracy of neglect than a smoky room where everyone decided they were going to let Srebrenica fall - which is just as inexcusable It could have been saved.".

Mine Has Never been a hi-tech garden but things are changing The main drawback to machines for me has been their noise I would rather use a slasher than a strimmer any day. Arresting Gen Mladic and Mr Karadzic would surely be one way for the British government to act on Robin Cook's fine words about a foreign policy based on principles with action. grave breaches" of the Conventions.The first sign of a change of policy occurred last week when the War Crime Tribunal made its first arrest, based on a secret indictment, with the help of the UN in Croatia. But Mr Karadzic lives openly at his home in Pale, accompanied by bodyguards; he even registered to vote with foreign officials sent in to oversee local elections. Gen Mladic is more discreet, but he is thought to share a holiday house with his wife inside the main Serb military complex at Han Pijesak, 30 minutes' drive from Srebrenica.WE cannot change the past, but we can try to administer justice. Under the Geneva Conventions, to which all Nato members are signatories, soldiers have an absolute duty "to search for persons alleged to have committed ...

Amnesty International and other humanitarian groups say Nato officials are wrong to deny their obligation. He was ordered to serve 10 years in prison, the first person to be sentenced for war crimes since the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials following the Second World War.But the real perpetrators remain free, and Gen Mladic and Radovan Karadzic - both charged with genocide for ordering the summary executions of "thousands" in Srebrenica - are apparently invisible to the 20,000 Nato troops in Bosnia, 5,000 of whom are British.NATO officials argue that they were given the right but not the obligation to arrest war criminals under the Dayton peace plan (which was sealed mainly because the failure of Western policy in Srebrenica persuaded Nato that is must bomb the rebel Serbs in order to end the war). "If I had refused I would have been killed together with the victims."Erdemovic told the Hague tribunal that on 16 July - the day after Gen Mladic gave the Red Cross access to Muslim prisoners - his unit shot dead hundreds of Muslim prisoners. "I had to do this," he declared, pleading guilty to a charge of crimes against humanity brought by the war crimes tribunal. "If one believes there will be no peace without justice, justice requires trials, and trials at the tribunal require a defendant in the dock." But only one man has been brought to justice so far, and he was a pawn.Drazen Erdemovic, a Croat fighting in Gen Mladic's army, shot Muslims during the Srebrenica executions. Schools and grain stores are still scarred by bullet holes, blood stains and the desperate graffiti of dying men."These crimes demand a legal accounting," says Christian Chartier.

More graves may well be identified this summer: I have seen myself evidence of a huge operation in eastern Bosnia in muddy fields containing human bones, clothing, ID cards, odd shoes. Their investigations continue, says the tribunal spokesman, Christian Chartier. They were victims of Serbian determination to revenge earlier defeats, to prevent Muslim soldiers fighting on, and ultimately to cleanse Bosnia of Muslims.Last summer, forensic experts working for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia exhumed more than 450 bodies in four mass graves near Srebrenica. The Muslim men were lined up and shot dead, the bodies flung into pits. "We have reason to believe they were all killed, although we don't have the proof." The evidence came from the handful of survivors - men who cheated death by hiding under the corpses of their friends and relatives - who bore witness to what happened in the next eight or nine days.Gen Mladic and his men commandeered bulldozers to dig mass graves and trucks to transport their prisoners to execution sites, in fields and warehouses across the strip of eastern Bosnia that borders Serbia. The 7,300 the ICRC have identified are almost certainly all dead."These people will never be found again," says Michael Kleiner of the ICRC, which has investigated, to no avail, the many claims that the Srebrenica men are hidden away as slave labour. Their role was to interview relatives of the missing Muslims and compile the best estimate of the number still missing from Srebrenica.