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U.N. War Crimes Prosecutor Wants Milosevic
additional reporting by James Hider
THE HAGUE & BELGRADE (AFP) – U.N. prosecutor Carla Del Ponte put more pressure on Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica to deal with war crimes on Wednesday by saying she would only visit Belgrade next month if she could meet with him.
Speaking at a press conference in The Hague, Del Ponte said she was planning to go to Belgrade on January 18th and 19th and that it was important to meet Kostunica and other Yugoslav leaders.
She said she had sent him two letters that had "sadly" gone without reply.
The International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Kostunica's predecessor Slobodan Milosevic and four of his close associates in May 1999 for crimes against humanity during the war in Kosovo.
Kostunica campaigned for the presidential election in September saying he would not seek to extradite Milosevic, and when he came to power in October said that cooperating with the tribunal was not one of his priorities.
On Tuesday he even accused Del Ponte of undermining the ICTY's credibility by refusing to try NATO over its air war against Belgrade.
"A great shadow of doubt has fallen over The Hague court since Carla del Ponte refused to lead an inquiry into possible crimes against humanity committed during NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia," said the reformist president.
Del Ponte told a Russian television station that the court was not competent to judge the actions of NATO during the bombing campaign.
"The tribunal must establish if there is a personal responsibility for the crimes committed," she said.
"The information, the evidence, the elements that we have do not allow us to open an inquiry [against NATO] as the evidence is not sufficient from a legal standpoint," Del Ponte added.
Cooperation between the tribunal and Belgrade has so far been limited to the opening of an ICTY bureau in the Serb capital.
Meanwhile, Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said Wednesday Milosevic must face trial "as soon as possible" for the conflicts he helped spark in the Balkans.
But the trial - which should be preceded by a South African-style truth commission - should be in Serbia and not in a U.N. court, he said.
Milosevic "has to pay for what he did or inspired or organized as far as people in Bosnia and Croatia and all over Serbia are concerned," said Svilanovic, a leader of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS).
"I will push ... toward a prosecution here, as soon as possible. He has to be made accountable for what he has done to the neighboring nations," he added.
"We have the constitutional obstacle that we cannot extradite, and also a political obstacle in that we were promising the people not to extradite," said Svilanovic.
As for the charges the former leader might face, Svilanovic said it would be "easiest to start with corruption, but I am talking about serious things," such as war crimes.
"That is exactly what I am talking about," he stressed.
"It is not a problem about satisfying the ICTY ... but satisfying the highest moral principles," he said.
He said that while technically Milosevic might be able to leave the country, he could not "leave just like that, not like a tourist."
Svilanovic was talking on the sidelines of a DOS conference marking the end of the election campaign for Saturday's vote for a new Serbian assembly, which the 18-party coalition is tipped to win in a landslide victory.
He said he favored a South African-style truth commission to precede a trial to show Serbs - long duped by Milosevic's state media manipulation - what happened over the past decade.
"There is not much awareness. I think it will be a shock, it's been played down for a long time" he said, stressing that the siege and bloody fall of Vukovar in the 1991 war against Croatia was most likely to open Serbs' eyes to the horrors of the past.
He said Milosevic's associates would also face justice here, including the military commander of the Bosnian Serbs, Ratko Mladic, who lives in Belgrade and has also been indicted by the ICTY.
The foreign minister, who will accompany Kostunica to Paris Thursday to meet French President Jacques Chirac, said the next few months would be a bumpy ride as the euphoria of the democratic transition wore off and economic realities set in.
"Frankly I expect pressure, strikes, all of this in just a few months. And it's normal because people will try to see results in just a few months and its not easy to achieve," he said, adding that he believed the coalition would weather the crisis.
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