POLITICS-YUGOSLAVIA: Amnesty For 30 000 People in Yugoslavia

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Mar 7 2001 (IPS) - Yugoslavia’s reformist-dominated parliament has adopted the amnesty law which pardons some 30,000 people sentenced to long prison terms during the autocratic regime of Slobodan Milosevic.

“The corrections of mistakes from the past has to be made in order to turn this country into a really civilised one,” Yugoslav Justice Minister, Momcilo Grubac, told reporters after the law was passed in parliament recently.

“It is in the interest of the whole community here to make such corrections, because politics should, never again, interfere with the law. And that is exactly what happened in the past 10 years”.

The 30,000 pardoned are people sentenced in absentia during the 90’s or already serving their prison terms for two main categories of charges.

One is the charge for alleged terrorism, applied during the former regime against ethnic Albanians from Kosovo. More than 2,000 Albanians were sentenced to long prison sentences for alleged armed rebellion against Milosevic’s regime in the southern Serbian province in 1998 and 1999.

Another charge is for draft dodging and deserting the army and it applies to some 28,000 Serbs who refused to fight in Milosevic’s wars.

Many managed to flee the country ahead of being drafted and live abroad, obtaining the citizenship of their host country. They were unable to renew their Yugoslav passports in embassies and could not visit Yugoslavia, despite their foreign citizenship, and were deprived of the right to inherit property.

Thousands, who did not manage to flee the country, were serving prison sentences of up to five years.

Slobodan Milosevic was forced to admit his electoral defeat last October, following a decade of rule that gave rise to Serbia’s reputation as a pariah nation. During this period, he led the country into wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia and repressed over two million ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo province.

In 1999, the Serbs lived through 11 weeks of traumatic North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, air raids due to Milosevic’s politics in Kosovo.

His rule was accompanied by two rounds of strict international economic sanctions that brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy.

Many ethnic Albanians, sentenced to up to 15 years in prison for alleged terrorism, ended up in jails after being rounded up by Serb security forces during their hasty withdrawal from the Kosovo province in June 1999. Along with the men, Serb security forces also arrested women and minors.

NATO only agreed to stop the bombing after Belgrade agreed to withdraw all security forces from Kosovo.

“Where ethnic Albanian prisoners are concerned, the amnesty law is significant for starting a dialogue with the Albanians,” Gradimir Nalic told IPS. “There can be no reconciliation in this country until the wrongdoings of the past are, at least, corrected and this is just the first step.”

Nalic headed the Yugoslav Committee of Lawyers for Human Rights (YUCOM), a powerful NGO that was engaged by the new Yugoslav government to write the new law on amnesty. A month ago, Nalic became the legal adviser of the new Yugoslav president Vojislav Kostunica.

Milosevic’s Socialist Party, now the feeble opposition in parliament, blasted the amnesty law as “rewarding traitors and terrorists”. Party deputies, at the end of the parliamentary debate, held up placards accusing Yugoslavia’s new leadership of pardoning “traitors”.

Yugoslav Justice Minister, Momcilo Grubac, rejected opposition charges that pardoning draft dodgers would weaken the country’s defense, saying the aim was to restore social peace and integration.

“A law like this one does not bring into question the state’s defense capacity… It (the state) was destroyed by irresponsible politicians who have led the people for 10 years into senseless wars, misfortunes and tragedies,” he said during the debate.

To legal experts, the new amnesty law presents a test for the new government in the sense of putting the wars of past decade in their rightful place both in history and in the minds of many of the Serbs’.

A deep rift has existed for years in the Serbian public. A large part believed in the rhetoric of Milosevic’s regime that insisted on the fact that wars in the 90s were only the defence of “Serb national interest”.

At the same time, some of the Serbian public was anti-war and anti-Milosevic oriented and paid for that with activists being fired from work or arrested.

Milosevic’s propaganda described all his lost wars as victories. In his address to the nation on June 10, 1999, Milosevic, himself, described the end of the NATO air raids, paid by giving away Kosovo to the UN administration and international troops, as “victory over NATO”.

“We are coming to the point when things will have to be called by their real names,” says Biljana Kovacevic Vuco, head of YUCOM. “A good part of the Serbian public will have to learn what really happened in the past decade and why”.