[Kcc-News] Milosevic tried to cover up Kosovo crimes: official

[Mentor Cana]

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010525/1/q3p9.html
Saturday May 26, 12:49 AM

Milosevic tried to cover up Kosovo crimes: official

BELGRADE, May 25 (AFP) -
Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic ordered his aides to cover up
evidence of possible war crimes committed in his forces in Kosovo, a top
Serbian official said Friday, in the first such announcement by Belgrade.

The statement by Dragan Karleusa, the Serbian official in charge of the
fight against organized crime, marked the first time that the authorities
who took over from Milosevic last October had linked the former leader with
possible war crimes.

Karleusa said the evidence had emerged during police investigations into
the finding of a truck filled with corpses in the River Danube during
NATO's 1999 air war on Yugoslavia, which was sparked by Milosevic's
repression of the ethnic Albanian majority in Kosovo.

Police investigators found that Milosevic and top Serbian interior ministry
aides had discussed "cleaning up the terrain in Kosovo where the fighting
took place, in order to eliminate civilian victims who could become the
subject of a possible investigation" by the UN war crimes tribunal,
Karleusa said.

"Milosevic ordered former Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic to take
measures to eliminate all traces which could lead to any evidence of
crimes" committed in during the war in Kosovo, Karleusa told reporters.

However he did not give details of alleged war crimes committed in the
province.

Asked whether war crimes charges would be filed against Milosevic, Serbian
Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said, "When the investigation is
finished, we will file charges according to what we establish."

"For now, it is clear that we are dealing with the issue of eliminating
(evidence of) a criminal deed," he said, adding that Milosevic had not yet
been questioned during the investigation.

Milosevic and four of his top allies, including Stojiljkovic, have been
indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) for war crimes committed in Kosovo.

The former Yugoslav president was arrested on April 1, and is now being
held in a Belgrade prison awaiting prosecution on domestic corruption
charges.

However, since taking over last October, the new reformist administration
has remained reluctant to envisage extraditing Milosevic to the The Hague,
where the tribunal sits, saying they would prefer to try him at home.

They have also insisted that they could not hand over suspects to the ICTY
before the Yugoslav parliament approved a draft law on cooperation with the
UN court.

However Belgrade is aware that some cooperation with the ICTY is necessary
for the war-shattered country to survive after almost a decade of isolation
due to international sanctions.

The United States has made clear it would only support and take part in an
anxiously-awaited aid donors' conference on June 29 if there was progress
in cooperation with the tribunal.

Although Belgrade has partially satisfied some of the demands -- handing
over two Bosnian Serb suspects to the court and by arresting Milosevic --
only the extradition of Yugoslav nationals would be seen as a real
cooperation, Western officials insist.

Many in Yugoslavia, including President Vojislav Kostunica, still believe
the ICTY is a politically motivated institution that is biased against
Serbs.

In a bid to to prove that Yugoslavia can put its own house in order,
Kostunica and a group of intellectuals have launched a South African-style
truth commission to probe Serb responsibility in the series of wars that
broke apart the former Yugoslavia in the 1990's, leaving hundreds of
thousands of people dead and many more displaced.