[ALBSA-Info] Milosevic Taken Away To Jail

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

Milosevic Taken Away To Jail

By KATARINA KRATOVAC
  
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Former President Slobodan Milosevic, architect of 
a decade of Balkan wars, was whisked away to prison Sunday after a 26-hour 
armed standoff with police who arrested him to face corruption charges 
stemming from his ruinous rule. 

Milosevic, who at one point in the standoff reportedly brandished a gun and 
threatened to kill himself and members of his family, surrendered after 
late-night negotiations between the government and his Socialist Party. Local 
television showed footage of the car carrying Milosevic entering Belgrade's 
Central Prison and the iron gates closing behind it. 

Most Belgrade newspapers ran special morning editions Sunday. ``It's 
Finished, Milosevic is Arrested!'' read the headline in Ekspres Politika. 

Questioning of Milosevic began just hours after his arrest. 

An investigative judge was interrogating him ahead of issuing a formal 
detention order, valid for a month and renewable for a total of six months to 
allow a court time to decide whether to formally charge the former president, 
said Vladan Batic, justice minister of Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic. 

Batic said Milosevic was being treated like any other prisoner. 

``He has his own room,'' said Batic. ``He will be given food, allowed 
visitors, to have his own clothes and footwear, money, books, newspapers. He 
will not be subjected to any kind of physical harassment, no psychological 
pressure.'' 

Milosevic's arrest followed U.S. threats to suspend $50 million in economic 
aid if President Vojislav Kostunica's government did not show willingness by 
Saturday to cooperate with the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, 
Netherlands. But government officials said the detention was not linked to 
the deadline. 

The U.N. tribunal indicted Milosevic in connection with atrocities committed 
during his harsh crackdown on ethnic Albanians. Welcoming the arrest Sunday, 
tribunal spokesman Jim Landale said Yugoslavia has a ``binding obligation'' 
to turn him over. 

Kostunica has refused to extradite Milosevic to The Hague, insisting he 
should be tried at home for corruption and other alleged crimes. However, 
Yugoslav authorities clearly hope that the arrest of Milosevic, regardless of 
the charges, will lead to U.S. certification that the new democratic 
government has met conditions for the aid. 

Police official Miodrag Vukovic said pending charges against Milosevic 
include abuse of power and corruption that cost the state close to $100 
million, and that Milosevic would face a maximum five-year prison term if 
convicted. 

Batic, the justice minister, pledged a fair trial, and said the arrest had 
``at this moment'' no link to extradition demands by the Hague court. That 
wording suggested that authorities might consider handing the former 
president over to the U.N. court once he is tried domestically, and if a ban 
on extraditing Yugoslav citizens is lifted by parliament passing a law later 
this year. 

``Until we have the law ... none of our citizens can be handed over,'' he 
told reporters. 

He said that as conditions for his surrender, Milosevic had requested a 
``fair trial, humane (prison) conditions, possibilities for visits and 
pledges that at this moment we were not acting upon The Hague tribunal 
request. 

``It is impossible to say in advance whether the proceedings will last for 10 
days or six months,'' he said. 

Masked police had tried to raid the sprawling villa and seize Milosevic 
before dawn Saturday but were repulsed by guards firing automatic weapons. 
During the day, hundreds of his supporters blocked the villa's gates, 
chanting ``Slobo! Slobo!'' 

Milosevic told police he would rather die than surrender, and Serbian 
Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said that at one point the former 
president, brandishing a pistol, threatened to kill himself, his wife and 
daughter. Branislav Ivkovic, a close aide to Milosevic, said he surrendered 
voluntarily ``to include himself in the legal process.'' 

Mihajlovic said Milosevic's 32-year-old daughter, Marija, fired four or five 
pistol shots moments before her father was whisked away. A police official, 
who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she was apparently aiming at a 
government negotiator. There were no injuries. 

Milosevic's wife and daughter remained inside, said police officials. 

Describing Milosevic as a ``reasonable man, who did not want any more Serb 
blood to be spilled,'' the former president's lawyer, Toma Fila, blamed 
authorities for provoking the violence that preceded the arrest by sending 
riot police to storm the residence instead of only negotiators. 

Since his ouster from power last fall, Milosevic has lived under police 
surveillance in the tile-roof villa built for former communist dictator Josip 
Broz Tito. 

Milosevic gained power during the waning years of communist rule in Europe. 
In 1991, he triggered the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia, sending 
his army into losing wars against the pro-independence republics of Slovenia, 
Croatia and Bosnia. 

His brutal attempts to put down an ethnic Albanian rebellion in Serbia's 
province of Kosovo led to NATO airstrikes that pushed his forces out of the 
province in 1999. 

When Milosevic refused to accept electoral defeat, opposition supporters 
rioted. He conceded defeat Oct. 6, but remained politically active.