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Milosevic Faces Indictment for Crimes Against Muslims
THE HAGUE, June 26 (News Agencies) - Slobodan Milosevic has been indicted by the U.N. tribunal for crimes against humanity and war crimes during the 1999 Kosovo conflict with Muslim fighters, news agencies reported Monday.
The former warlord could also later face another indictment linked to the Bosnian war and for crimes against Muslims, court sources said.
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 Serbian 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 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.
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