The wheels of justice can turn slowly at times. But they do turn.

Take the case of the “Butcher of Bosnia.” As Yugoslavia violently broke up a quarter-century ago, a Bosnian Serb commander was working with deadly efficiency in places whose names resonate tragically: Srebrenica, Sarajevo. The ethnic cleansing campaign that Ratko Mladic helped orchestrate against Bosnian Muslims would ultimately kill some 100,000 people. Mr. Mladic escaped after the war to Serbia but was ultimately tracked down and extradited to The Hague.

Today, five years after his trial began, a United Nations tribunal found Mladic guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, and sentenced him to life in prison.

The Monitor broke the story of the Srebrenica massacre that killed more than 7,000 men and boys. David Rohde, the Monitor’s Balkans correspondent at the time, garnered a Pulitzer Prize and several other awards for his courageous and  “persistent on-site reporting.”

Persistence comes up repeatedly amid the search for accountability, be it related to the Bosnian conflict, ISIS crimes against the Yazidis, or what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson today called ethnic cleansing of Rohingya in Myanmar. People methodically document the unthinkable, building a case for a moment they trust will come. They often work at personal peril, motivated by their conviction that atrocity must not remain unexposed, and that sensibilities can shift.

As the Monitor’s Robert Marquand reported in 2011: Mladic’s arrest came “amid key changes in international and Serbian thinking – ranging from the killing of Osama bin Laden, to the Arab Spring…. [I]n the end, Mladic … may have been too great a liability for a country whose new generations seek to join Europe and emerge from isolation....”

And now to the five stories we chose for you today, showing civic spirit, persistence, and preparedness at work.