|
Thousands Defend Indicted War Criminal in Belgrade
BELGRADE, June 26 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Some three thousand supporters of jailed former president Slobodan Milosevic gathered in Belgrade on Wednesday to protest against the prospect of him being extradited to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
Some of the protestors carried Milosevic's photos, while the others shouted "Free Slobodan," as they marched from the central Belgrade Republic square to the nearby Serbian parliament building.
Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) organized the protest.
The Yugoslavian government issued a decree Saturday formalizing its relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), paving the way for the handover of Milosevic, wanted for war crimes allegedly committed by his forces in Kosovo.
Milosevic has been in a Belgrade jail since April 1, on domestic accusations of corruption and abuse of power.
Zoran Andjelkovic, a top SPS official, called for an urgent session of the Yugoslavian and Serbian parliaments to condemn and revoke "illegal actions" by the federal government.
"We demand release of Milosevic and all political prisoners in Serbia," Andjelkovic said, in a reference to a number of the former regime's officials being investigated for corruption and abuse of power by new authorities.
Andjelkovic said the protests would be held daily in Belgrade, insisting that the SPS demanded the "urgent release of Milosevic" pending trial here, and the government decree to be "proclaimed unconstitutional."
The first indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia was issued on May 27, 1999, when Milosevic was accused of murders, deportations, persecutions and violating the conventions of war stemming from the Kosovo conflict.
Four of his key allies, Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, former Yugoslav Deputy Premier Nikola Sainovic, Armed Forces Chief Dragoljub Ojdanic and Serb Interior Minister Vlajko Stojilijkovic were indicted on similar charges.
Louise Arbour, the court's former chief prosecutor, said the tribunal had sufficient evidence to show that Milosevic and his four co-accused were responsible for the deportation of 740,000 ethnic Muslim Albanians from Kosovo and the documented murders of 340 Kosovars.
Milosevic was head of the Yugoslav armed forces at the time.
The new indictment, likely to be issued in October, would concern the ousted Yugoslav president's role in the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the bloodiest and longest conflict in the violent disintegration of the Yugoslav federation.
Milosevic himself provided the impetus for this indictment when shortly after his arrest in April he admitted that his regime had financed atrocities by Serb forces in Bosnia and Croatia.
Court sources said this indictment was more difficult to establish from a legal standpoint since the chain of command in Bosnia did not reach Milosevic but ended at Radovan Karadic and Ratko Mladic, the political and military leaders of the Bosnian-Serbs.
Recently 61 bodies, believed to be of Muslim and Croat civilians killed by Serb forces during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, were excavated from a mass grave in northeast Bosnia.
In May, Serbian police uncovered yet another grave while they were investigating the case of a refrigerator truck pulled from the Danube River in April 1999 that contained the bodies of 86 presumed Kosovo Albanians.
Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic estimated last week that about 1,000 bodies of suspected ethnic Albanian victims of the war in Kosovo could be found in several mass graves in Serbia.
|
