Milosevic tried to cover up Kosovo crimes: official
Achmed Abdel-Rahim
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BELGRADE, May 25 (AFP) -
Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic ordered his aides to
cover up evidence of possible war crimes committed in his forces
in Kosovo, a top Serbian official said Friday, in the first such
announcement by Belgrade.
The statement by Dragan Karleusa, the Serbian official in charge
of the fight against organized crime, marked the first time that
the authorities who took over from Milosevic last October had
linked the former leader with possible war crimes.
Karleusa said the evidence had emerged during police
investigations into the finding of a truck filled with corpses
in the River Danube during NATO's 1999 air war on Yugoslavia,
which was sparked by Milosevic's repression of the ethnic
Albanian majority in Kosovo.
Police investigators found that Milosevic and top Serbian
interior ministry aides had discussed "cleaning up the terrain
in Kosovo where the fighting took place, in order to eliminate
civilian victims who could become thesubject of a possible
investigation" by the UN war crimes tribunal, Karleusa said.
"Milosevic ordered former Interior Minister Vlajko
Stojiljkovic to take measures to eliminate all traces which
could lead to any evidence of crimes" committed in during the war
in Kosovo, Karleusa told reporters.
However he did not give details of alleged war crimes committed
in the province.
Asked whether war crimes charges would be filed against
Milosevic, Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said,
"When the investigation is finished, we will file charges
according to what we establish."
"For now, it is clear that we are dealing with the issue of
eliminating (evidence of) a criminal deed," he said, adding
that Milosevic had not yet been questioned during the
investigation.
Milosevic and four of his top allies, including Stojiljkovic,
have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for
the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) for war crimes committed in Kosovo.
The former Yugoslav president was arrested on April 1, and is
now being held in a Belgrade prison awaiting prosecution on
domestic corruption charges.
However, since taking over last October, the new reformist
administration has remained reluctant to envisage extraditing
Milosevic to the The Hague, where the tribunal sits, saying
they would prefer to try him at home.
They have also insisted that they could not hand over suspects
to the ICTY before the Yugoslav parliament approved a draft law
on cooperation with the UN court.
However Belgrade is aware that some cooperation with the ICTY
is necessary for the war-shattered country to survive after
almost a decade of isolation due to international sanctions.
The United States has made clear it would only support and
take part in an anxiously-awaited aid donors' conference on
June 29 if there was progress in cooperation with the tribunal.
Although Belgrade has partially satisfied some of the demands
-- handing over two Bosnian Serb suspects to the court and by
arresting Milosevic -- only the extradition of Yugoslav
nationals would be seen as a real cooperation, Western officials
insist.
Many in Yugoslavia, including President Vojislav Kostunica,
still believe the ICTY is a politically motivated institution
that is biased against Serbs.
In a bid to to prove that Yugoslavia can put its own house in
order, Kostunica and a group of intellectuals have launched a
South African-style truth commission to probe Serb
responsibility in the series of wars that broke apart the
former Yugoslavia in the 1990's, leaving hundreds of thousands
of people dead and many more displaced.
Copyright (c) 2001 Agence France Press