[ALBSA-Info] New indictments await Milosevic for Croatia, Bosnia

[Gazhebo at aol.com]

New indictments await Milosevic for Croatia, Bosnia

By Paul Taylor, Diplomatic Editor

  
LONDON, March 30 (Reuters) - Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, 
arrested by Serbian authorities on Friday night, faces charges of crimes 
against humanity before a U.N. war crimes tribunal over the repression and 
mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1998-99. 

Prosecutors say they are also preparing fresh indictments over his role in 
the earlier wars in Croatia and Bosnia after the breakup of old Yugoslavia in 
1991. 

Under international law, all member states of the United Nations -- including 
Yugoslavia -- are obliged to hand over wanted suspects to the tribunal, based 
in The Hague, Netherlands, and to cooperate with prosecutors' investigations. 

However, officials of the International Criminal Tribunal for former 
Yugoslavia have said the U.N. court might agree to let Milosevic be tried in 
Belgrade first for alleged abuses committed while he was Serbian and later 
Yugoslav president. 

Milosevic's democratically elected successor, Vojislav Kostunica, adamantly 
refused to hand over his predecessor to international justice at a stormy 
meeting with chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte in Belgrade in January. 

Deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt, an Australian, said this month he expected 
the former Balkan strongman, ousted by a popular uprising last October after 
rigged elections, to be surrendered to The Hague by the end of this year. 

WAR CRIMES TRIAL IN BELGRADE? 

He told Reuters the tribunal might also agree to hold part of Milosevic's war 
crimes trial in Belgrade, to make the impact more direct on the peoples of 
the Balkans. 

However, part of the case would have to be heard in The Hague because some 
witnesses would be afraid to come to the Serbian capital, he said. 

"I think it would be good for the people of the Balkans to see Milosevic on 
trial in Belgrade and not just in a remote courtroom in the West," Blewitt 
said. 

He said the Kosovo charges had been issued first because it was easier to 
prove Milosevic's direct responsibility for actions of the security forces 
inside Serbia than for ethnic cleansing committed by Croatian or Bosnian 
Serbs. 

But he said the tribunal had received evidence that implicated Milosevic at 
the head of the chain of command during the wars in Croatia in 1991-92 and 
Bosnia in 1992-95. 

The Kosovo charges were issued in May 1999 in the midst of NATO's air 
campaign to force Yugoslavia to end a crackdown on ethnic Albanians in the 
province. The Serbs drove more than one million Albanians out of Kosovo and 
into neighbouring Macedonia and Albania during the NATO bombing. 

At the time, some analysts feared the indictment might prolong the war by 
removing any incentive for Milosevic to agree to withdraw Yugoslav army and 
paramilitary police forces from Kosovo. But he accepted a peace deal and 
began a pullout two weeks later. 

Blewitt said the timing was due to the fact that the court had acquired 
crucial evidence on Milosevic's personal role after the Kosovo war began, 
which he insisted did not come from Western governments. 

He acknowledged that the prosecutors decided to issue the indictment also to 
head off any possibility that Milosevic might be granted immunity from 
prosecution as part of a Kosovo deal, an idea which he said was under 
discussion at the time.