A BALKAN ACCORD : Nuremberg-Style Trials Unlikely for Leaders in Balkans : Justice: Suspects probably won’t be turned over to U.N. tribunal. But they will be subject to arrest if they go abroad.

Although all the parties to the Bosnia peace agreement pledged Tuesday to “cooperate fully” with the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, it is doubtful that there will be the kind of showcase trials that condemned a dozen Nazi leaders to death in Nuremberg after World War II.

The agreement states emphatically, as President Clinton put it in his nationally televised announcement Tuesday, that “those individuals charged with war crimes will be excluded from political life.”

That action should end the political careers of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, and Gen. Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander, both of whom have been indicted by the U.N tribunal on war crimes charges.

Although it is doubtful that Bosnian Serb authorities will turn them over to the tribunal for trial, U.N. officials believe that the indictments will render Karadzic and Mladic international pariahs unable to travel abroad. Under U.N. Security Council resolutions, all countries are obliged to arrest them.

The problem of cooperation was underscored a week ago when Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, who initialed the accord Tuesday, promoted one of his army officers only a day after the soldier was indicted for war crimes in The Hague.

Anguished and frustrated over its inability to stop atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Security Council created the tribunal in 1993 to try those responsible.

While the concept of war crimes and punishment has a long history, it is also murky. History has its quota of soldiers and commanders punished for excesses in war, but in most cases the victors have imposed the punishment on the vanquished. The new tribunal is the first recorded instance of an independent international body judging the accused.

With its panel of 11 judges from countries uninvolved in the Balkans war, the tribunal has evoked a good deal of skepticism. Many observers have looked on it as a meaningless sop to public opinion. British and French officials made it clear that they believed the tribunal was expendable if its existence stood in the way of a peace agreement.

Two individuals, however, gave the tribunal much of its potency. Madeleine K. Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made the cause of punishment for war crimes her own. In the private councils of Washington and in her public speeches, she insisted that no peace agreement be allowed to subvert the work of the tribunal.

While the Britain and France dawdled in turning over evidence to the international court, the United States, under Albright’s prodding, turned over sheaves of material.

Albright even insisted in a speech last year that any easing or lifting of U.N. sanctions against Serbia should “take into account good-faith cooperation with the war crimes tribunal” by the Serbs of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia.

The tribunal was strengthened by the U.N. Security Council’s appointment of Richard J. Goldstone, a leading South African jurist, as the tribunal’s chief prosecutor. Goldstone had exposed the secret campaign of political murders conducted by his country’s military intelligence officers against anti-apartheid activists.

Now, Goldstone is moving through uncertain and uncharted legal territory, and that complicates any attempt to predict the impact of the U.N. tribunal in the months ahead.

He nonetheless has proven relentless. At his request, the tribunal recently returned second indictments against Karadzic and Mladic, this time for their alleged role in the massacre of 6,000 Muslims after the fall of Srebrenica last July.

The tribunal, however, has only one accused person in custody, a Serb turned over to the court by Germany. He is expected to be tried in a few months. The more than 50 other indicted Serbs and Croats, including Karadzic and Mladic, are fugitives from justice.