Note to the "ladder of force left"

Michael Pugliese debsian at pacbell.net
Sun Oct 28 13:20:43 PST 2001


Max>...As in Serbia, there is the obvious possibility that other than Taliban/military facilities are deliberate targets. And there is the inevitability of missed targets and civilian casualties.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/24 /MN237026.DTL

NATO attack on Serb TV still making news Belgrade, Yugoslavia -- One of the most controversial actions of NATO's air campaign against Serbia is getting serious legal scrutiny more than two years later.

The building housing Radio-Television Serbia was struck by NATO cruise missiles early in the morning of April 24, 1999, as part of the campaign to force the Yugoslav army and Serbian police out of Kosovo.

Now, the former director of Serbian state television is on trial on charges that he knowingly allowed 16 young employees to die when the station was hit.

And the European Court of Human Rights recently confirmed that it will hear a case brought by survivors against 17 NATO member countries for mounting the attack.

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson and the U.N. chief war crimes prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, both have said former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic knew that the building would be attacked.

An association of the families of people killed in the building charges that the director of the station, Dragoljub Milanovic, also knew Radio- Television Serbia was going to be attacked. The association believes he was under orders to sacrifice some junior employees so that they could become martyrs and tools for Milosevic's propaganda machine.

In a court appearance earlier this month, Milanovic said that it was only by luck that he left the building 36 minutes before it was struck. "Fate did not want me to stay there and I am cursing it today, because I would have been spared the sorrow and the shame," he said.

Milanovic, a senior member of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia, is charged with gross violations of his duty to protect his employees. Prosecutors say he ignored a general order to move state employees to safer locations. If convicted, he faces a sentence of three to 15 years in prison.

Milanovic's trial is scheduled to resume Monday. The first hearing in the trial against the NATO countries is set for today.

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page C - 2

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/10/24 /MN138158.DTL Serbia surprisingly eager to hunt war criminals Crackdown a matter of national pride Belgrade, Yugoslavia -- A year ago, it would have been hard to imagine Serbian police investigating mass graves holding Albanian bodies.

No one could foresee that the Yugoslav Army would quietly punish dozens of its soldiers for war crimes in the 1999 assault on ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo.

Or that prosecutors would be preparing for a trial of two Serbian former police officers accused of killing 19 civilians in Kosovo, in what promises to be the first of hundreds of similar trials.

Of all the changes that have taken place in Yugoslavia since democratic reformers took over from indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic last fall, one of the most surprising is how vigorously the new authorities are trying to uncover crimes committed by Serbians against their neighbors.

It is an effort that would have seemed impossible last year, when reports of Serbian atrocities against Albanians, Croats or Bosnian Muslims were dismissed as Western propaganda.

And it is surprising even now, given that many members of the former regime still hold their positions and many newcomers hold strongly nationalist views.

But in part it is national pride that drives the investigations and trials. Dragan Karleusa, head of the Serbian police investigation unit, has overseen the probe of eight mass graves that hold the bodies of hundreds of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

"I'm a Serb and all my origins are Serbian," he said. "Every crime has to be solved because crimes are committed by individuals, not by the whole Serb nation.

The police were forced into action earlier this year when a regional newspaper reported that dozens of Albanian bodies had been discovered in a freezer truck. Karleusa said that after the article appeared, he was ordered to look into the allegations.

After dozens of interviews with witnesses, the police found the truck, with 86 bodies inside, in the Danube in eastern Serbia, apparently driven into the river to hide the results of massacres in Kosovo.

As a result of the probe, eight mass graves have been discovered containing 450 bodies, a number that is certain to rise as the exhumations are completed.

"Our new government has ordered police to find any facts about who killed these people, how, and who is responsible for the silence of the last two years, everything from start to finish," Karleusa said.

The army is also conducting internal trials of soldiers accused of war crimes but has released very little information.

The government appears to be acting aggressively on war crimes for reasons of state pride -- to prove that it can, and that it doesn't require the help of international prosecutors in The Hague.

"The intention of the government is to show every day that we are more and more serious," said Dusan Ignjatovic, executive director of the Yugoslav Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights.

Many in Serbia, notably Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, protested Milosevic's transfer earlier this year to The Hague, arguing that he should be tried in Serbia instead of by the U.N. tribunal.

Officials from the U.N. tribunal make regular visits to Belgrade, demanding the government's help in getting other major figures from the lists of the indicted. Matias Hellman, coordinator for the court's outreach program in Serbia, said when all the investigations are finished they will total about 250 indictees.

Hellman said the number of war criminals in the region could be as high as 10,000. But the U.N. tribunal doesn't have the resources to try thousands of people.

"The tribunal was never intended to try everyone," Hellman said. "So there's a lot of work that remains for the local judiciary, for the perpetrators who weren't that high-ranking."

The judicial system has started to act, a little more slowly. One district prosecutor, in the southern city of Prokuplje, has initiated proceedings against two former police officers accused of killing 19 ethnic Albanians in Suva Reka.

"This is something we have to do and want to do," said Predrag Dejanovic, an assistant minister of justice.

Many judges are unfamiliar with recent developments in international law, so the Ministry of Justice is holding training seminars. There are also structural flaws in the legal system. For ex ample, there is no witness protection program, a serious omission in such an emotionally charged issue. The ministry has prepared a package of legal reforms that is before the parliament.

The issue of impartiality also worries some. Under the old regime, judges didn't even have to be told which way to rule in cases like these. "They knew that they had to rule for the government or they would be dismissed," Ignjatovic said.

That desire to please may hold over today despite the change in the government's priorities, Ignjatovic said. Nonetheless, he added, "We'll never know if we don't try" to seek justice.

As for the police investigations, they are also compromised by the presence of officers like Sreten Lukic, director of public security and former police commander in Kosovo. Many in Belgrade's human rights law community believe he is the subject of a sealed U.N. indictment.

Many in Serbia say that, with their efforts to clean up their own house, they deserve some help from the U.N. tribunal and from their neighbors in prosecuting war crimes committed against Serbs. The Croatian government recently announced that it has plans to try Croats for war crimes against Serbs.

Karleusa said he is cooperating with U.N. police in Kosovo and hopes to get help from them in finding hundreds of Serbians who went missing during and immediately after the war.

"Only when we solve all of this can we go forward," he said. "It was a war, there were crimes, now we have to look to a new future with our neighbors."

©2001 San Francisco Chronicle Page C - 2
>From B92

Milosevic rally in Belgrade BELGRADE, Friday - The Socialist Party of Serbia managed to rally several thousand in Belgrade this evening in support of Slobodan Milosevic and other Yugoslav citizens currently in Hague custody.

Party deputy leader Ivica Dacic told the crowd that the Hague Tribunal had indicted Milosevic in a bid to lay collective guilt on the Serbian nation - "all of us were freedom fighters, which is why we're all war criminals," he said.

Dacic said the demonstration was not only an expression of support for the ousted Yugoslav president but of dissatisfaction with the current authorities.

On his signal, the demonstrators applauded the mention of Milosevic, and booed the new authorities.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list