Whenever the international community becomes involved in resolving a conflict it fractures along familiar lines: between those seeking peace and those seeking justice. The peacekeepers argue that the priority is to stop the fighting, the justice seekers insist that politicians and their warlords must be called to account for their crimes.

The likely indictment on Monday by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, is a decisive victory for the latter.

Mr al-Bashir will be the first head of state to be indicted by the ICC, but the third in recent years to be indicted by an international court.

There are some lessons to be drawn from these precedents. In May 1999 the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia indicted Slobodan Milosevic, then Serbian President, on war crimes charges for atrocities carried out by Serbian forces in Kosovo.

In March 2003 Charles Taylor, President of Liberia, was indicted on war crimes charges by the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

Milosevic contemptuously dismissed the tribunal's indictment, just as Mr al-Bashir has pledged that no Sudanese would ever be surrendered to the ICC. But in October 2000 Milosevic fell from power. He was arrested in 2001 and sent to the tribunal. In February 2002 he found himself standing in the dock. In March 2006 he died in his cell, his trial unfinished.

Despite his indictment, Charles Taylor was allowed to leave Liberia in summer 2003 for exile in Nigeria. In 2006 he was arrested there, and sent to The Hague, where he is now being tried by the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

The key lessons of Milosevic and Taylor, indeed any trial of a head of state, reaching back to that of Charles I and Louis XVI, is that leaders stand in the dock only when they are deposed, by domestic or international efforts or by a combination of both.

For international criminal justice comes at a cost: the erosion of national sovereignty. It's notable that despite intermittent interference from Sudan's neighbours, the five-year Darfur conflict has remained primarily domestic, fought by Sudanese rebels against Sudanese government forces and its murderous paramilitaries known as the Janjawid. Sudan has not even ratified the statutes of the ICC.

Nevertheless, its head of state will join Ahmad Harun, the Sudanese Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, and Ali Kushayb, a Janjawid leader, on the ICC's most-wanted list.

Milosevic was brought down in a one-day uprising organised in part by Otpor, the Serbian youth civil resistance movement, and in part by Western intelligence services. Behind-the-scenes deals were made with the Yugoslav Army and Serbian police and intelligence services, so that when Milosevic called for them to take control, they would not act.

Crucially, a new pro-Western democratic government was ready to take power. In Liberia Western-backed rebels fought their way to the capital, forcing Taylor to leave. The situation is very different in Sudan. There is little appetite in the West for regime change. Yet the Milosevic case could still prove relevant for Sudan.

Despite Khartoum's bluster, indictments by international criminal courts do focus minds. The prospect of long prison sentences encourages former allies to turn on each other, and make behind-the-scenes deals with prosecutors, as happened in Serbia. The regime in Khartoum is fractious and nervous. Like Yugoslavia, Sudan is collapsing. Mr al-Bashir knows that his greatest enemies are not in The Hague, but near by in Khartoum.

Adam LeBor is the author of Complicity with Evil: The UN in the Age of Modern Genocide.

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