POLITICS-YUGOSLAVIA: War Crimes Suspects Surrender To Tribunal

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, May 2 2002 (IPS) - Serbs accused of war crimes have succumbed to pressure and have begun to surrender themselves to the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Analysts say this is despite efforts by remaining members of the old regime to prevent cooperation with the Tribunal.

General Dragoljub Ojdanic, who surrendered himself last week, has pleaded not guilty to charges of war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999.

Ojdanic, who surrendered to the ICTY last Thursday, became the first top official of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime to hand himself over to the international authorities.

The former Yugoslav Army chief of staff made the decision after the Yugoslav parliament passed the new law on cooperation with the ICTY on April 11. The law was adopted under the stern pressure of the West, that threatened to cut the financial aid to the ruined country.

“General Ojdanic’s surrender had the important psychological and political effect,” says analyst Vladimir Goati. “The atmosphere in this country after the adoption of the law on cooperation with the ICTY was heated, but the political tensions are off now”.

Vlajko Stojiljkovic, co-sharer of Kosovo 1999 indictment, former police minister and top official of Milosevic’s Socialist Party, committed suicide after the law was adopted.

The suicide was used to trigger a nationalist and rightist campaign against the ICTY, but tensions eased following the decision by Ojdanic and five other accused to surrender within the government’s deadline set for May 12.

Milosevic’s vice prime minister Nikola Sainovic, who has also been indicted, says he will surrender to the ICTY later this week, along with Milan Martic, the former leader of the rebel Serbs in Croatia. Martic is accused of war crimes against Croatian civilians.

“By May 12, the remaining three people who have been indicted who contacted the authorities to surrender, should be in Holland,” Yugoslav Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic said.

Two of them, generals Mile Mrksic and Vladimir Kovacevic, are accused of war crimes in the Croatian war, while the third Momcilo Gruban is being charged for running a camp for non-Serbs in Bosnia.

“The surrenders mean the return of this country to the rules of civilised conduct after the decade of defiance by Milosevic and international isolation because of his war politics,” sociologist Cedomir Cupic says.

“With the law and the first surrenders people have started to think of what crimes these people are being accused of rather than of the fact that they are Serbs who are being hounded by the international community,” he added.

More than 200,000 people, most of them non-Serb civilians, died in bloody conflicts in the Balkans in the 90s. The official propaganda of Slobodan Milosevic, who fell from power in October 2000, presented the ICTY as Serb hating and run by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, that undertook air raids against Serbia in 1999.

Under the new law, the surrender of alleged war criminals means that the Yugoslav state will help with their defense and provide guarantees that they will appear before the ICTY once the court decides to set them free until the beginning of their trails. Such decisions have already been made by the ICTY for several top Serb and Croatian indictees.

The May 12 deadline was set up by the authorities as a way of showing its willingness for quick cooperation. Seventeen of the list of 23 indictees have not indicated any intention to surrender. These include the most wanted on the list, such as Radovan Karadzic, who risk being arrested and handed over to the ICTY.

“I have no intention to answer the appeals for my surrender to ICTY,” Karadzic wrote in a letter published in the Belgrade weekly Nedeljni Telegraf. “It’s high time that the international police (in Bosnia) stopped harassing my family and friends in search of me.”

Karadzic, former leader of Bosnian Serbs, is charged for war crimes that include genocide after the massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men in Srebrenica in July 1995. His whereabouts are secret, but he is believed to be hiding in the mountainous region of Eastern Bosnia or Western Montenegro.

Analysts note that a recent move by the ICTY could add up to breaking the illusion that the court is biased towards the Serbs.

Nenad Banovic, a Bosnian Serb extradited to the ICTY last November, was released by the court 10 days ago. Despite the indictment, the prosecutors office declared there were no grounds to establish that Banovic really took part in crimes committed in one of the camps for non-Serbs in Bosnia in 1992.