In the early hours of April 2, little more than a week after the start of NATO’s bombing campaign, a 14-year-old Kosovar girl named Dalina Caka huddled in the basement of a house in Djakovica’s Qerim district. With her were 18 other women and children, and one man. Outside, Serb police were on a killing-and-burning raid. When the rampaging troops discovered Dalina and the others, they “shot the 20 occupants and then set the house on fire,” killing everyone, according to the war-crimes indictment of Slobodan Milosevic and four of his top henchmen. The indictment lists hundreds of atrocities like these alleged murders in Qerim. Now the challenge for prosecutors–if they can ever get custody of the Serb defendants–is building a chain of evidence that links such crimes to Milosevic’s actions in Belgrade.

Milosevic’s moral responsibility is beyond dispute. The brutal and bloody Serb campaign to “cleanse” Kosovo of ethnic Albanians has been so pervasive and prolonged that it is impossible to view the man in charge as a bystander. Establishing criminal guilt, though, requires rigorous proof. The indictment, prepared by prosecutors of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, outlines two ways of making the case.