By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jun 26 2001 (IPS)

Yugoslavia has begun a legal procedure that could lead to the extradition of former President Slobodan Milosevic to the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Yugoslav Justice Minister Momcilo Grubac handed over the Tribunal’s request for Milosevic’s transfer to a local court, as he is required to do under a decree passed on Saturday by the Yugoslav government.

The court will inform the justice ministry within three days about the results of the request. Milosevic’s and his lawyers’ appeal procedure can take another eight days, so no extradition can be expected until later next week.

Milosevic tops the list of those accused by the Tribunal of alleged war crimes in Kosovo in 1999. Milosevic became president of Serbia and Yugoslavia in 1990, but threw in the towel last October, after losing the elections.

If extradited, Milosevic will be the only head of state — indicted while in office — to be brought before the court.

Saturday’s decree followed weeks of controversy on how the country should solve the problem of co-operating with the UN Tribunal.

The threat by leading Western countries that they would not take part in the conference — expected to bring more than one billion dollars in fresh investments into impoverished Yugoslavia — pushed Yugoslav government into the hasty adoption of the decree.

The donors will meet in Brussels on Jun 29.

On his part Monday, Milosevic’s lawyer Toma Fila started a procedure of questioning the constitutional validity of the decree at the constitutional court.

Fila declined to comment about the time-span to assess the validity of the decree. “Everything is in the (constitutional) court’s hands now,” he told journalists. “It doesn’t matter how long the validation procedure takes”.

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica received a delegation from Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) Monday evening. The delegation demanded that the President intervene to prevent Milosevic’s extradition.

Slavica Djukic Dejanovic, a top SPS official who took part in the meeting, quoted Kostunica as saying “extradition of war crimes suspects to the Tribunal was a lesser evil from the evil that could strike the country if it did not co-operate with the Tribunal”.

Government officials say it’s necessary to respect international laws.

“This was a big test for us,” Yugoslav deputy Prime Minister Miroljub Labus said at a press conference following the adoption of the decree. “We are not selling anyone…It was high time we showed we were being serious when co-operation with the international community is on the agenda”.

Saturday’s extraordinary session followed an unsuccessful effort by the government to push the law on co-operation with the Tribunal into parliamentary procedure.

The day before (on Friday) it became clear that Montenegrin legislators in the federal parliament would vote against the law. The government withdrew it from parliament. Federal parliament has members from both Yugoslav republics of Serbia and Montenegro.

The government decided to adopt the decree, by-passing parliament.

The move caused fierce reactions from the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), whose leader and former Yugoslav president Milosevic was arrested on Apr 1 under the charges of corruption during his 10-year rule.

“The decree represents a constitutional coup. Extradition will be an act of capitulation,” Zoran Andjelkovic, an SPS official told IPS.

“Yugoslav constitution bans extradition of Yugoslav citizens to foreign countries and, with the hasty adoption of a simple decree, the new government has breached all the laws one can name”, Andjelkovic asserted.

But Constitutional law expert Pavle Nikolic told IPS: “The Tribunal is an organ of an international institution – UN – where Yugoslavia is a full member. The laws of those institutions are above our own laws and we have to respect them. This means that the co-operation with The Hague would have to exist, with or without our laws, decrees or other documents”.

Yugoslav Left party, headed by Mirjana Markovic, Milosevic’s wife, described the extradition of Yugoslav citizens as “giving up the sovereignty of the country for a handful of dollars”.

But analyst Ljubodrag Stojadinovic says the extradition of individuals charged by the Tribunal relieves Serbs from the collective guilt for war crimes “done in their name, but without their consent”.

“The collective guilt remains if we keep him (Milosevic) here, if we agree to think about his crimes as our own crimes and if we continue saying that he is an honest man,” Stojadinovic said. “Let him prove that he is innocent in the court”.

A poll conducted by the Centre for Alternative Studies, a respected Belgrade-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), showed that some 48 per cent of Serbs support the idea of Milosevic being extradited. The survey, conducted at the beginning of June, showed that 33 per cent of Serbs were against the extradition. The rest did not have a clear idea on what should be done.

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