POLITICS-YUGOSLAVIA: Extradition Demand Causes Controversy

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 9 2002 (IPS) - There is controversy in the political corridors of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) after the government failed to meet the March 31 deadline to hand over suspects to the Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

“To extradite or not to extradite has become the hottest political question now,” says analyst Vladimir Goati. According to Goati the reformist alliance that ousted Slobodan Milosevic from power 18 months ago has split into two main camps.

The reform-minded government of Serbia, bigger sister of Montenegro in FRY, supports the extraditions. However, the FRY administration, topped by Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, has called for a law of extraditions to be adopted first.

The March 31 deadline came from the United States administration who has threatened to block aid if the extradition is not carried out. Under U.S. legislation, FRY can receive this year’s remaining 40 million dollars of financial aid but only if the Bush administration has certified it has passed several tests – including cooperation with ICTY.

Analysts say loss of the foreign aid from other donors and international bodies, as well as the confidence of foreign investors, is now also at stake.

“Others will follow the US decision and we’ll end up in the mess like in Milosevic’s times,” Serbian Finance Minister Bozidar Djelic said.

He says also under threat is the 800 million dollar World Bank reconstruction loan, badly needed in the economically devastated country. “The whole sum comes to four billion dollars in the next two years,” Djelic added.

On the other hand, the federal administration led by FRY’s President Vojislav Kostunica, a moderate nationalist, views the handovers with deep suspicion.

“My stomach turns over when I think about The Hague,” Kostunica admitted in a recent television interview. “But we must first pass the law on cooperation and see what is to be done next,” he added.

Yugoslav parliament failed to pass the law since Milosevic was ousted.

Djindjic’s government used a kind of legal shortcut to extradite Milosevic to ICTY last June.

Cooperation with ICTY, in the terms of the U.S. administration, means the handover of other war crimes suspects to The Hague. Another three Milosevic-era officials accused of war crimes in Kosovo in 1999 are widely seen as the most likely candidates. They are former Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister, Nikola Sainovic, former army chief-of-staff, Dragoljub Ojdanic, and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, Serbian interior minister under Milosevic.

The handover remains one of the most politically sensitive problems in FRY. “The handovers themselves are not the real problem. It is about what the public really knows about the Tribunal and wars,” Serbian Prime Minister said in a recent television interview

Many Serbs see the Tribunal as a politically biased institution. In general, they are hostile to it and deny that Serbs committed war crimes. The wars of the 90s ended with more than 200,000 dead in the country that had 24 million people. Most of the dead are non-Serbs.

Srdjan Bogosavljevic, director of the Strategic Marketing agency, which carried out a poll of 2,200 interviewees, said that four-fifths of the population believes ICTY is biased.

“Serbs are not only unable to acknowledge war crimes. They are convinced they never occurred,” he said. “When we asked them to cite three war crimes committed by Serbs, half of the interviewees said Serbs did not commit a single crime.”

Only a small proportion, mostly younger, better educated people, accept that some Serbs are responsible for the most horrific war crimes since the Second World War.

Srbobran Brankovic of Belgrade Gallup said the surveys reflected a “lack of morality” in the public, which the government was to blame for.

At the time of Milosevic’s handover, he said, the new leaders were willing to admit that the Serbian side had committed war crimes. Then silence descended and the subject was forgotten, apparently because politicians feared losing support if they discussed the subject openly.

FRY and its two republics face both parliamentary and presidential elections this year.

“The electoral race has began,” analyst Vladimir Goati told IPS. “When they say ‘extraditions’, politicians think ‘voters’. None of them is willing to give up the large proportion of electoral body that opposes the handovers”.