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NewsPro Archive
November 2000
ABC News: Montenegro won't let Yugo cbank resume control
WIRE:11/29/2000 11:33:00 ET
BELGRADE, Nov 29 (Reuters) - Montenegro said on Wednesday it would not allow the Yugoslav central bank to resume control over the coastal republic"s monetary policy now that it was firm in its aim to gain independence and international recognition. A top adviser to Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic said the position had already been made clear to new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica. "President Milo Djukanovic told Mr. Kostunica that Montenegro can"t provide legitimacy to federal institutions," Djukanovic"s political adviser Miodrag Vukovic told reporters. "Monetary experts in Montenegro have said the National Bank of Yugoslavia is not recognised by Montenegro," he said on the sidelines of a seminar on ties between Yugoslavia"s two estranged republics, Serbia and Montenegro. Yugoslavia"s new central bank governor Mladan Dinkic has vowed to restore payments between the republics within 100 days. Kostunica"s party, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, called on Dinkic to accept Vuk Ognjanovic, a Montenegrin, as his deputy on Wednesday, but Dinkic said to do so would ruin his credibility as Ognjanovic was governor in 1992 at the start of a period of fierce hyperinflation. But Vukovic said there was no way the Yugoslav central bank could in any form return to Montenegro. "That"s impossible. We will not give our authorities back to the federal level." Since Kostunica"s victory in September"s presidential election, Montenegro has ditched the Yugoslav dinar and set up its own central bank. The German mark is its only legal tender. Instead of mending ties in their federation, Vukovic, a member of Djukanovic"s Democratic Party of Socialists which has shifted from pro-Yugoslav to pro-independence policies over the past three years, said both republics must become independent. Once independent, Montenegro would agree to a monetary union and joint diplomacy and army with Serbia. "But the future union would have no attributes of a state," he said. But Djordije Blazic, a Montenegrin deputy justice minister who said he was speaking as a legal expert, questioned who would benefit from a union of independent states. "Who will the new joint army with two commands serve? How can we have joint diplomacy and two seats in the United Nations? How can we have a monetary union with two different monetary systems? Will this all be for the well-being of the nations or to satisfy the needs of political elites?" he said. SERBS CAUTIOUS, SEEK PATIENCE Serbian legal experts warned against hasty decisions and sought patience from Montenegro, at least until after December 23 parliamentary elections in Serbia. Montenegro has threatened to break away unilaterally if it does not reach a political deal with Serbia. Dusan Janjic, an analyst at the Institute for Social Science, said keeping Serbia and Montenegro in a single state could mean an end to Djukanovic"s rule. "One must agree to a dialogue and show patience until Serbia elects a new government. If there is a political deal Djukanovic goes, if not Serbia and Montenegro will split apart," he said. Janjic said giving Montenegro independence would create other problems in the Balkans, including in Kosovo and Bosnia. "It would be better for the two to stay together. It makes no difference whether it"s a loose or strict federation. It"s worth making an effort," Jan Svejnar, director of the William Davidson Institute at University of Michigan, told Reuters. The institute was picked by the U.S. State Department to study and aid transition in the Balkans.
ABC News: Threat of Serb-ethnic Albanian violence clouds NATO leaders' Kosovo visit
WIRE:11/30/2000 00:49:00 ET
PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) _ Even though it"s outside the tense province, the threat of new Serb-ethnic Albanian violence is clouding a scheduled Thursday visit to Kosovo by NATO"s secretary general and its top military commander. Lord Robertson, the secretary general, and U.S. Gen. Joseph W. Ralston are visiting at a time of confrontation in a region where a recent rebel ethnic Albanian offensive claimed at least five lives. Robertson and Ralston are expected to consult with senior NATO commanders in Kosovo during their visit. They also will meet with ethnic Albanian leaders to talk about how to stop rebel incursions into Serb-controlled territory. Ethnic Albanians make up the vast majority of the population in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia"s main republic. Kosovo has been under international control since last year, and many residents want full independence for not only Kosovo but also the heavily ethnic Albanian Presevo Valley region in nearby Serbia proper. In the three-mile buffer zone between Kosovo and the rest of Serbia, days of attacks by the independence-minded rebels earlier this week left at least four Serb policemen dead and a main road under rebel control. On Wednesday, though, Serb police moved into region and reclaimed the village of Lucane. Backed by two armored vehicles and armed with automatic weapons, police zigzagged from house to house as they cautiously entered the village. The strategic village is the first recaptured by Serb forces since last week"s rebel offensive. It brought Serb security troops closer to the ethnic Albanian militants entrenched on nearby hills. They now face each other from a 500-yard distance. A high-ranking Serb police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said his forces would not enter deeper into the buffer zone. He said the officers plan to set up a "permanent presence" in the village. Kosovo has been administered by the United Nations since last year to force an end to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic"s campaign of repression against the ethnic Albanian majority. Tens of thousands are believed to have died in Milosevic"s crackdown. Last week"s attacks by the rebels triggered protests by Western governments and fears of more bloodshed in the region. Yugoslavia"s new pro-democratic leadership _ claiming the militants are crossing from Kosovo _ demanded that NATO troops stationed in the province stop the incursions into southern Serbia. In Kosovo, NATO spokesman Maj. Peter Cameron said Wednesday that NATO-led peacekeepers intercepted a truck inside Kosovo carrying anti-tank weapons, mortar rounds and other ammunition. The truck also contained uniforms with the insignia of the rebels fighting in the buffer zone, Cameron said. Several people were arrested. Cameron said NATO did not know whether the truck was heading out of the province and into the buffer zone. Elsewhere Wednesday, Russia proposed lifting the U.N. arms embargo on Yugoslavia but keeping it for Kosovo. The U.N. Security Council adopted the ban in March 1998 to try to halt the Serb crackdown in Kosovo. But since then, a new, democratic leadership has taken over in Belgrade. A Russian draft resolution distributed to Security Council welcomed the new leadership and its efforts to promote reconciliation and stability in the region. It noted that the conditions laid out for lifting the embargo have been met. But the British and French ambassadors said the timing wasn"t right to lift the embargo, particularly with parliamentary elections in Yugoslavia coming up Dec. 23, council sources said. The United States and European countries pledged to lift all sanctions against Yugoslavia following Milosevic"s ouster. While U.S. and EU economic measures have been lifted, the arms embargo has remained in place.
The Guardian: Serbian court to interrogate Milosevic
Critics see Serbian plot to save ex-leader from Hague trial
Gillian Sandford in Belgrade
Thursday November 30, 2000
Slobodan Milosevic will face some form of court proceedings in Serbia for fraud soon after the republic holds elections on December 23, according to an interview given to a Belgrade newspaper by Zoran Djindjic, the man likely to be Serbia's next prime minister.
The scheme reflects the new authorities' determination not to give up the former Yugoslav president for prosecution at the international war crimes tribunal at the Hague. Those who believe Mr Milosevic should face the Hague tribunal view Mr Djindjic's scheme as a fudging device.
The court, Mr Djindjic said, "will examine three issues: election fraud, the issue of his wealth and the way he acquired it, and the question of who ordered the several murders and assassinations [in Yugoslavia]."
Cedomir Jovanovic, a spokesman for Mr Djindjic's party, said he expected this to take place in January. There was a need to assign responsibility for what happened in Serbia in recent years: "We need some answers from Milosevic."
Mr Djindjic gave the first details of his plan in an interview with the Belgrade-based daily Glas Javnosti. Specifically, he referred to the attempted killing of Vuk Draskovic, leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, and the assassination of a leading Belgrade editor and journalist, Slavko Curuvija.
"He [Milosevic] will have to appear during an investigation process, maybe as a witness, but he can't avoid coming to court. And that will be immediately after elections," he said.If, as expected, the party of President Vojislav Kostunica wins the December elections in Serbia, Mr Djindjic will very likely become the republic's prime minister.
Under Serbia's system, preliminary inquiries are carried out by an investigating judge, who decides whether charges and a trial are justified.
Whether the new government will actually go beyond an initial court interrogation and allow a full prosecution of Mr Milosevic, is open to question. He has just been triumphantly reelected as head of the republic's largest party, the Socialists, and has been allowed to live freely in his Belgrade villa with military protection.
Sonja Biserko, president of the Helsinki commission for human rights in Belgrade, reacted with dismay to the news of the Serbian proceedings. Despite threats against her, she has long advocated cooperation with the Hague.
"Milosevic is responsible for many more things than election fraud," she said. "He is responsible for perpetrating the wars in former Yugoslavia, for war crimes in Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo - and for isolating Serbia."
Zarko Korac, leader of the small Social Democratic Union which belongs to the anti-Milosevic coalition and supports the Hague tribunal, said: "The indictment of Milosevic is much more serious [than the issues Mr Djindjic listed] ... My firm opinion is that this has to be done in cooperation with the Hague."
Aleksandar Popovic of Mr Kostunica's Democratic party of Serbia - which is anti-Hague - said Mr Djindjic had failed to talk to members of the anti-Milosevic coalition before speaking. "Politicians should not interfere with the judicial system. We need an independent judiciary," he said.
LA Times: Hope vs. Doubt in Yugoslavia
Vojislav Kostunica has become wildly popular since the uprising that brought him to power. But some reformists wonder if his cautious nature has stalled the revolution.
By RICHARD BOUDREAUX, Times Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 29, 2000
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia--In 1983, a Serbian legal scholar named Vojislav Kostunica coauthored a book that reflected on political revolutions. Such turning points, he wrote, are "rare moments" when those with power can "act unbound" to remake the world around them.
Now Kostunica finds himself in exactly that position, thrust into the presidency of Yugoslavia by a "bulldozer revolution" in which people power and earthmoving equipment enforced his electoral victory over Slobodan Milosevic.
Yet at his moment of opportunity to sweep away the entire Milosevic regime and bury its venomous Serbian nationalism, the new leader has switched off the bulldozer and begun building a new order on the foundations of the old.
As the face of Eastern Europe's final uprising against a Cold War-era strongman, Kostunica is a cautious legalist who inspires both passionate hope and troubling doubt that the Balkan region can at last overcome its decade of ethnic bloodshed.
He is an ethnic nationalist who backed the ideal of a Greater Serbia--an expansion of the former Yugoslav federation's dominant republic to embrace Serbs elsewhere--but not the massacres committed in its name. He sees no conflict between this narrow patriotism and his desire to lead a normal European democracy.
He is a conservative in every sense, as uneasy with the notion of radical institutional change as he is with the tumult his job has brought to his own very private, parochial life. The country is sick of upheaval, he says, and longs for stability.
He is, above all, a lawyer. Even as his care for legal niceties slows reform at home, it also binds him to Western-supervised accords that ended wars in the Serbian province of Kosovo and in Bosnia-Herzegovina on terms unfavorable to the Serbs. He upholds those accords despite his long distrust of Western aims in the Balkans.
"If he's an extremist about anything, it is legality," says Liljana Bacevic, a pollster and former academic colleague.
A large man who looks dwarfed by his vast new office here in the Federation Palace on Lenin Boulevard, the 56-year-old Kostunica admits being awed and still a bit apprehensive about the speed of change since he outpolled Milosevic on Sept. 24.
"I expected things would develop more slowly here, like the 'Velvet Revolution' in Prague," he said in an interview, recalling the former Czechoslovakia's smooth passage from communism in 1989. "I underestimated the bulldozer factor."
Kostunica (pronounced kosh-TOON-eet-zah) is soft-spoken, and his mop of dark hair gives him the look of a rumpled professor. Ask him a question and, unlike a typical Balkan politician, he pauses to think. His answers are direct, coolly analytical and devoid of extreme language.
Some believe his aloof manner masks insecurity and indecision in a man who had never before run anything bigger than a 5,000-member political party. But he has clearly set Yugoslavia's new course with two key decisions--one of them modified under pressure.
The first came the night of Oct. 5 as he faced hundreds of thousands of supporters outside City Hall in Belgrade, capital of both Yugoslavia and Serbia.
They had seized and burned the Yugoslav parliament building and Serbian television studios that afternoon, and Milosevic's police were in full retreat. The next step, many thought, should be the arrest of Milosevic himself, a man accused of corruption, war crimes and attempted theft of the election.
"To Dedinje!" people shouted, eager to storm the Belgrade suburb where Milosevic lives.
"Dear Serbia," Kostunica told the crowd. "No one is marching to Dedinje. You are staying here with me. I am staying here with you."
Cleaner Break Sought
That decision set a pattern for what some democracy activists now fear is a revolution stalled. Kostunica took office two days later, but the disgraced Milosevic is still free, and was even reelected head of the Socialist Party over the weekend after a fiery speech.
Most allies of Kostunica are demanding that he make a cleaner break with the past by firing two of its most hated figures: the Yugoslav army chief of staff, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, and the Serbian secret police chief, Rade Markovic. But Kostunica, who has pledges of loyalty from both men, has chosen a step-by-step transition.
Legally, he points out, the police chief answers not to him but to a caretaker Serbian administration. A new Serbian parliament and government are to be elected Dec. 23, and he wants them in place before overhauling the police, army and judiciary.
To tinker with armed institutions now, Kostunica explains, "might provoke some sort of disorder" and "jeopardize the democratic changes that we have started." For the same reason, he's in no hurry to arrest Milosevic.
Kostunica's second key decision was to start a peace dialogue with ethnic Croat and Muslim leaders in Bosnia. Their capital, Sarajevo, had been besieged and destroyed by Bosnian Serb shelling during the deadliest Balkan war of the 1990s.
His late-October visit did not start out as a healing mission. To the dismay of authorities in Sarajevo, the new president first announced a "private pilgrimage" to the Serbian part of Bosnia for the ceremonial reburial of a nationalist Serb ideologue and poet, Jovan Ducic, whose remains had come home from Chicago.
Kostunica did not seem to understand at first how provocative this was. He had supported the Bosnian Serbs' losing wartime effort to form their own state and link it with Serbia. He had visited Bosnian Serb trenches and collected blood for their hospitals.
Now, for his first appearance as president in another Balkan country, he had chosen a Serbian Orthodox Christian ceremony in Trebinje, a town "cleansed" of its Muslim inhabitants and mosques. Might not this be construed, he was asked, as a blessing for lingering Bosnian Serb separatism?
Finally he adjusted his plan, at the urging of allies at home and Western officials in the region. He went to the Serbian ceremony but sat silently through hours of nationalist speeches. Then he flew straight to Sarajevo and voiced support for the 1995 Dayton peace accords, which aim to preserve Bosnia as a multiethnic country run by Croats, Muslims and Serbs.
That decision displayed Kostunica's willingness to balance nationalist sentiment with the demands of statesmanship. He now spends the biggest part of his time courting Balkan and Western leaders, lobbying to end years of isolation and economic sanctions against Serbia. In an impromptu meeting Monday, he shook hands with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at a European security conference in Vienna.
"He's proud to be a nationalist . . . but he's also a democrat and, as he has said repeatedly to us, a pragmatist, a realist," says Richard Holbrooke, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "When he says the Dayton agreement is part of international law, when he recognizes that his [country's] economic future lies in these things, it's encouraging."
Others are not convinced that the leopard can change its spots. "Serb hegemony is heavily wounded. But it's not eliminated," warns Adem Demaci, an ethnic Albanian separatist leader in Kosovo. "Kostunica himself is one of the very important ideologues of Serb hegemony."
The president's first steps, however, are playing well in the rest of Serbia, where he won an 84% approval rating in the first survey of his presidency.
"He has a calming effect on people," says Svetlana Stamenkovic, a 30-year-old Belgrade accountant. "We see him reaching out to the world. He looks wise. Likable. Normal. Without promising anything concrete, he gives us a sense that our life can be normal."
The Serbs have endured a most abnormal history: They threw off five centuries of Turkish rule in 1878. They resisted Nazi occupation. After World War II, the Communists closed their Orthodox churches. Milosevic lost most of the Yugoslav federation in four wars; the last of these, against the separatist Albanian majority in Kosovo, brought 78 days of bombing last year by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The Serbian feeling of victimization by outsiders is legendary, particularly in the rural Serbian heartland known as Sumadija, where Jovan Damljanovic, the new president's great-grandfather, settled in the 19th century. He served in the first Serbian legislature after Turkish occupation and adapted the name of his village, Kostunici, as his own. During his election campaign, Vojislav Kostunica stopped there to tout his "authentic Serbian roots."
He was born in Belgrade on March 24, 1944. He likes to inform Westerners that he has survived two Anglo-American bombings--last year's NATO strikes and a 1944 Easter attack that was aimed at the Nazis but damaged much of central Belgrade, including his parents' home.
His father, a rural judge who moved here from the village, served six months on Serbia's postwar Supreme Court. The new Communist authorities fired him for opposing their political purges of public servants.
Kostunica inherited his father's Serbian Orthodox faith, aversion to communism and distaste for any brand of revolutionary justice. The future president's 1983 book, "Monism or Political Pluralism," detailed how Marshal Josip Broz Tito's Communists dismantled a budding multi-party democracy in the early postwar years and then erased it from history texts.
The young Kostunica, an only child, played basketball and listened to Elvis Presley but didn't socialize much. Radomir Diklic, a year behind him in high school, remembers a brilliant student so quiet and unsmiling that classmates called him starmali, one who is young but acts old.
"His family had been pushed out of the mainstream," Diklic says. "I think that's why he has always been a bit of a loner."
Kostunica's wife of 24 years, Zorica Radovic, is from a like-minded family. The two met at Belgrade University Law School. She is a lawyer, and one of her first cousins is the top Serbian Orthodox prelate in Montenegro, the smaller of Yugoslavia's two remaining republics. The couple have no children.
Like his father, Kostunica took up law, used it to challenge the system and lost. In 1974, he was fired as a law school teaching assistant after defending a nationalist colleague who was jailed for criticizing Tito's attempts to dilute Serbia's constitutional power within the Yugoslav federation.
The young lawyer took refuge at the state Institute for Philosophy and Social Theories, an academic ghetto where leading dissidents were allowed to work but not teach. There he translated the Federalist Papers and wrote scholarly analyses of Alexis de Tocqueville and other liberal democratic thinkers.
In 1989, the dissident ghetto spawned the Democratic Party. Kostunica, a co-founder, quit in 1992 to start his own Democratic Party of Serbia. More nationalist-minded than others in the democratic camp, the party shunned alliances, refused to take Western aid and remained small.
"It was more like a religious sect than a political party," says Ognen Privicevic, a former member.
Kostunica gained fleeting notoriety on a 1998 visit to rally besieged Serbs in Kosovo. Someone handed him an assault rifle, and a camera clicked. The newspaper photo gave the impression--false, he says--that he supported Milosevic's brutal crackdown on Kosovo Albanians.
"My nationalism is greater than the normal nationalism of, for example, the French, because Serbs objectively suffered more than any other people in Yugoslavia," he says now. "Serbs sometimes made big mistakes, but when you add and subtract everything, their destiny is quite apocalyptic. I couldn't be indifferent. But I never hated or sinned against other peoples."
His otherwise lackluster career as a party leader looks brilliant in hindsight. When 18 parties formed the Democratic Opposition of Serbia this year and searched for a candidate, Kostunica emerged with the fewest negatives; he was the only contender untainted by corruption or evident collaboration with either the West or Milosevic.
Crisscrossing the country in his battered white 1990 Yugo, visiting two or three cities a day, he campaigned as the anti-Milosevic and mentioned God in his speeches. Enthusiastic crowds drew him out of his shell. He promised an end to "stormy and difficult events" with an administration that would be law-abiding "and, if you like, boring."
That now sounds like wishful thinking. On a recent Saturday, he complained that his presidential burdens, far from being dull, keep him awake all but three to five hours a night and rob him of weekends at a country cottage near his ancestral village.
"We are conquering some new realms of freedom" for Yugoslavia, he said with a weary sigh, "but I'm losing myself, some realms of my personal freedom."
His top priority is persuading a restless Montenegro not to secede--a move that would bring the remaining federation to an end, since it would leave only Serbia, making Kostunica's Yugoslav government superfluous. But he has promised to respect the Montenegrins' choice.
To countries demanding apologies for Serbian atrocities, he is offering a "truth commission" to investigate crimes of all Balkan belligerents, and hinting that Milosevic will be tried eventually at home--not extradited, as the United States demands, to face an international tribunal in The Hague.
The West an Asset
And inside Serbia, he faces a challenge from Zoran Djindjic, the most powerful party leader in his coalition, whose followers have seized control of some state enterprises and banks and continue to demand a purge of the army and police. The two rivals teamed to oust Milosevic but have never trusted each other.
Kostunica's biggest asset in these battles is the West. Persuaded by his sincerity, both the United States and the European Union were quick to lift some sanctions and promise hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. That has bolstered Kostunica's enormous popularity at home.
One interesting measure of Serbia's psychological isolation over the years is the new president's surprise over this breakthrough--as if he had truly believed the Serbs were doomed to remain pariahs and victims.
"The prejudices are breaking down much sooner than I expected," he said with a look of amazement. "To hear Americans saying that one can be accepted as a democrat regardless of some disagreements with official American policy was a strange experience. I had no idea that our so-called moderate nationalism could ever be accepted in Washington."
The Washington Post: Crash of Yugoslavia's Money Man
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 29, 2000;
BACKA PALANKA, Yugoslavia –– Two dozen empty warehouses in this Danube River town stand as a monument to the Yugoslav politician who has come to epitomize the thuggery and corruption of the Milosevic years.
Until last month, Mihalj Kertes was director of the Yugoslav Customs Bureau, a title that barely hints at his real role in recent Balkan history. Unctuous and smooth, Kertes served as behind-the-scenes treasurer and hatchet man to ousted Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic for more than a decade. He financed ruthless paramilitary groups that waged war in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo, and was the key figure in a vast smuggling operation designed to evade Draconian international sanctions.
The empty warehouses are all that remains of a grandiose money-making scheme: a huge duty-free zone in Kertes's home town of Backa Palanka, on the border with Croatia. According to local residents, the plan was at once a way for Kertes to enrich himself and his associates, ensure continuing off-the-books funding for secret Milosevic projects and provide jobs for his own political supporters.
The dream of transforming this provincial backwater on the flat Danube plain into another Hong Kong or Macao died Oct. 6, when heavily armed democracy activists burst into the Yugoslav customs headquarters in the capital, Belgrade, and caught the sharply dressed Kertes shredding hundreds of documents. Hours later, Milosevic went on television to concede defeat in the Sept. 24 Yugoslav presidential election, marking an end to his 13 years of authoritarian rule.
"Kertes was the perfect symbol of a corrupt system," said Milan Stevanovic, a strategist with the Democratic Opposition of Serbia movement who led the raid. "He was the second man of the regime, the man who controlled the finances."
A member of Serbia's ethnic Hungarian minority, the bland, eager-to-please Kertes owed his remarkable political ascent to his willingness to do Milosevic's bidding without question. Like his patron, he was neither a true nationalist nor a doctrinaire communist. Instead he was a unique mix of Balkan warlord and old-style machine politician.
Attempts to interview Kertes for this article were unsuccessful; he has dropped out of sight since Milosevic's overthrow. But memories of him are vivid in Backa Palanka, a town of 25,000 on the Danube in the Vojvodina region of Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia. Even though Kertes, 59, lived in Belgrade, townspeople here often saw him riding through the streets in an armored limousine en route to his mother's heavily guarded house.
As the undisputed boss of Backa Palanka, Kertes controlled much of the local economy. He used the police force and paramilitary squads to harass the political opposition. But he also took care of his own, rewarding supporters with jobs, cars and assorted customs booty. The town provided roughly 800 customs officials to a total work force of 2,300 in Serb-led Yugoslavia.
"Kertes was God here," said Bogoljub Trkulja, a longtime political opponent. "Nobody could make a speech here, or appear on local television, without first thanking Kertes."
At Christmas, Kertes even arranged for local kindergarten children to receive elaborately wrapped toys, fruit and candy that customs had confiscated from travelers. The children were told that "Uncle Kertes" had collected the presents from Santa Claus at the border.
'Not Afraid of Serbia'
As a mid-level Communist Party official, Kertes shot to prominence in 1988 when he led a march of 150,000 Milosevic supporters on the provincial capital, Novi Sad, during the "yogurt revolution" named for the pots of yogurt that were hurled at an assembly building by Kertes and his supporters.
At the time, Serbia was in the grip of a nationalist frenzy that was exploited and manipulated by Milosevic, who had just taken over as leader of the Communist Party. Even though Kertes was from a minority group, he understood that history was moving in Milosevic's direction. One remark, in particular, made him famous: "How can you Serbs be afraid of Serbia when I, a Hungarian, am not afraid of Serbia?"
Two years later, after Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia, Backa Palanka found itself on the front line in a vicious border war. According to Serbian officials, Milosevic put Kertes in charge of smuggling weapons to ethnic Serbs, first in Croatia and later in Bosnia. Kertes also took the lead in forming paramilitary units that were subsequently accused by international human rights groups of many of the worst atrocities of the war.
The leader of an extreme-right Serbian nationalist party, Vojislav Seselj, named Kertes in 1993 as the de facto commander of Serbian paramilitary units in the Slavonia region of Croatia, across the Danube from Backa Palanka. Other Serbian officials have linked Kertes to a secret police group known as the Frenkijevci (Frankie's men), after its commander, Franko Simatovic. The black-clad Frenkijevci are believed to have been responsible for mass killings in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
The paramilitary units were largely financed through smuggling operations, an arrangement formalized in 1993 when Milosevic appointed Kertes head of the Yugoslav customs service. It was a position that permitted Kertes to levy whatever tax he chose on a vast array of goods, including oil and cigarettes, that were being smuggled into Yugoslavia despite U.N. sanctions.
"He was the most powerful head of the customs service in the history of this country," said Vladan Begovic, one of a trio of lower-level officials appointed to run the service after Kertes's ouster. "It was as if he administered a shadow state budget."
Among the people who benefited enormously from Kertes's tenure as customs chief was Milosevic's playboy son, Marko. According to Serbian businessmen, Marko Milosevic formed an alliance with Kertes that gave the younger Milosevic control over all Philip Morris cigarettes sold in Serbia, an extraordinarily lucrative business in a country where the average adult smokes a pack of cigarettes a day. The profit on one truckload of cigarettes smuggled into Serbia in defiance of sanctions was about $250,000.
"In business circles, there was a rule, 'Don't touch Philip Morris; this is Marko's business,' " said Dusan Zabunovic, who operated a rival import business. "What was permitted to Marko was forbidden to everybody else."
Zabunovic, one of the leaders of the group that stormed the customs headquarters on Oct. 6, discovered the rules of the game the hard way in 1995 when he had a run-in with Marko Milosevic. He said the president's son approached him with an offer to buy a lucrative duty-free shop that he operated on Serbia's southern border with Macedonia. When he refused to sell, Kertes sent in the bulldozers. A few months later, a company closely associated with Marko Milosevic built a shop on virtually the same spot.
The Office Stash
When Zabunovic and other Democratic Opposition of Serbia activists burst into the Belgrade customs headquarters they discovered Kertes and a handful of aides throwing documents into a shredder. "They were all white in the face," recalled Zabunovic. "They pleaded with us not to maltreat them."
Among the documents waiting to be shredded was a pile of thank-you notes to Kertes from Milosevic supporters around the country acknowledging various favors, such as the gift of a tractor or the loan of a car. Investigators are using these documents to try to understand the elaborate system of patronage that Kertes financed on the basis of customs seizures and shakedowns.
Other items found in Kertes's office suite, officials of the new government say, included about $1.3 million in German marks and Yugoslav dinars, 18 pounds of drugs, 20 pieces of gold jewelry, 15 sniper rifles and 32 pistols. In the garage, opposition activists found 10 bulletproof cars, including several BMWs and Mercedes. At a nearby warehouse, they discovered large amounts of cigarettes, liquor and high-tech equipment, along with a pile of smoldering inventory cards, suggesting a hurried attempt to destroy incriminating documents.
Shortly before the takeover of customs, according to Zabunovic, Kertes ordered a truckload of cigarettes and whiskey to be dispatched to a special police unit in Vojvodina. Opposition activists say this represented a last-ditch attempt by Milosevic aides to rally support for his doomed government from the same paramilitary forces that had behaved so ruthlessly elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia.
After his brief detention, Kertes was permitted to leave the customs office, although he now faces a variety of lawsuits and is a prime target for prosecution.
Back in Backa Palanka, meanwhile, townspeople are making a difficult transition to the post-Kertes era. An electoral map of Serbia shows the municipality was the only one in western Serbia to cast a majority of votes for Milosevic in the election. The Kertes system--a mixture of patronage and intimidation--ran extraordinarily deep here.
"All the illegal activities in this town can ultimately be traced to Kertes," said Milos Gagic, a member of the student resistance movement Otpor, whose family was shaken down for $2,000 by armed thugs in league with police officers. "In a country as poor as Serbia, it does not require much money to make people afraid or buy them off. Kertes held all the strings."
The Washington Post: Serb Police Retake Town Near Kosovo
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 30, 2000; Page A29
BUJANOVAC, Yugoslavia, Nov. 29 –– Heavily armed Yugoslav police in the disputed Presevo Valley today reentered an ethnic Albanian village they had abandoned last week, causing 1,000 local people to flee toward the U.S.-patrolled section of neighboring Kosovo and adding to tensions in the area.
Backed by two armored vehicles, the police retook the village of Lucane without resistance from the so-called Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, an offshoot of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army, according to news reports from the scene. Guerrillas continued to hold positions on wooded bluffs about 500 yards from the village but held their fire.
Today's action was the latest development in a week-old crisis involving Yugoslavia's new democratic government and NATO authorities in Kosovo. The move by police of the Interior Ministry of Serbia, Yugoslavia's main republic, appeared designed to send a signal that any widening of the rebel-controlled area would not be tolerated. Uniformed members of the rebel group had entered Lucane last week.
At the same time, Yugoslav officials stressed that their forces had not entered a three-mile-wide buffer zone that separates Yugoslav forces from the NATO peacekeepers who have patrolled Kosovo since last year. Under an agreement that ended NATO's 78-day bombing campaign, heavily armed Yugoslav forces must keep out of Kosovo and the buffer zone.
Most of Kosovo's people are ethnic Albanians. The same is true in the Presevo Valley just outside its border, and guerrillas who want to unite it with Kosovo have stepped up attacks against Yugoslav authorities in the past week, killing four policemen. Often they use the buffer zone to conduct training and launch attacks.
Immediately outside Bujanovac, the buffer zone was eerily deserted today. Just outside the zone, Yugoslav authorities have flooded the area with troops and police special forces equipped with armored cars and machine guns mounted on American-made Humvees. People going in and out of the valley were routinely searched, and troops armed with small artillery pieces stood watching the hills deeper in the valley.
Last week, the new democratic government of President Vojislav Kostunica threatened to launch a counterattack against the guerrillas, but backed off under pressure from the West. But the government remains deeply angry at the killing of the police officers and its inability to take effective action because of the buffer zone.
Yugoslav authorities, who estimate that there are 1,200 to 1,500 guerrillas operating in the area, have accused NATO of not doing enough to seal the border and prevent the shipment of arms from Kosovo into the valley.
Western officials, who have condemned the rebels, remain uncertain about how to resolve the problem because the agreement locks both sides into positions three miles apart, giving the rebels free rein in between.
Today, NATO Secretary General George Robertson reaffirmed the alliance's opposition to "extremists" and "terrorist-related activity." He said NATO would step up patrols and establish closer working-level contacts with local Serbian police to enhance security in the buffer zone.
He denied reports that NATO and Yugoslav troops might conduct joint patrols in the area.
Yugo Minister Says No Milosevic Extradition for Now
SARAJEVO (Reuters),Wednesday November 22 - Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic will have to face justice for his role in Balkan wars but he will not be extradited to the U.N. war crimes court for now, Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said on Wednesday.
``At this moment, the position of the government of the federal Republic of Yugoslavia is that there will be no extradition,'' Svilanovic told a news conference he held with his Bosnian counterpart Jadranko Prlic.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) indicted Milosevic last year for atrocities committed by his forces against ethnic Albanians in the southern province of Kosovo that prompted NATO to launch a 77-day air war.
Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte of the ICTY told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that Milosevic must be extradited and stand trial before The Hague-based court.
``There simply is no alternative,'' she said.
Svilanovic said Milosevic would have to answer for ``the decisions he has taken for the wars in Croatia, in Bosnia and the sufferings of the citizens of these two countries and the citizens of Yugoslavia in all its parts.''
``Thus I belong to those who want his personal responsibility to be established and I believe that this will be happening in the following months and years,'' he added.
But whether Milosevic -- ousted last month by reformists after a decade of authoritarian rule -- will be handed over to U.N. court ``is the question that will be answered in the future.''
``But no one who was indicted for war crimes can escape justice, and this in full cooperation with The Hague tribunal,'' he said, adding that there was no place for Milosevic in Serbian politics.
``He cannot come back to political life...any hints of his come back will have to receive a very hostile reception by ordinary people,'' Svilanovic said.
Milosevic appeared in Serbian media this week for the first time since his ouster on October 6 and an ally declared him the only candidate to lead his Socialist party.
Guardian: Milosevic keeps grip on party and its cash
From his Belgrade villa, ex-president vanquishes rebels
Special report: Serbia
Jonathan Steele
Thursday November 23, 2000
Yugoslavia's former president, Slobodan Milosevic, has shown he remains a powerful political force by putting down a revolt against his leadership of Serbia's largest party.
Efforts by rebels to use an emergency party congress on Saturday to oust him now look set to collapse, so that it will be Mr Milosevic who leads the party into crucial elections for the Serbian parliament next month.
Though he lost the Yugoslav presidency after his election defeat and a popular uprising this autumn, the main power in the country rests with the Serbian authorities rather than those of the Yugoslav Federation which Serbia dominates. Whichever party wins the December election will have ultimate control.
When plans were laid, in the aftermath of last month's uprising in Belgrade, for an emergency congress of the Socialist party of Serbia (SPS), Mr Milosevic's critics hoped to use the momentum that forced his shock departure from the Yugoslav presidency to dump him as party chief.
But from his private villa in the elite Belgrade suburb of Dedinje, Mr Milosevic has been rallying his supporters over the telephone or by summoning them to meetings. He is thought to make occasional forays into town in small cars with tinted windows.
The party congress this weekend is to take place in the Sava Centre, a large conference hall in the suburb of New Belgrade, but Serb journalists said yesterday that no details have been given as to whether the press will be allowed in or if Mr Milosevic will attend.
In a rare appearance this week on Yu Info, a state TV channel he created, Mr Milosevic was seen urging party associates to maintain unity.
"There are scenarios to destroy the state, to destroy the economy, to destroy the party because it is the only guarantee for the defence of the national interests," he declared. If the congress sent a message of unity, "the consequences in the elections on December 23 will be positive".
It was unclear where the televised meeting with party colleagues was held but viewers noted that the Serbian president, Milan Milutinovic, - once thought ready to break from Mr Milosevic - was sitting meekly in the audience.
"Milosevic is seeing many people," said the party's general-secretary, Zoran Andjelkovic, a loyalist who was Belgrade's last governor in Kosovo before the Nato intervention in the Serbian province last year. "Many people communicate with Milosevic personally or over the phone. Milosevic is communicating with the outside world directly. I can assure you of that."
Former colleagues now concede that they have failed to generate enough strength to remove Mr Milosevic.
Zoran Lilic, a past president of Yugoslavia, who left the Socialist party a few weeks ago, has set up his own party. "Milosevic is not giving up politics. He is considering his best possible survival options, and counting on things going downhill for the movement that ousted him," he said.
The SPS's former vice-president Milorad Vucelic, who split with Mr Milosevic at the end of 1998, had been considered the most likely replacement as party president. Now he too is planning to form his own party and says he may not even attend the congress.
"If I thought I could serve any purpose, I would come," he said. "But, as matters stand, my presence would not facilitate a democratic dialogue."
Mr Vucelic belongs to a group calling itself the "SPS founders", which has been calling for Mr Milosevic to resign in favour of a temporary secretariat to run the party.
The group includes another former Yugoslav president, Borislav Jovic, and the former head of the Belgrade branch of the party, Slobodan Jovanovic.
None of these men is a liberal and most were involved in the virulent nationalism of the early 1990s during the wars with Croatia and Bosnia. At that time Mr Vucelic ran Radio Television Serbia, the main state channel, which protesters burned down last month.
The latest defector from the SPS is Ratko Markovic, a former deputy prime minister, who led the negotiations for autonomy in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. He denounced Mr Milosevic for taking control of drafting all documents for the congress without consultation.
The platform says that the Socialists have a "big chance of a comeback because of the deteriorating economic and social situation in the country", according to the party sources.
Mr Milosevic is also counting on clear strains among Yugoslavia's new leaders. President Vojislav Kostunica is at odds with Zoran Djindjic, his campaign manager, who has made no secret of wanting to be Serbia's next prime minister.
But independent Serbian journalists say public support for the new leadership is still high. Foreign aid is providing fuel and this has meant fewer power cuts than a year ago.
Mr Milosevic's party is expected to get a maximum of 20% in the December elections, and possibly much less. Some observers believe the SPS will do worse with him at its head, so they see his defeat of party rebels before Saturday's congress as a plus.
"Staying in charge of his party does not mean he can make a comeback. But Milosevic wants to send a message to the country and the world that he's still very much politically alive and a political fact," an experienced Belgrade analyst said yesterday.
As SPS head, Mr Milosevic will also continue to control large party funds. This helps him command the obedience of potential rebels. Because most were involved in making money under his mafia-style rule as well as in war crimes, he can also use blackmail.
The New York Times:Strife Flares in Kosovo; U.N. Aide Says 'Crisis' Persists
By CARLOTTA GALL
BELGRADE, Serbia, Nov. 22 — Yugoslav authorities warned today that the region could be facing the risk of a new war after violence grew with attacks on Serbian targets in Kosovo and southern Serbia.
The head of Kosovo's United Nations administration, Bernard Kouchner, also expressed concern in a statement reading in part: "As I have repeatedly said, Kosovo remains in crisis. The conflict between the two communities is not over."
The warnings came after a bomb exploded in Pristina on Tuesday night, half demolishing the home of the Serbian representative in Kosovo, killing one man and injuring several others. Fighting also flared on the boundary between Kosovo and Serbia, with the Serbian government reporting that one policeman was killed and three were missing.
The violence was immediately blamed on Albanian extremists beginning a new campaign against the Serb community in Kosovo and a new offensive in an ethnic Albanian area of southern Serbia.
The Democratic Party leader, Zoran Djindjic, also warned of increasing instability as Serbia and Kosovo continue to adjust to changes in the region.
Dr. Kouchner said that the attack was aimed at the United Nations mission in Kosovo, known as Unmik, which was trying to encourage reconciliation between Albanians and Serbs and to allow for thousands of displaced Serbs to return to the province.
In one attack, Stanimir Vukicevic, the head of the Yugoslav government's liaison committee with the international administration in Kosovo, escaped injury in the blast to his home on the outskirts of Pristina. Two people were injured and one, a driver, died later in a hospital.
Serbian officials in Belgrade linked the bomb blast to an attack on Serbian police officers in the southern Presevo region near the Kosovo boundary. They said Albanian gunmen crossed over from Kosovo in the night and began an attack with mortars and artillery. The Serbian policeman died when he and other officers went to investigate.
The Presevo valley is an area mostly populated by ethnic Albanians but is outside Kosovo and remains under control of the Serbian military and police. Albanian rebel fighters have control of one or two villages in the area and frequently attack Serbian policemen in the area, laying mines on the roads and engaging in firefights.
American troops, part of the NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo, are stationed on the boundary of eastern Kosovo, and their job is to prevent the movement of weapons and guerrillas across the boundary.
Western diplomats and peacekeepers have also put pressure on Albanian leaders to cease support for the insurgents who number at the most a few hundred. A spokesman for the Kosovo peacekeeping force confirmed they had seen some small- arms and mortar fire on the Serbian side of the boundary Tuesday. But he dismissed claims that large numbers of guerrillas had crossed into Serbia overnight.
Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic and Mr. Djindjic, both leaders of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia that swept former President Slobodan Milosevic from power last month, demanded an urgent meeting between the peacekeeping officials in Kosovo and Yugoslav security forces.
"We warn the international public that tolerating such incidents could lead to a new hotbed in the Balkans," Mr. Djindjic said. "We demand that international organizations ensure security in the region."
U.N. Prosecutor Probes Kostunica
By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press Writer , November 21
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The chief international war crimes prosecutor on Tuesday challenged the world's quick embrace of Yugoslavia's new leader, saying his refusal to immediately surrender former president Slobodan Milosevic for trial is unacceptable.
``It would be inconceivable to allow Milosevic to walk away from the consequences of his actions,'' prosecutor Carla Del Ponte told an open meeting of the U.N. Security Council. ``Milosevic must be brought to trial before the international tribunal. There simply is no alternative.''
Later, she told reporters that her office has gotten very good cooperation from Cyprus and other countries in freezing Milosevic's assets. ``It is a huge, huge amount of money that was stolen (from) the Serb population,'' she said, refusing to disclose the amount until the investigation is complete.
Del Ponte praised the international community for resisting the temptation to offer Milosevic ``an easy escape route'' following his defeat in Sept. 24 presidential elections by a democratic coalition led by Vojislav Kostunica .
Del Ponte, who was barred from visiting Yugoslavia when Milosevic was president, has been invited by Kostunica to Belgrade and welcomed the opportunity to establish good relations. She will reopen the tribunal's office there, which has been closed since NATO's bombing campaign last year. Deputy U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham said the United States was ``delighted'' at these first steps.
But in no-nonsense language, Del Ponte made clear that Kostunica's reluctance to deal with the issue of Milosevic will be at the top of the agenda during her visit in the next few weeks.
``The world has embraced President Kostunica despite the fact that he has repeatedly said that cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia 'is not a priority' for him,'' she said.
``Whatever President Kostunica may say, the surrender of Milosevic is a priority. It is a priority for him; it is a priority for me; and it should, in my submission, also be a priority for the Security Council of the United Nations '' she said.
Kostunica, a legal scholar, questions the independence of the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, which has indicted Milosevic for his actions in Kosovo, the province of Serbia that the United States and its NATO allies helped put on a path of self-rule.
The new president has made clear that he will not arrest or extradite Milosevic.
The prosecutor also had sharp words for Croatian President Stipe Mesic, who was elected earlier this year, accusing his government of refusing to allow access to witnesses and to hand over material for use as evidence by the tribunal.
The chief prosecutor also complained that NATO-led forces in Bosnia were arresting far fewer indicted war criminals than in the past, noting that the latest arrest was in June. Unfortunately, she said, her proposal to create a special police task force with responsibility to apprehend indicted fugitives throughout Bosnia has not yet been adopted.
The Washington Post:Milosevic Looks For a Comeback As Party Chief
By Dusan Stojanovic
Associated Press
Wednesday, November 22, 2000
BELGRADE, Nov. 21 –– Slobodan Milosevic was declared the only candidate for Socialist Party chief today, underlining the ousted president's desire for a political comeback.
The leadership nominated Milosevic as the sole candidate for party president, a position the Socialists will fill Saturday at a special congress, said top party official Zivorad Igic. Many analysts expect he will be reelected.
The decision indicates that Milosevic, who was ousted as Yugoslav president in a popular revolt Oct. 5 after refusing to concede electoral defeat, still has a following among some party members, mostly hard-liners.
Several of the more moderate Socialist leaders have quit the party in recent days, protesting Milosevic's desire to remain in politics, and disgruntled former Milosevic allies formed two separate left-wing parties this week.
On Monday night, Milosevic was shown on television urging resistance to the new government of President Vojislav Kostunica. It was Milosevic's first TV appearance since Oct. 6, when he conceded defeat a day after Kostunica's supporters stormed parliament and other government buildings.
The brief report on Yu Info television showed a confident Milosevic, under indictment for war crimes and accused by many of his countrymen of bringing economic and social misery, calling on Socialist Party associates to maintain unity.
"There are scenarios to destroy the state, to destroy the economy, to destroy the party because [the Socialist Party] is the only guarantee for the defense of the national interests," Milosevic said, waving an index finger.
Party officials said the former president has been encouraged by the new government's inability to curb Yugoslavia's economic slide and by bickering among the forces that ousted him.
According to sources within the party, a document prepared and approved by Milosevic for the congress says the Socialists have a "big chance" of a comeback in the Dec. 23 parliamentary elections in Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.
Allies of the new government said Milosevic's public reappearance indicates the former Yugoslav autocrat is trying to escape responsibility for all he has done to the state and its people by finding shelter within his party.
Milosevic and his wife, Mirjana Markovic, are guarded in their upscale Belgrade villa by a paramilitary force of about 100 loyal, well-armed troops, commanded by his longtime personal bodyguard, police Gen. Senta Milenkovic.
Milosevic is said to hope that as Yugoslavs struggle through a winter of power outages, no heat and soaring prices, they will again take to the streets, this time against the new leadership. In the meantime, Milosevic expects that Kostunica's Democratic Opposition of Serbia, composed of 18 parties, will break apart because of internal bickering.
ABC News:Balkans hope for fresh start at EU Zagreb summit
ZAGREB, Nov 22 (Reuters) - Five Balkan countries, four of them successors of communist Yugoslavia, are hoping a European Union summit in Zagreb on Friday will help them leave behind a decade of political and economic misery. The meeting will bring together for the first time the wealthy 15-member bloc and Europe"s former trouble spots -- Croatia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Albania. Another former Yugoslav republic, Slovenia, will also attend, although its drive for EU membership is well ahead of the bloc"s Stabilisation and Association (SAA) programme designed especially for the Balkans. Launched by France in July to intensify the isolation of then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, analysts say the summit is intended to impress on the Balkan states that they do have a future in Europe. The opportunities unlocked by last month"s ouster of Milosevic in presidential elections have significantly raised its importance, they say. "In return for a clear commitment to sustained reform, regional cooperation and respect for democratic standards and international obligations, the EU is offering these countries a road to Europe as potential candidates for membership," said an EU statement released on Wednesday. The EU leaders will announce 4.65 billion euros in aid for reforms in the region until 2006, assess each country"s progress, encourage further reforms and urge more regional cooperation via a relaxation of the existing trade regime. Macedonia will sign an SAA agreement with the bloc, while Croatia will start talks on the same subject during the summit. A DECADE OF WAR The Yugoslav federation, set up by the late communist leader Josip Broz Tito and often seen as a buffer zone between the West and the rigid communism of the Soviet bloc, disintegrated in 1991, plunging the region into instability and war. Ethnic Serbs took up arms to fight the independence drive of Croatia in 1991 and of Bosnia a year later, carving out their own territory, ethnically cleansed of Croats and Muslims. The wars in Bosnia and Croatia came to an end with the signing of the Dayton peace treaty by Yugoslav, Croatian and Bosnian leaders in late 1995. By that time, other former communist countries -- most notably Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia, had started implementing democratic and market reforms and already fixed their sights firmly on European Union membership. "The summit proves that the EU does not want to limit its expansion to the existing candidate countries, it will encourage other countries as well," Croatian Foreign Minister Tonino Picula told Reuters in an interview last week. "We are talking about the countries that have been left outside the mainstream of EU"s expansion, due to traumatic historic circumstances," he said. YUGOSLAVIA IN FOCUS Yugoslavia, apparently rid of Milosevic"s brand of nationalism, is expected to join the family of EU aspirants at the summit. Its delegation will be led by President Vojislav Kostunica, who has managed in a short period of time to return his country to most international institutions, from the United Nations to the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Yugoslavia"s republic of Serbia was the only Balkan country to wage an open war with the West, during NATO"s three-month bombing campaign last year to force Milosevic out of Kosovo. The campaign halted a Serbian purge of the province, populated mainly by ethnic Albanians. Kosovo was put under U.N. administration but its future status -- like that of Serbia"s pro-Western sister republic Montenegro -- is still unclear. Kosovo will be represented at the summit by its U.N. administrator Bernard Kouchner. Montenegro"s independence-minded President Milo Djukanovic has said he will come only if he is allowed to address the summit as a head of state.
Independent: Milosevic deserted by party officials
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
21 November 2000
The ousted president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, who lost the support of his people last month, is now being deserted by his party, the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS).
Eight of the party's highest- ranking officials resigned from its executive at the weekend. One was Mihailo Markovic, who was preparing the party's annual congress, due to be held on Saturday.
The SPS congress was hastily convened when Mr Milosevic was forced from power after a popular uprising in October, but now the former president might have to stand alone on the podium.
In their resignation statements, the officials expressed their "strong disagreement with those who are trying to prevent the transformation of the Socialist party into a modern, European and democratic organisation". That was a clear reference to Mr Milosevic, who is widely believed to be trying to maintain his grip on the party.
In a further sign that the party is disintegrating, two splinter groups, headed by once-prominent aides of Mr Milosevic, have formed political parties in the past week, called the Serbian Social-Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialist Party.
ABC News: Albright hopes to see new Yugoslav chief in Vienna
WIRE:11/20/2000 18:08:00 ET
WASHINGTON, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Secretary of State Madeleine Albright hopes to meet new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica for the first time at a security conference in Austria, her spokesman said on Monday. "The secretary would like to meet President Kostunica if it could be worked out during their very limited time in Vienna," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters. Albright is expected to arrive in Vienna on Sunday for bilateral meetings before attending a plenary session of the foreign ministers of the 55-nation Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that begins on Monday. Austria, which is chairing the OSCE, has also invited Kostunica for bilateral meetings, to mark Belgrade"s readmission to Europe"s top human rights and security body. The readmission was approved 10 days ago. For Albright, meeting Kostunica would draw a line under the campaign to oust his predecessor, Slobodan Milosevic, whose dramatic exit by popular revolt last month she described as the most important moment in her nearly four years in office. Yugoslavia and the United States last week resumed the diplomatic ties that Belgrade broke off last year in response to a 78-day NATO bombing campaign. President Bill Clinton had already ended a fuel embargo and flight ban on the Balkan country and promised to review crucial U.S. support for funds from international lending bodies. Albright was arguably the strongest proponent of the bombings, undertaken to get Milosevic to stop his campaign against ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, now a de facto international protectorate. DERIDED AS "MADAME WAR" She became a hate figure in the region, was dubbed "Madame War" by communists in Russia and faced accusations at home of not giving diplomacy enough time to work. "It was called Madeleine"s war, and they made a lot of fun of me," she told a Women"s Foreign Policy Group luncheon earlier on Monday. "But it turned out all right, and I"m very proud of that," she added, reflecting on her proudest moment in four years in the job that she will probably lose when the next president is inaugurated in January. "It"s no secret that I was criticized a lot for that and made to feel inadequate as a civilian woman and was accused of being emotional and that I didn"t understand about what American forces were for," she said. Albright heard of Milosevic"s impending political demise by telephone from Washington while she was flying home from Middle East peace talks in Egypt on Oct. 5. She made no effort to hide her delight on hearing that protesters had stormed the Yugoslav parliament at the start of a revolt that forced Milosevic to accept that he had lost an election. Albright rushed to the back of her plane to tell reporters of the events, comparing them to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Czechoslovak-born daughter of a diplomat who fled first the Nazis and then communist rule, Albright made ending conflict and division in Europe a strong theme of her term in office.
ABC News:Milosevic Steps Boldly Back Into TV Spotlight
WIRE:11/20/2000 19:17:00 ET
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Slobodan Milosevic stepped boldly back into the spotlight on Monday after more than a month of seclusion, appealing for party unity in his first television appearance since being forced to quit as Yugoslav president. The longtime Serb leader, blamed by the West for a major role in four Balkan wars over the past decade, was shown on Yu-Info state television making a forceful speech to officials in his Socialist party ahead of a congress due on Saturday. "It is the utmost necessity that this congress is a congress of unity," Milosevic, appearing confidant and defiant, told the gathering at an unspecified location. The report on Yu-Info, a station widely regarded as having close links to Milosevic"s entourage, also said the meeting had shown great support for the former president to be re-elected as leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia at the congress. Milosevic has had no public profile since October 6, when he appeared on television to admit defeat to reformer Vojislav Kostunica in presidential elections after a mass uprising. He made no public or television appearances, although he was reported to have attended several Socialist party meetings. He is believed to be living behind the well-guarded walls of a presidential villa in the exclusive Belgrade suburb of Dedinje. Western governments have insisted there can be no political role for Milosevic, indicted by a U.N. court on Kosovo war crimes charges, in a democratic Yugoslavia and his opponents at home have stated he is getting weaker by the day. But Monday evening"s television appearance suggested Milosevic had no plans to bow out. MILOSEVIC ACCUSES OPPONENTS The ex-president, wearing a dark suit jacket, light-colored shirt and red tie, mounted a strong attack on his opponents. "There were scenarios to overthrow the state, to destroy the economy, to destroy our party, because our party is the only guarantee for the defense of the people"s state and national interests," Milosevic said. He accused the party"s opponents of attempting to engineer a crisis in Socialist ranks. "All our opponents are trying with all their might to make this congress the congress of arguments, disintegration and disorientation," he fumed. Stunned by Milosevic"s defeat and the party"s drubbing at the hands of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia alliance backing Kostunica, the Socialists have been plunged into turmoil. Several leading figures have left the party. But Milosevic insisted the party could do well in parliamentary elections in Serbia, Yugoslavia"s dominant republic, scheduled for December 23. "If the congress is a congress of unity and transmits that message to the public as well, the consequences in the elections on the 23rd will be positive," he said. Some Socialists hope to benefit from discontent as Yugoslavia makes the difficult transition from a state-run economy to a market system under Kostunica and his allies. Opinion polls, however, have so far given little cause to back up this theory. Some polls have shown the Socialists, successors to the all-powerful Communists who ran Yugoslavia for decades after World War Two, with percentage support barely in double figures. Milosevic was flanked at the meeting by Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, who has also been indicted on Kosovo war crimes charges by the U.N. tribunal, and party general secretary Zoran Andjelkovic, a former governor of Kosovo. Yu-Info said the meeting had taken place on Monday in Belgrade but gave no further details of the time or location.
Milosevic Plots Political Comeback
Monday November 20 2:01 PM ET
By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Six weeks after handing over power, Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites) is still living comfortably in his posh villa, recuperating from the shock of his ouster from the presidency and plotting a political comeback.
Socialist Party officials say Milosevic has been encouraged by the new government's inability to curb Yugoslavia's economic slide as well as simmering public discontent with the new pro-democratic leadership and bickering among the forces that ousted him.
``Milosevic is not giving up politics,'' said Zoran Lilic, who resigned last month from the Socialist Party. ``Milosevic is considering his best possible survival options, and counting on things going downhill'' for the democratic movement that ousted him.
Milosevic's allies say the former president is devoting much of his time to planning for Saturday's congress of his Socialist Party. Moderates plan to use the session to try to unseat Milosevic as party leader.
However, Milosevic hopes to retain control.
``Milosevic is seeing many people,'' said the party's general-secretary, Zoran Andjelkovic. ``Many people communicate with Milosevic personally or over the phone. Milosevic is communicating with the outside world directly. I can assure you that.'' He would not elaborate.
Several other Socialist Party officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Milosevic has recovered from the shock suffered when crowds rioted in Belgrade after the disputed September election, forcing him to concede defeat to Vojislav Kostunica (news - web sites).
With Kostunica refusing to extradite Milosevic to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, the former first couple has shelved plans to flee the country. Instead, Milosevic and his wife, Mirjana Markovic, have been seen strolling hand-in-hand in the garden of the white brick house on Uzicka Street in the capital's Dedinje district, where they moved weeks before he was ousted.
In some ways, their life is not so different from the final months of his rule, when the president rarely ventured out in public. He and his wife are guarded by a paramilitary force of some 100 loyal, well-armed troops, commanded by his longtime personal bodyguard, police Gen. Senta Milenkovic.
Their daughter Marija is staying with them, while son Marko, who has been linked to several murky business deals, is believed laying low in Russia after he was turned back from entering China shortly after his father's downfall.
The Milosevic home is in a complex of renovated villas near what had been his official residence until it was destroyed by NATO (news - web sites) bombs last year. The villa has a spacious living room with white sofas, green marble walls, small bedrooms upstairs and a large grassy garden planted with roses and pine trees.
When the former first couple do venture out, it is in secret, using small cars with tinted windows, officials say.
Those who claim to have seen Milosevic recently say the former strongman insists he never lost to Kostunica at the polls, but was forced out in an ``illegal and violent street coup.'' He has convinced himself that he stepped aside to spare the nation from bloodshed.
His wife, a member of an elite communist political clan, curses army and police generals who refused to use force against demonstrators.
According to party insiders, the Milosevics are pinning their hopes on the country's deteriorating economy - which critics blame on his disastrous economic policies and nearly a decade of international sanctions.
He hopes that as Yugoslavs struggle through a winter of power outages, no heat and soaring prices, they will again take to the streets - this time against the new leadership. In the meantime, Milosevic expects the 18 parties that form Kostunica's Democratic Opposition of Serbia will break apart because of internal bickering.
That may not be so far-fetched.
There are signs that the Kostunica coalition may unravel after the Dec. 23 elections in Yugoslavia's main republic, Serbia, because of increasingly public infighting between its leaders over numerous economic, political and other issues.
Among those issues is Kostunica's refusal to arrest Milosevic or to replace secret police chief Rade Markovic and army commander Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic. Kostunica said he considers U.N. tribunal anti-Serb. He insists firing Markovic and Pavkovic would threaten internal security.
Markovic, who is no relation to Milosevic's wife, commands the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit, Milosevic's crack troops in the Balkan wars. Pavkovic, despite his declaration of loyalty to Kostunica, is considered by some opposition leaders as unreliable since he had been among Milosevic's strongest supporters.
``Without Milosevic's arrest and the removal of Markovic and Pavkovic, we are faced with an unfinished revolution and a real danger of the former dictator's comeback,'' said Velja Ilic, a Kostunica ally.
The Christian Science Monitor:Along with winter, cold reality sets in for Serbs
Six weeks after Milosevic's dramatic ouster, Yugoslavia faces rising prices, no power.
By Alex Todorovic
Special to The Christian Science Monitor
BELGRADE, YUGOSLAVIA
As she patiently heats a Turkish jezba over a large candle to make coffee, Jelena Janic voices exasperation with Yugoslavia's first winter of freedom. "When I was watching the parliament building go up in flames, I'm not sure what I expected, but I know it wasn't this," says the unemployed anthropologist. "Prices have skyrocketed, and I've spent hours each day without electricity."
Six weeks after mass street demonstrations toppled former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in the wake of elections generally considered fraudulent, most citizens are dumbfounded that things seem to be going from bad to worse. The wave of euphoria following Mr. Milosevic's ouster has been replaced by frustration over electricity outages, rising prices, stagnant salaries, and the continuing influence of Milosevic loyalists in key sectors of the economy and political life. His supporters still control the parliament of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic, although that's expected to change with elections in late December.
"This is going to be a very tough winter for us. There's no way around it. It will take months to root out the old guard and the transition will be slow," says Dragan Vucinic, an adviser to the government of new President Vojislav Kostunica.
Citizens are just learning the full extent of the decay that set in during the former regime - under United Nations sanctions for the past eight years. State and private media are reporting for the first time on the desperate state of the country's health, power, and school systems. The former regime, for instance, borrowed electricity from nearby countries last winter, then squeezed Yugoslavia's electric company this summer to return the borrowed power, while delaying needed repairs and maintenance work.
"The power grid is literally falling apart. In retrospect, it's fairly obvious why Milosevic scheduled early elections in September. He knew once the temperatures dropped, the electric grid would fail," says Dr. Vucinic.
One thousand citizens gathered recently in Milosevic's hometown of Pozarevac to demonstrate against power outages. "We don't have power for 12 hours a day, but they keep the lights on at Bambipark all night," says demonstrator Slobodan Perovic, referring to the amusement park owned by Milosevic's son Marko, who is now in exile.
In addition to a collapsing infrastructure, some Milosevic loyalists appear determined to punish citizens for support of the democratic movement. "Let's see what they do now. Here's your democracy," a former Milosevic coalition partner reportedly quipped as Serbia's parliament passed sweeping price liberalizations that sent food prices skyrocketing.
The state of the country's health system is even more dire. "We are currently performing only the most urgent of operations due to a shortage of fundamental supplies," says Gordana Todorovic, an administrator in one of Belgrade's largest hospitals. "If they can afford it, patients sometimes bring their own surgical supplies for operations. Without help from charities, we wouldn't be able to feed patients."
The short-term goal of the new government is to keep social peace during a difficult winter.
Foreign governments and organizations have pledged billions in long-term aid to Yugoslavia, but emergency aid has been slow to arrive. Late last week, $20 million from Germany put the lights back on in central Belgrade.
"Emergency aid will be a key issue this winter.... The aid is arriving slowly, and we have yet to see what will happen once temperatures drop," says Vucinic.
Even though citizens are frustrated by the sudden deterioration in living standards, opinion polls show a majority are optimistic about the country's general direction. "I was determined to leave ... if Milosevic stayed in power," says Janic. "Now I will stay and build my life here. I don't have to listen to their lies on television anymore and that's enough for now."
LA Times:Student Muckrakers Ready to Bulldoze Corrupt Politicians
Yugoslavia: Otpor, a key group in ousting Slobodan Milosevic, warns that it is not letting down its guard.
By DAVID HOLLEY, Times Staff Writer
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia--The television commercial shows a black-jacketed hoodlum making deals in a rundown warehouse with a politician wearing a suit and tie. Suddenly, they are surprised by an approaching bulldozer.
The camera zooms in on a stubble-bearded man somberly staring at the corrupt pair from the driver's seat, and a message from the student-led resistance movement Otpor flashes on the screen: "Just Watching You."
The advertisement has been airing as a warning to remnants of the old regime and to the new Yugoslav authorities that Otpor, which played a key role last month in toppling Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, is not letting down its guard.
The bulldozer has become a symbol here of people's power, a reminder of how such a machine was used Oct. 5 to break down the front door of the state television offices and enable protesters to take over that bastion of power. The middle-aged driver, Ljubivoje Djokic, better known as "Joe," plays himself in the commercial.
Otpor, which uses a raised fist in its logo, wants to keep the pressure on corrupt holdovers from the past, discourage newly empowered politicians from making unseemly compromises with pro-Milosevic forces and warn the erstwhile opposition leaders now in power not to be corrupted by their new status.
The student group is trying to document cases of corruption and abuse of power that occurred during the Milosevic years, change the way Yugoslavs and their politicians view the work of government, and promote honest elections ahead of Dec. 23 voting for a new parliament in Serbia, the dominant republic of Yugoslavia.
"I'm not saying the new government is bad. But we don't know that it's good," said Dejan Randjic, a 27-year-old university student and key figure in organizing Otpor's media campaign. "We want to put pressure on the [pro-Milosevic] Socialists on one side: 'You will go to jail--why not?--for some bad things.' "
To former opposition figures now in power, he said, Otpor's message is: "You have to be different, or you will not be in the government anymore."
The people of Yugoslavia "really should get it into their heads that once you give someone power, they have a tendency to misuse it," explained Miljana Jovanovic, a 26-year-old student and another key leader of Otpor. "Professional politicians shouldn't feel they are like God. There is a very big force liberated now: ordinary people."
An Implicit Threat
Otpor has plastered Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, with billboards and posters showing the "Just Watching You" slogan and images of the bulldozer, with its implicit threat of street demonstrations.
The posters declare: "In our Serbia there are 5,675 registered bulldozers and a couple million potential drivers. Watch what you're doing!" Below that, playing on the meaning of Otpor as resistance, is the slogan, "The People Are the Resistance."
"Our aim was that everyone [in government] can recognize themselves as the target of the bulldozer," Randjic said.
Started two years ago by young people frustrated with the inability of traditional opposition parties to unite and oust Milosevic, Otpor claims about 50,000 activists and broad support among the Serbian people.
For some Otpor members, Milosevic is an example of what people need to worry about. When he came to power, a large majority of Serbs "thought he was a saint, and it turned out he was the devil himself," said Vesna Petkovic, 24, a student. "So you always have to be careful about power politics.
"Most of the [opposition] parties had some problems in the past involving corruption," she added.
Otpor has launched a team of 30 volunteer lawyers to investigate corruption. It has dubbed the effort "Service for the Extortion of Truth," a play on the idea that gangsters and corrupt politicians may demand money but these attorneys are simply demanding the truth.
For two hours every evening, the lawyers gather material from citizens who report evidence of corruption to Otpor's headquarters.
"We're investigating all sorts of frauds and abuse, helping out our legal system in dealing with this situation," said Dragan Palibrk, a 30-year-old attorney with the project. "We as a team of lawyers decided to do it because for 10 years it was virtually impossible to come by that data. We think now is a good time; the conditions exist for us to do this."
The service takes as a model the Chicago law officers who went after gangster Al Capone. "We want to create some kind of 'Untouchables,' " Randjic said.
Nenad Konstantinovic, 27, one of the founders of Otpor and a lawyer involved in the corruption investigations, said the long-term goal is "to establish a system of responsibility in this society."
"We are trying to find who are the individuals who did crimes in the past 10 years, corruption especially, and abuse of power," he said. "From that we will file criminal complaints, and after that, the public prosecutor will start the process. After that, we will try to be the monitor of those services and press them to do their job."
The project has collected important evidence on corruption at several major state-owned companies, said Otpor leader Jovanovic.
Jovanovic stressed that corruption was not limited to pro-Milosevic authorities. Many city governments controlled by the opposition during the past few years also were involved in corruption, she said.
New Belgrade Mayor Milan Protic, viewed by many Otpor activists as among the cleanest of the former opposition politicians, said that since taking over City Hall from another faction opposed to Milosevic, "we have found that over 750 apartments were given away to people" who were friends or relatives of city officials. The city also owns about 25 luxury cars, he said.
"I believe those young people have the right to send a warning," Protic said about Otpor.
Some Not Thrilled
Zoran Djindjic, president of the Democratic Party and another key figure in the new power structure, was less enthusiastic when asked about Otpor's new campaign.
"Nobody is in a privileged position to observe the other one," said Djindjic, a longtime pro-democracy leader who is viewed as suspect by some partly because of his preference for high-quality suits.
Konstantinovic, the lawyer, said it is important for the new democratic authorities to face criticism from other democratic groups such as Otpor, not just from the Socialist remnants of the old regime.
Otherwise, he said, if the new government falters, voters could turn to the Socialists again as they did in the 1990s with ex-Communists in many former Soviet Bloc countries after center-right governments imposed painful economic reforms. This way, angry citizens can turn to another democratic force, he noted.
Ironically, Otpor has been accused of corruption by some--mainly supporters of Milosevic before the Sept. 24 election that led to his ouster by new President Vojislav Kostunica. These critics put up posters showing the Otpor fist, but full of dollars, with the slogan: "It's Finished--With Treason." One of Otpor's key election slogans had been "He's Finished."
Otpor does not deny receiving foreign financial support but argues that taking the aid was a patriotic rather than anti-Serbian act.
"I never felt like a traitor or a foreign mercenary because whatever amount we got from outside or foreigners, we always used it the way we thought we should," Jovanovic said. "We always kept the Serbian national interest in mind."
Such outside support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the election, Jovanovic said.
In the run-up to the September vote, Otpor also ran humorous and effective political ads on municipal television stations controlled by the opposition. One showed a housewife holding a T-shirt with an image of Milosevic on it and declaring: "For the last 10 years, I've been trying to get rid of this stain. I've tried everything." But now there is a way, she says, gesturing to a washing machine that stood for the election. She pops in the T-shirt and, sure enough, Milosevic is washed away.
The more recent bulldozer ad will be followed by another ad in December targeted mainly at the Serbian Electoral Commission. After the September balloting, the panel's federal counterpart initially denied that Kostunica had won an outright victory and ordered a new election, which could have prolonged Milosevic's rule.
"In the next clip," Randjic said, "this bulldozer driver 'Joe' will be checking up the machine, being sure there's enough oil and gas--just in case."
UN Official Calls For Kosovo Parliamentary Vote
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 17, 2000 -- (Reuters) The UN administrator for Kosovo on Thursday called for parliamentary elections in the Yugoslav province within months but said he did not have the means to organize voting for Serbia's December election.
Bernard Kouchner, supported by U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke, suggested to the UN Security Council that parliamentary elections in Kosovo be held "early next year, possibly in the spring."
In his briefing to the council, Kouchner said parliamentary elections were "even more pressing now" following the municipal poll organized by his UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) on October 28.
"We now have to accelerate the process of defining substantial autonomy and develop institutions of self-government, with the Kosovars sharing more and more responsibility in the administration of Kosovo," Kouchner said.
At the same time, however, he said that he could "in no case" organize elections in Kosovo on Dec. 23 for Serbia's parliament. But after harsh criticism from Russia, he left the door open to do see what he could do.
"I would like to affirm today before you that the UN Mission in Kosovo can in no case organize such elections ... for technical reasons," Kouchner said in his opening remarks.
He said this would involve more NATO troops and monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), many of whom had left the country. He also said there were no electoral lists for Serbs living in Kosovo. And he said he had received no formal request from Belgrade.
In later comments to the 15-member council, Kouchner, however said: "I shall provide all the support that I am capable of. We shall see to it that these arrangements are brought about."
Both elections go to the heart of Kosovo's future status, as an independent, mainly ethnic Albanian state, as a Yugoslav province with substantial autonomy or as a province of Serbia, without the right to secede.
An ambiguous Security Council resolution 1244 adopted in June 1999 suspended Serbia's right to government in Kosovo but upheld Yugoslavia's sovereignty over the territory.
The resolution, which put Kosovo under UN control, followed an 11-week NATO bombing campaign that forced the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops and police who had been oppressing the Albanian inhabitants.
Since then, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has been ousted from office, replaced by the new Belgrade government headed by Vojislav Kostunica.
Holbrooke, in endorsing all of Kouchner's positions, said many observers, including some from the OSCE, wanted to postpone the Kosovo parliamentary elections for a year.
"I think the idea you need a year to prepare them is ridiculous. The longer we wait, the more difficult it will be to conduct them and the more likelihood that they will turn on the wrong set of issues," Holbrooke said.
On the Serbian elections, Holbrooke said that he agreed that UNMIK, and by extension the NATO-led force stationed in Kosovo, could not supervise the vote. He said NATO commanders had told him they would need "a significant number of additional combat battalions" which were not available."
But Russia's envoy, Gennady Gatilov, said Kosovo's Serbs could not be excluded from voting in Yugoslav elections and wondered why "some elections can be held and others cannot."
He also called for lifting of the UN arms embargo against Yugoslavia, the last sanctions in place, against Belgrade after the Balkan wars of the 1990s. "This would demonstrate confidence in the new leadership of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia," Gatilov told the council.
Gatilov said Kosovo, where Albanians now persecuted the Serb minority, was not well placed for any elections and that the October municipal vote was dominated by illegal demands for independence.
In response Kouchner said: "Sometimes I get the impression you are more royalist than the king."
Both Russia and Yugoslavia's representative, Vladislav Mladenovic, said it was time for a limited contingent of Belgrade's army to return to Kosovo as provided in the 1999 council resolution.
But Kouchner said such a move was far too premature. "How can you think that would be possible only one and a half years after the war?
Mladenovic pledged his government would work toward "achieving substantial autonomy" for Kosovo through peaceful means. Any other solution he said was "fraught with unforeseeable consequences" for the region as a whole.
Guardian:Kosovan sex slave ring is smashed
Special report: Kosovo
Nicholas Wood in Pristina
Saturday November 18, 2000
Police in Kosovo, backed by British and Norwegian peacekeeping troops, say they have broken an international trafficking and prostitution ring by raiding bars, hotels and homes in the town of Kosovo Polje, near the provincial capital Pristina.
Officials of the Nato-led peacekeeping force K-For said the operation had revealed the involvement of both Serbs and Albanians in the province's sex slave trade.
Twelve women, all from the republic of Moldova, were found as the police and troops searched the area.
The K-For spokesman, Flight Lieutenant Martin Perin, said the trade was centred on Albanian-owned bars in the town. Serbs had been identified as controlling prostitutes in private houses and flats.
"There has been a considerable amount of cooperation between Albanian and Serb pimps, with women being exchanged between them."
Teams of royal marine commandos used sledgehammers to smash down the doors of a house and several flats. Sniffer dogs were sent in to search for explosives.
Most of the women were found in the Black Lady bar, on the ground floor of a block of flats. Red velvet curtains covered what used to be a shop window, and a disco ball lit up the centre of the room.
Six women were led away by police officers to a waiting van while three men, the bar's owners, were handcuffed and photographed. Nobody tried to resist arrest. One of the men held the womens' passports.
A Royal Ulster Constabulary officer seconded to the UN said the women were nearly all there against their will.
"Some may be victims of trafficking, others women who got into prostitution but were held against their will. They don't have freedom of movement and they are not being paid," he said.
He said the raids had been made with the support of residents. "The local community are fed up with pimping and prostitution going on in their backyards."
Elsewhere, police officers said they found drugs and syringes. Seven people were arrested and four pistols were seized. A police spokesman said several of the suspects were believed to be former members of the Kosovo Liberation Army.
A senior former KLA commander, Sabit Geci, was detained in Pristina last month, accused of threatening to kill the owner of strip bar.
The sex slave trade has boomed since the UN took control of Kosovo 17 months ago. The women are smuggled into the province from Serbia and Macedonia, and sold for as little as £350.
Many are tricked into leaving their homes, mainly in eastern Europe, by the promise of work in the west.
The arrests follow the creation of 22-strong trafficking and prostitution unit. The UN's police spokesman, Derek Chapelle, said the military's concentration on combating the high murder rate and inter-ethnic violence had left the sex trade to grow largely unhindered.
"This is the first large-scale effort directed against the problem," he said. "Until now people have felt fairly safe here, there has been a climate of impunity. The message now is that we will direct our resources against any aspect of criminality."
The 12 women will be given the opportunity to return to Moldova if they were brought to Kosovo against their will.
The Herald Tribune:Kostunica, Barring Purges, Aims for Democracy of Laws
Steven Erlanger New York Times Service Friday, November 17, 2000
BELGRADE For President Vojislav Kostunica of Yugoslavia, who is trying to manage a difficult transition from the regime of Slobodan Milosevic while respecting legal niceties and holding together his broad coalition, the elections for a new Serbian government next month cannot come soon enough.
But the rush to build a new democracy cannot be done radically, without building on the foundations of the existing state, Mr. Kostunica said in an interview this week, rejecting arguments from his allies for a rapid purge of top commanders of the secret police and the army.
"I'm eager for a systemic transformation in the police, the army, the judiciary and other institutions," Mr. Kostunica said. "But they cannot be transformed without the election of a Parliament and a very serious public debate."
In particular, he said, "it would be irresponsible to start experimenting" with the police, the secret police and the army "when we have no Parliament in Serbia and a strange type of transitional government."
The Oct. 5 uprising that forced Mr. Milosevic to recognize the election of Mr. Kostunica did not by itself change the Serbian government, where real power lies here. But pressure, negotiations and threats caused the Serbian government and Parliament to dissolve, with a provisional government in place and early elections called for Dec. 23.
After those elections, Mr. Kostunica said, with a newly elected Parliament and government, "there could be a parliamentary commission that might dismiss all the top functionaries of the secret police or the police generally or the Interior Ministry, and that's another situation."
"Now," he said, "it would be quite irresponsible, at the moment when we are controlling things, to start experiments with the police and the secret police."
Mr. Kostunica, slumped in one of the vast and vastly uncomfortable red velvet armchairs in his office, smiled. "Dec. 23 can't come fast enough," he said.
While the country is relatively stable, a sharp and all-too-public debate rages within the 18-party coalition, known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, about the pace of change.
Mr. Kostunica wants a deliberate process of elections and legality.
Much of the coalition, dominated by the Democratic Party leader, Zoran Djindjic, argues for more rapid and visible change now, both to satisfy public anger and to remove from power those most associated with the repressive pillars of Mr. Milosevic's rule: Radomir Markovic, the head of the secret police, and General Nebojsa Pavkovic, the army chief of staff.
Mr. Kostunica spoke delicately of "different approaches" within the coalition.
But an important part of the subtext is that Mr. Kostunica and Mr. Djindjic do not trust each another. Mr. Kostunica does not want Mr. Djindjic to control the secret police or its files; Mr. Djindjic thinks Mr. Kostunica is not sufficiently committed to systemic change. Mr. Kostunica has a small party but is hugely popular; Mr. Djindjic has a large party but small electoral support.
In that sense, they need each other. But it is also obvious that the coalition will split - whether before or after Dec. 23 remains a question.Most analysts believe that it is symbolically important for the coalition to remain together through the elections and form a responsible Serbian government, breaking into two or three factions later.
Mr. Kostunica, as federal president, is also trying to preserve the Yugoslav Federation, including tiny Montenegro, Serbia's sister republic.
President Milo Djukanovic of Montenegro broke with Mr. Milosevic in 1998 and moved toward the West. But with the election of Mr. Kostunica, the West has urged Mr. Djukanovic to forgo independence and work out a new relationship with Belgrade - in part to ensure that a Yugoslavia exists in which Kosovo can be a part, to avoid immediate demands for Kosovo's independence.
But Mr. Djukanovic, whose position at home has been weakened by the election of Mr. Kostunica, now argues that Yugoslavia no longer exists. That infuriates Mr. Kostunica, who is open for negotiating a new relationship or even separation, so long as the process is transparent and capped by referendums in both republics.
Mr. Kostunica noted that Yugoslavia must exist, because it was just readmitted to the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. "It seems the whole world sees something Djukanovic does not see," Mr. Kostunica said.
The distortion of the society did not begin with Mr. Milosevic but with the victory of the Communists 56 years ago, Mr. Kostunica said.
In Kosovo, the Serbian province run by the United Nations and patrolled by NATO-led troops, Mr. Kostunica is insisting that security be improved for the Serbs there.
State Department Reviewing List of Banned Yugoslavs
Thursday November 16 2:47 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States, recognizing that Yugoslavia has changed, is reviewing its list of Yugoslavs ineligible for U.S. visas, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said on Thursday.
The visa ban, imposed in 1998, applied to more than 800 people, many of them closely associated with former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites), who lost elections in September to President Vojislav Kostunica (news - web sites).
The European Union (news - web sites) has a very similar list and last week it lifted the ban on visas for several former Milosevic associates, including the Yugoslav army's chief of staff and the head of Serbia's secret police.
Reeker said the United States would review both the list of names and the guidelines for giving visas to other former members of the Milosevic government.
``We are consulting with the European Union and with the government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia on that process,'' the spokesman added.
The United States, unlike the European Union, never publicized the list for U.S. domestic legal reasons.
The visa ban review is part of the rapid rapprochement between Washington and Belgrade in the weeks since popular outrage drove Milosevic out of office in October.
The Yugoslav government decided on Thursday to renew diplomatic relations with the United States and three other Western countries with which it broke ties during last year's NATO (news - web sites) air war over Kosovo.
Reeker said restoring relations would come about through an exchange of presidential letters and diplomatic notes. ``This will occur in a meeting between (Yugoslav) Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials and Ambassador (William) Montgomery in the next few days,'' the spokesman added.
``The actual technical exchange of letters won't probably happen until tomorrow,'' a State Department official said.
Montgomery, head of the U.S. Office of Yugoslav Affairs, is considered the most likely ambassador.
Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said the diplomatic move was in line with the government's priority of speedy re-integration with the world.
The Washington Times: Future aid tied to cooperation
By Joshua Kucera
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — U.S. aid to Yugoslavia will start to be tied to specific concerns — such as cooperation with international war crimes prosecutors — after April 1, President Clinton's Balkan envoy, James O'Brien, told reporters yesterday.
Congress last week approved $189 million for the country, nearly evenly split between the two republics of Serbia and Montenegro. For the time being, that aid has no strings attached, Mr. O'Brien said.
But starting in April, that aid will depend on the cooperation of the new government of President Vojislav Kostunica, he said. That means allowing investigators from the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague to have access in Yugoslavia and assisting in the apprehension of war-crimes suspects.
"This is part of a being a normal state in the international community," Mr. O'Brien told a small group of foreign reporters in the United States' temporary offices in a luxury hotel here. The U.S. Embassy has been shuttered since it was vandalized and looted during the NATO bombing raids here last year.
Mr. O'Brien arrived in Belgrade on Tuesday and has met with Mr. Kostunica, Prime Minister Zoran Zizic and other top political figures as well as media and independent nongovernmental organizations.
"It was a normal and intensive exchange between countries that have got a working relationship," he said.
The two countries have not had diplomatic relations since the United States and other NATO countries bombed Serbia to stop Yugoslav army repression of ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
Mr. Kostunica took power last month after he defeated former President Slobodan Milosevic and massive crowds in Belgrade stormed parliament to force Mr. Milosevic to accept the results.
The new government has said it is ready to resume relations with the United States and with France, Germany and Great Britain. Mr. O'Brien said that only technical issues remain to be resolved before that happens, and that once the Yugoslav government acts, it could happen any day.
Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic has said the resumption of relations with the United States will happen soon, possibly this month.
Almost immediately after Mr. Kostunica came to power, the international community began pressing him to turn Mr. Milosevic over to the international court. Mr. Kostunica argues that his government faces more immediate problems, and that ultimately the former president should be tried in Yugoslavia for his crimes against the country's citizens.
Mr. O'Brien said the United States does not object to Mr. Milosevic being tried in Yugoslavia.
"Our point is that there are other victims such as Kosovar Albanians," he said. "Those victims also deserve their day in court."
In his first month in power, Mr. Kostunica has faced domestic criticism that too many members of the former regime remain in power. Mr. Kostunica, a constitutional lawyer, has emphasized the need for gradual reform, and Mr. O'Brien said the United States respects that.
"The international community recognizes that there need to be some compromises in order to consolidate democracy," he said. "But we'll be looking at important figures to make sure they're dedicated to carrying out the democratic will of the people."
Mr. O'Brien also downplayed the possibility that a new administration in the United States could change its policy toward the Balkans. Texas Gov. George W. Bush has caused consternation in the region by suggesting that the American involvement in peacekeeping here ought to be scaled back.
Relatives of Missing Kosovo Serbs March in Belgrade
Thursday November 16 3:52 PM ET
By Gordana Kukic
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Several hundred relatives of Serbs missing in Kosovo marched in Belgrade Thursday calling for help in tracing sons, father and brothers they fear have been kidnapped or detained.
They blocked a street in front of the Serbian parliament demanding the release of Serbs they said had been abducted or arrested in Kosovo, a de facto international protectorate after last year's NATO (news - web sites) air-campaign on Yugoslavia.
The protesters, carrying pictures of missing sons, fathers and husbands, had banners reading ``Where are our children?'' and ''Return for everybody.'' They demanded equal treatment for ethnic Albanians imprisoned in Serbia and Serbs detained in Kosovo.
``I expect the international community to put pressure on Albanians to tell us where are the Serb fathers, sons and children,'' said Rajko Djinovic, head of the Belgrade-based Association of Families of Kidnapped Persons from Kosovo.
``We have a list of around 1,300 missing and kidnapped persons. We want to know where they are and whether they are alive,'' he told Reuters.
Protester Milivoje Todorovski, a doctor who worked in Pristina for 35 years, said his son Aleksandar was kidnapped in June 1999. ``I even asked my Albanian friends to help me. But there is a code of silence on their side,'' he said.
The demonstration came a day after tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians took to the streets in the Kosovo capital Pristina in the latest in a long line of mass rallies calling for the release of their ethnic kin held in Serbian prisons.
Serbian Minister Visits Kosovo
Also Wednesday, a Serbian minister visited Kosovo and promised measures which the United Nations (news - web sites) said could ease the suffering of Kosovo Albanians in Serbian jails and their relatives.
The visit by Dragan Subasic, the co-minister for justice in Serbia's transitional government, was thought to be the first by a Serbian cabinet member since the end of the war between Serbs and members of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority last year.
International officials say more than 729 ethnic Albanians are in Serbian prisons and 3,500 are registered as missing. Their fate is one of the most emotive issues in postwar Kosovo.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica (news - web sites) said in an interview Thursday that the chief of his cabinet, Ljiljana Nedeljkovic, the previous day had visited Serbs held in prisons in Pristina and near the town of Urosevac.
Hundreds of Serbs who fled Kosovo after last year's NATO bombing campaign have returned to the province in recent months, the U.N. refugee agency said Thursday.
Maki Shinohara, spokeswoman for the Belgrade office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said at least 1,000 Serbs had gone back to Kosovo on their own, mainly from southern and central Serbia.
``What we're seeing in Kosovo right now is that there are actually people returning,'' she told a news conference.
U.S., Yugoslavia Re-Establish Ties
Thursday November 16 4:14 PM ET
By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - After an exchange of diplomatic letters, the United States and Yugoslavia will re-establish a relationship that soured in the conflict over Kosovo: They will reopen their embassies in each other's capital within the next few days.
In an interview Thursday with state radio in Belgrade, President Vojislav Kostunica (news - web sites) said Yugoslavia was ``returning to the world swiftly, its head high up, and with dignity.''
He also said his government would focus its relations mostly on Europe and Russia, while also forging ties with ``the most powerful country in the world - the United States,'' and others.
Earlier, the Yugoslav government announced it was ready to restore diplomatic relations with Germany, France and Britain as well.
Still, more than a hint of discord remains. Kostunica has refused to send Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites) and a handful of the former president's loyalists to The Hague, Netherlands, for trial on war crimes charges.
Kostunica has said they should face justice in Yugoslavia. But Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic on Thursday said visas would be issued to tribunal personnel to reopen an office in Belgrade.
``I'm not aware that the new government has fully moved ahead on a number of matters,'' a State Department spokesman, Philip Reeker, said while welcoming Belgrade's invitation to renew ties that Milosevic suspended under bombardment by NATO (news - web sites) warplanes last year.
The assault, led by the United States, forced Milosevic to withdraw Serb troops and special police from Kosovo, where they had been accused of repression of secession-minded ethnic Albanians, who comprise a majority in the province.
Kosovo's links to Serbia are based on strong cultural and religious ties.
``We hope to restore the strong ties that have historically characterized the relations between our two countries and peoples,'' Reeker said. ``We expect to complete the procedures for doing so within the next few days,'' he said.
The Yugoslav embassy in Washington and the U.S. embassy in Belgrade will be open for consular services and staffs will be hired. Also, Reeker said, the United States was reviewing restrictions on travel here by former Yugoslav officials.
The U.S. ambassador, William Montgomery, will exchange presidential letters and diplomatic notes with the Yugoslav foreign ministry in the next few days. And then, Montgomery said in Belgrade, the U.S. embassy would be ``up and running.''
Relations with Milosevic were virtually nonexistent toward the end of his 13-year rule. The Clinton administration did not disguise its hope that Kostunica would take the presidency from him in an election in September.
A legal scholar, the new president questions the independence of the war crimes tribunal, which has indicted Milosevic and other senior Serbian military and political officials.
The United States and its allies, meanwhile, have made no effort to arrest them.
The Clinton administration has promised a rapid expansion of U.S. aid to Yugoslavia along with other actions to help the new government prosper and regain respect for the country in the world community.
Yugoslavia's prime minister, Zoran Zizic, told reporters in Belgrade that his country sought to renew ties with the United States, Britain, France and Germany to end its isolation.
``There is no harder moment for a government than a breakup of diplomatic relations,'' Zizic said. ``And there is no better moment than establishing them.''
Britain and France also welcomed the move.
Since Milosevic's ouster, Yugoslavia has rejoined the United Nations (news - web sites) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation (news - web sites) in Europe.
Kostunica also has attended a European Union (news - web sites) summit and held talks with several world leaders.
The New York Times:In Yugoslav Misery, Investors Knock
November 17, 2000
By PETER S. GREEN
Just over a month has passed since Yugoslavia's emerging democrats sent President Slobodan Milosevic packing and Western countries began lifting sanctions. Already, foreign investors are sifting through the physical and economic wreckage for investments and markets in Yugoslavia, a country they say should be the engine of Balkan recovery.
Trade delegations from Greece, Austria and the Czech Republic have visited. American and European companies are considering investing or reviving dormant links, and some that weathered the storm have expansion plans.
"My client list has doubled since the changes," said Benoit Junod, a former Swiss diplomat in Belgrade whose Geneva-based consulting firm, A&S, is scouting Serbia on behalf of foreign clients, particularly construction concerns.
In 1989, Yugoslavia was the wealthiest and most open country in the Communist world. Ten years of ethnic hatred, economic mismanagement and war have left its economy devastated and its infrastructure in tatters. But where many citizens see misery, investors see opportunity.
With eight million people in Yugoslavia, plus or minus two million Kosovars and two million Serbs in the diaspora, it is one of the Balkans' biggest and most important markets. Brand-conscious consumers with a surprising amount of money are thirsting for a better life. Labor is cheap, and the country sits astride the main road, rail and river routes linking Europe and the Balkans.
The economic reformers behind Yugoslavia's new president, Vojislav Kostunica, say speedy privatization is a high priority. Crucial assets for sale include the huge tobacco factory in Nis; electric, oil and gas companies; cement factories; and the government's 51 percent stake in Telekom Srbija.
The possibilities have piqued interest. An Austrian construction company, Bau Holding Strabag A.G., is exploring the loans and grants promised to Serbia for rebuilding by the European Union and others. "We are looking at projects like reconstruction of bridges over the Danube, highways, etc.," said Bau's chairman, Roland Jurecka.
Svetozar Janevski, managing director of the Pivara Skopje brewery in Macedonia, said he hoped to recapture Serbian markets lost when Macedonia seceded from Yugoslavia in 1992. "We have to think that Serbia is a market of 10 million people, and we can't cover that with one brewery in Skopje," Macedonia's capital, he said. Pivara Skopje, 51-percent- owned by a joint venture of the Dutch brewer Heineken N.V. and the Greek Coca-Cola bottler, the Hellenic Bottling Company, will be looking at some of the 10 major breweries in Serbia and at mineral water bottlers.
The Austrian bank Raiffeisen Zentralbank Group, a leading lender across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, is moving to set up in Yugoslavia. "We have already made contacts with several Yugoslav banks to become their correspondent partner, and the second step would be to open our own operation," said a spokesman, Andreas Ecker.
Experts say the key is whether the government that emerges from the December elections can push significant reforms through the regional parliaments in Serbia and Montenegro and whether the governments can hold together through the pain of reforms. Serbia makes up 95 percent of Yugoslavia's population; Montenegro, its tiny sister republic, constitutes the rest.
Statistics show that average incomes are under $50 a month and unemployment is over 50 percent, and the economy is shrinking at over 7 percent a year. But that is not the full story, said Srdjan Bogosavljevic, director of the Strategic Marketing and Media Research Institute, a privately owned concern in Belgrade.
"There is no gas, but people are driving cars everywhere," he said. "There are no visas, but people are traveling. There are no salaries, but the restaurants are full."
Vastly skewed official statistics and a thriving gray economy help explain the apparent paradox. And remittances from Serbs abroad, Mr. Bogosavljevic said, are an estimated $100 million to $150 million a month.
So with even a small sign of recovery, markets for consumer goods in particular are likely to take off. "The future looks very bright," said Ephram Jeffy, general director of IBP Beograd A.D., the authorized Coca- Cola bottler in Yugoslavia. IBP operated during the Milosevic regime.
Anti-American sentiment during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia last year did not dent sales, he said; Coke sold 24 million cases of soft drinks in Yugoslavia and he expects to double that in two years.
"The war has shifted into subconsciousness," said Srdjan Saper, chief executive of the I&F McCann Erickson Group, an advertising agency in Belgrade. Mr. Saper says he is already hiring to meet an expected advertising boom.
Vladimir Joksic, the deputy general manager of the agency, a unit of the Interpublic Group, added: "One of the huge potentials here is the mindset of Yugoslav consumers. They know how to read advertising, and most of the Western brand goods were already here — they were present on the black market."
The McDonald's Corporation has 16 restaurants in Yugoslavia. At the height of economic sanctions, it was able to obtain locally some 80 percent of its supplies and keep operating. That loyalty to the local market has built customer loyalty. "A lot of people will be surprised how fast this market will pick up," said Branimir Lalic, vice president for purchasing at McDonald's Central Europe operations, who is looking at sites for new restaurants on Serbia's highways.
Other businesses are already reaping the benefits of President Kostunica's arrival. ICN Pharmaceuticals of Costa Mesa, Calif., whose chairman, Milan Panic, is a former Yugoslav prime minister and opponent of Mr. Milosevic, won back control of its Belgrade pharmaceuticals factory, which had been confiscated by the Milosevic government. The company sees the Belgrade plant as crucial to winning export markets in the Caucasus and Turkey.
Yugoslavia's open past should help it avoid the slow learning curve that has dragged down development in other former Communist nations.
"We are at the center of the Balkans here, and have many people who for 20 or 30 years have been doing business with the West," said Dusan Mitevic, general manager of ICN Yugoslavia. "If the government assures stability, this country has the resources and the people, so it can very quickly rejoin the world."
Guardian Unlimited: Kostunica courts Serbia's old foes
Gillian Sandford in Belgrade
Guardian
Friday November 17, 2000
The Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica, moved yesterday to restore diplomatic relations with the US, Britain, France and Germany, the countries that spearheaded last year's Nato bombing campaign in Kosovo.
"There is no harder moment for a government than a break up of diplomatic relations," the prime minister, Zoran Zizic, said. "And there is no better moment than establishing them."
In Washington, a national security council spokesman, Daniel Cruise, said: "We look forward to the necessary formalities being completed and relations being formally restored in the coming days."
Reopening ties with Washington is particularly significant because, unlike Britain, France and Germany which re-established limited consular, commercial and cultural functions after the bombing, the US had no diplomatic representation in Belgrade.
The move comes more than a year after former president Slobodan Milosevic cut ties at the start of Nato's 78-day air offensive, launched after Belgrade's crackdown on Kosovo's ethnic Albanians.
Since Mr Milosevic was forced from power after the September 24 election, Yugoslavia has rejoined the UN - after eight years in the wilderness - and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Mr Kostunica has also attended an EU summit and held talks with several world leaders.
President Bill Clinton's Balkans envoy, James O'Brien, discussed restoring relations during talks in Belgrade on Wednesday. But Mr O'Brien said substantial US aid would only follow if Yugoslavia cooperated with the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
He confirmed that Congress was ready to approve $100m (£69m) for Serbia and $89m (£62m) for Montenegro.
Mr Kostunica has balked at efforts to send Mr Milosevic and a handful of his loyalists to stand trial in the Hague, but said they may face prosecution in Yugoslavia.
Yesterday the Yugoslav foreign minister, Goran Svilanovic, said that his government would allow the tribunal to work in Yugoslavia. He made no mention, however, of any change in Mr Kostunica's position on Mr Milosevic or anyone else wanted by the tribunal.
Britain is providing £11.5m in aid to support the transition to democracy and is a strong advocate of Belgrade's rapid return to world bodies such as the UN. The British trade minister, Richard Caborn, visited the country last week.
Since coming to power, Mr Kostunica has moved quickly to end Belgrade's international isolation. He addressed the European parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, clearly stating his wish for Yugoslavia to join the EU.
Last Tuesday, Belgrade hosted a two-day meeting of the stability pact for south-eastern Europe, which also recently opened its doors to Mr Kostunica's administration.
The renewal of diplomatic relations comes as US diplomat Richard Holbrooke hosts a conference of Balkan leaders today in Dayton, Ohio, marking the fifth anniversary of the Dayton peace accords which ended the war in Bosnia.
On the agenda is the next phase of the Dayton agreement, as well as the future status of Kosovo and Montenegro. Nato's secretary general Lord Robertson, Kosovan leaders and Montenego's president, Milo Djukanovic, will attend, but Mr Kostunicais sending his foreign politics adviser, Pavle Jevremovic.
Yugoslav Army Says Kosovo Border Situation Worsening
BELGRADE, Nov 16, 2000 -- (Reuters) The Yugoslav army said on Wednesday the security situation in a tense region of Serbia bordering Kosovo was worsening and the number of ethnic Albanian guerrillas there had tripled.
Army spokesman Colonel Svetozar Radisic said mortar attacks had intensified and Serb police had suffered casualties.
"The number of terrorists has tripled in the last month... and that is linked to the policies of Albanian parties after the municipal elections in the province," Radisic told a news conference, without elaborating.
Western diplomatic sources said there had been an increase in attacks in recent weeks, with mines being laid in local roads, but doubted that Albanian guerrilla numbers had tripled, putting their strength at "a few score".
A NATO source said the Kosovo peacekeeping force was as active as ever in seeking to prevent material support reaching the guerrillas - who did not appear to have much backing among the local Albanian population.
Radisic was referring to last month's local polls in Kosovo, a de facto international protectorate after the NATO bombing campaign from March to June 1999.
Kosovo's first free democratic elections on October 28 were won by the Democratic League of Kosovo of moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, defeating the more radical party of former guerrilla commander Hashim Thaci.
It was not immediately clear which parties Radisic was referring to at his news conference, nor how this had influenced the situation in the boundary area.
POLICE TARGETTED BY MINES
An ethnic Albanian group calling itself the Liberation Army for Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB), named after three municipalities in the region, is believed to have been involved in several clashes with Serb police over the last year.
The area is predominantly populated by ethnic Albanians, who have complained about police harassment and intimidation.
Last week, a policeman was killed when his car hit an anti-tank mine and two others died in an incident on the same road on October 13.
The NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo has tried to cut supply lines of the UCPMB, which is based in the village of Dobrosin.
Radisic said relations between the Yugoslav Third Army and KFOR and UN police in a five km (three mile) security zone along the administrative border were correct.
"We meet regularly once a week and the cooperation is correct, in a spirit of the military-technical agreement," he said.
KFOR and the U.N.-led civilian administration took control of Kosovo under the 1999 agreement following NATO's bombing campaign to halt Yugoslavia's repression of ethnic Albanian majority in the province.
The Telegraph:Plea for aid to prop up Yugoslav democracy
By Alex Todorovic in Belgrade and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Strasbourg
FEEDING Yugoslavia's people this winter is a higher priority than punishing war criminals, President Vojislav Kostunica told the European Parliament yesterday. He said: "We'll get to other matters later, but for now our priority is the survival of our people."
The new Yugoslav leader side-stepped demands for a commitment to extradite Slobodan Milosevic to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague following his indictment last year. Any prosecution over the ousted president's role in orchestrating mass killings should take place in Serbian courts, he said. "Mr Milosevic is responsible for many things, but he is most responsible before his own people."
The European Commission said yesterday that emergency aid deliveries to Yugoslavia began on Saturday as part of a £120 million package to boost the transition to democracy. About 20 lorries a day are arriving with food, medicine and heating oil. A commission official said: "We're determined to show that it's not bound up in red tape, that it's being delivered on the ground, so that everybody can see that democracy makes a difference."
But the message is not getting through in Yugoslavia. Most Serbs fear that their first winter of freedom will be marked by widespread hardship. Political disillusionment is growing, and Milosevic's allies are seeking a comeback in elections due next month.
Belgraders such as Angelina, a dental technician, are becoming familiar with a lack of electricity and the techniques needed to cope. Many evenings she now heats coffee over a candle. She said: "Prices have sky-rocketed, my salary is the same and I spend hours each day without power."
Six weeks after the Yugoslav revolution, Angelina, like many Serbs, is dumbfounded that things seem to be going from bad to worse. She said: "I don't understand how we had more electricity while Nato bombed our country than we do now."
People throughout the country are saying the same. The euphoria following Yugoslavia's revolution has been replaced by frustration over the collapsing infrastructure and the continuing political crisis. Milosevic allies enacted sweeping price liberalisation that has left poor families worse off than ever. The state of the health system is even more dire than that of the electricity grid.
Gordana Todorovic, an administrator in a Belgrade hospital, said: "We are performing only the most urgent of operations because of a shortage of fundamental supplies such as surgical gloves, surgical thread, gauze and standard medications."
Some critics allege that the power shortages are being organised by Milosevic cronies in an attempt to influence next month's elections. True or false, the crisis is having an effect on some Serbs. One Belgrade shop worker said: "Everything is going to rot."
European Union aid cannot arrive soon enough. In addition to the 20 lorries a day, Germany has begun delivering emergency electricity supplies which should alleviate some power cuts, although a sharp drop in temperatures could have dire consequences.
Yet the faith of many democrats remains undimmed. They are still hoping that the problems will be temporary. Angelina said: "Of course it's a nuisance not to be able to prepare a meal or iron your clothes when you want. But at least I don't have to listen to Milosevic's lies any more on the evening news."
The New York Times:Case for a Serbian Democracy (Without Purges)
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, Nov. 15 — For President Vojislav Kostunica of Yugoslavia, trying to manage a difficult transition from the regime of Slobodan Milosevic while respecting legal niceties and holding together his broad coalition, the elections for a new Serbian government next month cannot come soon enough.
But the rush to build a new democracy cannot be done radically, without building on the foundations of the existing state, Mr. Kostunica said in an interview, rejecting arguments from his allies for a rapid purge of top commanders of the secret police and the army.
"I'm eager for a systemic transformation in the police, the army, the judiciary and other institutions," Mr. Kostunica said. "But they cannot be transformed without the election of a Parliament and a very serious public debate."
In particular, he insisted, "it would be irresponsible to start experimenting" with the police, the secret police and the army "when we have no Parliament in Serbia and a strange type of transitional government."
The Oct. 5 uprising that forced Mr. Milosevic to recognize Mr. Kostunica's election did not by itself change the Serbian government, where real power lies here. But pressure, negotiations and threats caused the Serbian government and Parliament to dissolve, with a provisional government in place and early elections called for Dec. 23.
After those elections, Mr. Kostunica said, with a newly elected Parliament and government, "then there could be a parliamentary commission that might dismiss all the top functionaries of the secret police or the police generally or the interior ministry, and that's another situation."
"Now," he said, "it would be quite irresponsible, at the moment when we are controlling things, to start experiments with the police and the secret police."
Mr. Kostunica (pronounced kosh- TOON-eet-zah), slumped in one of the vast and vastly uncomfortable red velvet armchairs in his office, smiled. "Dec. 23 can't come fast enough," he said.
While the country is relatively stable, a sharp and all-too-public debate rages within the 18-party coalition, known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, or DOS, about the pace of change.
Mr. Kostunica wants a deliberate process of elections and legality. Much of the coalition, dominated by the Democratic Party leader, Zoran Djindjic, argues for more rapid and visible change now, both to satisfy public anger and to remove from power those most associated with the repressive pillars of Mr. Milosevic's rule: Radomir Markovic, the head of the secret police, and Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, the army chief of staff.
Mr. Kostunica spoke delicately of "different approaches" within the coalition.
But an important part of the subtext is that Mr. Kostunica and Mr. Djindjic simply do not trust each another. Mr. Kostunica does not want Mr. Djindjic to control the secret police or its files; Mr. Djindjic thinks Mr. Kostunica is not sufficiently committed to systemic change. Mr. Kostunica has a small party but is hugely popular; Mr. Djindjic has a large party but small electoral support, with high negatives.
In that sense, they need each other. But it is also obvious that the DOS coalition will split — whether before or after Dec. 23 remains a question. Some around Mr. Kostunica believe he should capitalize on his own popularity to run his own slate of candidates for the Serbian Parliament and let Mr. Djindjic and those who follow him fend for themselves. But most believe that it is symbolically important for coalition to remain together through the elections and form a responsible Serbian government, breaking into two or three factions later, and Mr. Kostunica and Mr. Djindjic have been urged to work more closely together.
Mr. Kostunica, as federal president, is also trying to preserve the Yugoslav federation, including tiny Montenegro, Serbia's sister republic. President Milo Djukanovic of Montenegro broke with Mr. Milosevic in 1998 and moved toward the West. But with the election of Mr. Kostunica, the West has urged Mr. Djukanovic to forgo independence and work out a new relationship with Belgrade — in part to ensure that a Yugoslavia exists in which Kosovo can be a part, to avoid immediate demands for Kosovo's independence.
But Mr. Djukanovic, whose position at home has been weakened by Mr. Kostunica's election, now argues that Yugoslavia no longer exists. That infuriates Mr. Kostunica, who is open for negotiating a new relationship or even separation, so long as the process is transparent and capped by referendums in both republics.
In the interview, Mr. Kostunica noted that Yugoslavia must exist, because it was just readmitted to the United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. "It seems the whole world sees something Djukanovic does not see," Mr. Kostunica said tartly. "In that semi-autistic view Djukanovic reminds me a little of Milosevic — Milosevic also saw things the world did not see."
On Thursday, Yugoslavia is expected to reestablish normal diplomatic relations with the United States, Britain, France and Germany, four NATO powers with whom it severed ties during NATO's war on Serbia last year.
Mr. Kostunica also objected to Mr. Djukanovic's statement that problems between Serbia and Montenegro predated Mr. Milosevic, noting that Mr. Djukanovic and his representatives voted for Mr. Milosevic as federal president as late as 1997.
In Kosovo, the Serbian province run by the United Nations and patrolled by NATO-led troops, Mr. Kostunica is insisting that security be improved for the Serbs who remain. He and the army are also troubled by Albanian attacks on Serb police on Serbian territory near Kosovo.
And he wants a better effort made to account for Serbs who are missing in Kosovo. On Tuesday night, for instance, he met with the wife of a Serb doctor, Andrija Tomanovic, who disappeared in Pristina on June 24, 1999, after NATO forces entered Kosovo. And a top aide will soon visit Serbs in Kosovo's jails.
The distortion of the society did not begin with Mr. Milosevic but with the victory of the Communists 56 years ago, Mr. Kostunica said.
"The law has to be equal for everyone," he said. "I'd never want something that looks like the revolutionary justice described in Stalin's textbooks."
He stopped for a moment, then said: "If we think about guilt and responsibility for the last 13 years of Milosevic, what of the responsibility for the last 56 years? There are so many examples of revolutionary leaders who committed very serious crimes but under the revolutionary flag, and they are still alive, and some try to appear now as democrats or liberals."
Justice must be done, he said, but carefully done. The system corrupted so many people, Mr. Kostunica said, that "many may ask, `Why me, and not someone else?' "
G7, Financiers Ponder Yugoslavia Assistance
PARIS, Nov 14, 2000 -- (Reuters) Officials from the Group of Seven rich nations and international financial institutions met on Tuesday to review their Balkans policy in the wake of the fall of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
The brief gathering was expected to proffer warm words of encouragement for new President Vojislav Kostunica rather than pledges of fresh aid.
It was also convened to reassure Yugoslavia's neighbors that a new improved relationship with Belgrade would not deprive them of international funding.
"There will be a clear statement of support for the region and Yugoslavia," said Jean Lemierre, president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), before heading into the half-day meeting.
A news conference was scheduled for 1:15 p.m. (1215 GMT).
Besides the EBRD, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank (EIB) and European Union Commission also sent senior delegations to the talks.
The EU has already promised an emergency package of EUR 200 million (USD 166 million) to help Serbia through the coming winter and provide a breathing space to look at what kind of assistance was needed for the longer term.
However, delegates arriving for the Paris talks warned that Yugoslavia's massive debt arrears represented a hurdle to releasing desperately needed funds for a country impoverished by a decade of war, sanctions and gross mismanagement.
Belgrade owes the World Bank alone some USD 1.7 billion and senior officials from the organization said this week that they would not issue new credit lines until they had reached a restructuring agreement with the new Yugoslav authorities.
"The World Bank never writes off debt," the official said. "Before Yugoslavia renews its membership of the bank, it will have to agree to a plan to clear these arrears," he added.
EBRD MEMBERSHIP AROUND THE CORNER
Membership of the EBRD will be an easier matter, because it is a relatively new body and Belgrade does not owe it money.
Lemierre told reporters on Tuesday that he expected Belgrade to be enrolled by the end of the year, opening the way to the rapid implementation of funding projects.
One of the earliest programs will be direct assistance to small and medium-sized companies. "That is the way to finance the real economy," said Lemierre, who declined to speculate how much cash would be made available.
"All we can say is that we won't have problems funding projects," he said.
Analysts say the Yugoslav economy is in dire straight, with fuel and food reserves exhausted and basic infrastructure in a terrible state of repair following last year's Kosovo conflict.
The country is in default on virtually all its external debt - estimated at between USD 12-14 billion - while its foreign reserves in October stood at a paltry USD 385 million.
The Paris meeting was held under the auspices of the so-called High Level Steering Group, which was set up during the Kosovo war to oversee the work of the European Commission and World Bank in coordinating aid to the Balkans.
Finance officials said international aid donors would meet in Brussels on December 12 to discuss specific Belgrade requests for assistance. "That is when we will get into the nitty-gritty of funding," said one senior executive.
EU Lifts Ban On Former Milosevic Aides
BELGRADE, Nov 14, 2000 -- (Reuters) The European Union has lifted a visa ban on several former close associates of Slobodan Milosevic including the Yugoslav army's chief of staff and the head of Serbia's secret police.
The revised list was agreed last week and formally adopted without fanfare by EU development aid ministers, diplomatic sources said on Tuesday.
One diplomat said the list was shortened on the advice of Yugoslavia's new authorities, including President Vojislav Kostunica. But a senior Yugoslav pro-democracy leader expressed surprise at the changes.
A comparison of the new and old lists of those banned on the web page of the EU's official journal showed army chief General Nebojsa Pavkovic had been removed. So had Rade Markovic, the chief of Serbia's DB secret state security service.
Pavkovic commanded the army in Kosovo during NATO's bombing campaign last year, when hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees fled the province in fear of repression.
The UN war crimes tribunal has publicly indicted Milosevic and four associates, but not Pavkovic, for atrocities carried out during the bombing.
Pro-democracy leaders have accused Markovic's secret police of involvement in politically motivated kidnappings and killings under Milosevic. He has denied the charges and a row over his future has hampered the work of Serbia's caretaker government.
SURPRISE AT LIFTING OF BAN
The leader of the largest party in the Democratic Opposition of Serbia alliance, which united behind Kostunica as its candidate for president, said he was surprised by the end of the bans and the suggestion that the DOS had approved the changes.
"This is a misuse and a manipulation because at the last DOS meeting, nobody knew anything about it," Zoran Djindjic told Belgrade's Blic newspaper.
"This proposal (for the removals) was made by someone with sympathies towards the Milosevic regime. I was most surprised by the removal of Rade Markovic from the list," he said.
Also removed from the list were former Yugoslav Prime Minister Momir Bulatovic, former Serbian Justice Minister Dragoljub Jankovic as well as several senior members of Milosevic's Socialist party.
An EU source in Brussels said the new list was "shorter by more than 100 names but less than 200". "The main category to be shortened was the military. It was very substantially reduced," he told Reuters.
The source said further reductions of the visa ban list were expected in future as it was refined with the help of the Kostunica team from the original 600 or so names "which had to be put together quickly with no cooperation from Belgrade".
Sources at NATO said they expected removing Pavkovic, Markovic and Bulatovic would "probably raise some eyebrows around here".
Some allies, while anxious to see Kostunica succeed, might wonder what these people had done to merit being granted permission to travel in the EU, one source acknowledged.
City Center Swamped In Kosovo Prisoner Protest
PRISTINA, Nov 14, 2000 -- (Reuters) Tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians swamped the center of the Kosovo capital Pristina on Monday in a demonstration to demand the release of friends and relatives in Serbian jails.
Members of the province's ethnic Albanian majority have been campaigning since the conflict ended for the release of the prisoners detained during last year's Kosovo war.
The most recent protests have also focused on fears that the Albanian prisoners could be targets for violence in revolts taking place in several Serbian jails over the past two weeks.
Reporters watching the latest protest in Pristina estimated there could be up to 100,000 people on the streets.
Demonstrators carried placards saying "There is no freedom without the release of prisoners" and "Freedom doesn't make sense without them". They called on international authorities to do more to secure the prisoners' freedom.
Kosovo's United Nations-led administration said its head, Frenchman Bernard Kouchner, had been in touch with a number of governments to try to help resolve the issue.
"We are also regularly in touch with the co-minister of justice in Belgrade as well as with human rights lawyers in Belgrade," spokeswoman Claire Trevena said.
Prisoners started revolts in three of Serbia's main jails early last week. Serbian officials have said the ethnic Albanian prisoners have been evacuated from the jails or are safe within them.
According to International Red Cross sources in Pristina, 729 ethnic Albanians are in Serbian prisons and 3,500 are registered as missing.
Kosovo remains legally part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia but has been run as a de facto international protectorate since the end of the conflict in June of last year.
Stability Pact Meets in Yugoslavia to Discuss Aid
BELGRADE, Nov 13, 2000 -- (Reuters) Yugoslav leaders and international officials met on Monday in Belgrade to discuss ways to get aid flowing as quickly as possible now the country has embraced democracy.
The two-day gathering, under the auspices of the European Union's Stability Pact for the Balkans, was the first international conference in the Yugoslav capital following the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic last month.
Marking another step in Yugoslavia's swift march away from international isolation under Milosevic, the conference attended by hundreds of delegates was to focus on providing local help to city and town councils across Yugoslavia.
"Humanitarian aid must be concrete. It must have a human face," said new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, pleading for direct help tailored to local municipalities' needs.
"We are sincerely and truly grateful for the aid we are receiving for the coming winter, but we want to work," he added. "That is why we need investment and export credits in order to revive the economy and get back on our own feet."
Bodo Hombach, the pact's German co-ordinator, said international officials had carried out a swift survey of municipalities across the country to assess their needs.
He said the conference was held under in the belief that there was much truth in the old adage "all politics are local".
"That's the only standard we can accept for politics - is it in a position to improve peoples' real lives?" he said.
The Stability Pact, set up after the Kosovo war, brings together governments and international organizations and focuses on building and restoring infrastructure in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia's new Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic appealed to mayors and local council members from around Yugoslavia gathered in a 1970s conference hall not to fall victim to the corruption which became endemic under Milosevic.
He told them they would have to resist the temptation to abuse aid funds for personal gain.
"All the states in transition faced this challenge because they didn't want to be Mafioso states," he said. "We must be accountable to all our citizens."
Tribunal Prosecutor Expects Milosevic Arrest Soon
Sunday November 12
ZURICH (Reuters) - Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will be arrested soon on war crimes charges, the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte was quoted as saying Sunday.
Swiss newspaper SonntagsBlick quoted Del Ponte, Switzerland's former federal prosecutor, as saying: ``Milosevic will be arrested soon.''
Commenting on news that Yugoslavia had approved the setting-up of an office by the Dutch-based Tribunal in Belgrade, she said, ``With that, the days of Milosevic and other war criminals are numbered.''
Del Ponte said she did not want to lose any time in dealing with indicted war crimes suspects, adding she would also tackle crimes against the Serb people. ``We are here for justice and we want to prove we can contribute to peace.''
Officials at the Tribunal in the Hague have said that they want to give Yugoslavia's new leaders some time before demanding the handover of Milosevic and other suspects.
Milosevic has been indicted with three aides and a general for crimes against humanity for orchestrating a ``campaign of violence and terror'' against Kosovo Albanians last year.
Del Ponte has requested a meeting with new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica , but a date has not been agreed so far. Kostunica took office last month.
The New York Times:Yugoslavia Is Cheered but Faces Cheerless Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, Nov. 12 — The new Yugoslavia has been welcomed back to the world almost uncritically by a United States and a Europe that cannot quite believe their luck. Slobodan Milosevic, the autocrat who stirred such turmoil in the Balkans for so long, is gone.
But the new Yugoslav and Serbian governments are finding that Mr. Milosevic's rule left enormous holes in their budgets for basic needs like electricity, food and pensions, and a West that never believed Mr. Milosevic would fall so quickly has been caught unprepared, promising quick aid but scrambling to deliver it.
Elections for a new Serbian Parliament and government — and Serbia is where the real power lies here — are on Dec. 23, and should be the vital moment when the anti-Milosevic coalition, already bickering viciously, is consolidated in power.
But since Mr. Milosevic was overthrown in early October, the people of Serbia have suffered prolonged electric shortages and power cuts and price rises on basic foods that brought inflation in October alone to 27 percent, after the artificially restricted increases of 2 to 3 percent a month under Mr. Milosevic.
The weather has been mild but will soon turn cold, putting sharp new strains on energy supplies before the election; the pension system is broke, and there are significant shortages of cooking oil, sugar and medicine.
Western diplomats and officials recognize the need for speedy support for the new Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica, and his allies in the 18-party coalition still known as DOS, or the Democratic Opposition of Serbia.
Serbian officials say they need $500 million in energy, food, medicine and pension support to get through the winter — $2 million a day alone for electricity and natural gas. Western help is coming, but slowly, tied up with bureaucratic and political restrictions.
"Serbia needs assistance right now and a timely supply of the fuel and electricity will consolidate democratic processes in the country," said the Serbian deputy prime minister, Nebojsa Covic.
Goran Pitic, an opposition economist who has suddenly become the Serbian minister for foreign economic cooperation, said: "People are proud of getting rid of Milosevic and will put up with lots of sacrifice. But already people grumble about why we seem incompetent at providing basic needs."
Nada Maricic, a pensioner of 78, said she lacked electricity for six hours a day and most of the night. "When we were bombed, we had electricity until the end, and now, not," she said, referring to the 78 days of bombing by NATO last year. "The new ones will learn. I just hope they will learn fast."
Katarina Bogicic, a student of 18, said, laughing: "It would almost be better to cut off the electricity altogether. It shuts off when I come home and starts up just when I'm ready to leave. It really gets on my nerves." Still, she said, "I'm proud of people."
"We know if we don't have electricity now, we'll have it next year," she said.
The Milosevic government used most of its reserves to get through the election of Sept. 24, said Miroljub Labus, the federal deputy prime minister. Now, he said, the opposition must prove its mettle, and it needs help from the West that promised it.
"Frankly speaking, we have enough in promises, and we're grateful," he said. "But disbursement is another problem — it's a question of timing. The European Union is moving incredibly fast by their standards, but it's not fast enough for us. We're in the middle of an energy crisis, and below that, we have a deep social crisis, with low wages and people very nervous about their future."
Mr. Pitic said: "We appreciate all help but we need more, especially from the big players. Our message is: cash. We don't have to see that cash, but there are bills to be paid. We're a transitional government before the elections, and our main task is heating, electricity, food and wages. Then we can worry about price stability and economic transformation."
The European Union, spurred by Christopher Patten, its foreign-policy commissioner, has been pushing its varied countries and officials to get electricity and oil to Yugoslavia as fast as they can.
"We've been bending every rule to get help here even a day sooner, especially energy, food and medicine," said Michael Graham, the European Union ambassador here. "But with the best will in the world, it's complicated."
When Mr. Milosevic fell, "money for Serbia wasn't even there," Mr. Graham said. "Three months ago, everyone yawned and said Milosevic would be in power for at least another year."
Mr. Patten and the European Union wrenched 200 million euros ($165 million) for Serbia out of special reserve funds. Some $66 million will go for energy, and the rest for food, medicine, schools and support for the news media. But even that aid cannot flow until after a European ministerial meeting on Nov. 20.
The United States is offering a total of $100 million for this year (nearly three times the $35 million given last year), but the first $10 million, to be used urgently to buy electricity, is being held up by Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who wants assurances on American policy toward possible independence for Montenegro.
Congress has also put conditions about Belgrade's cooperation with the Hague tribunal on war crimes on the use of the aid after March 31. Washington has authorized an extra $20 million in emergency food aid to be distributed by the World Food Program, aimed at pensioners and internally displaced people in Serbia — which now has more refugees from its wars than any other country in Europe — and the Europeans have done the same. The average salary here is now about $40 a month, down from $100 in 1997.
But most of the American aid will not arrive until next year.
To get started quickly, the European Union resurrected a program devised last year to help cities then ruled by the anti-Milosevic opposition to get oil. The first shipment arrived at the border of Bosnia and Serbia on Saturday, with 10,000 tons of fuel, worth some $1.5 million, arriving over the next 20 days for those seven cities.
"It's not enough," Mr. Graham said. "But it takes a strain off the system."
Serbian officials have been scrambling, with Bulgaria supplying extra electricity in return for promises of money from the United Nations mission in Kosovo, which owes Serbia $19 million for electricity used last year. Even the Serbian republic in Bosnia has been providing extra electricity to Belgrade.
Mr. Kostunica went to Moscow to get promises of natural gas supplies, vital to heat large parts of Serbia, but the Russians, already owed nearly $300 million, are offering only about a month's supply, and that on credit. Mr. Labus is grateful, given Moscow's own financial problems, but more negotiations are necessary.
There have also been offers of aid from individual European countries, including Italy (some $50 million), Germany ($25 million), Greece ($7 million for electricity imports) and Norway ($9 million and a loan vital to Belgrade's reentry into the International Monetary Fund).
The British are offering just $1.75 million over the next two months, half of that for energy. In general, Mr. Labus said, promises of aid total about $455 million, "but timing is everything."
Still, opinion polls show that Mr. Kostunica and his allies are widely popular, while Mr. Milosevic's Socialists are scrambling to redefine themselves. Despite the economic problems and internal squabbling, the democratic coalition is expected to hold together long enough to win the elections next month and form a government.
"But then the real problems begin," said Jurij Bajec, a respected economist. "There are 10 years of isolation to fix," with a painful process of economic change and market transition that will inevitably create further unemployment, inflation and political unhappiness.
"People will vote for DOS, but after a few months they will ask, legitimately, for real improvement in their lives and their wages," Mr. Labus said. "I need to boost economic activity in the spring, and right now I really don't have any instruments to do it."
Serious aid for reconstruction will not arrive until mid-2001, he said. "But what do I do between February and June?"
BBC:Belgrade 'Spider five' await verdict
Monday, 13 November, 2000
By Jacky Rowland in Belgrade
A court in Belgrade is due to give its verdict on Monday morning in the case of five men accused of spying for France and of murdering two Kosovo Albanians during the Nato bombing campaign last year.
Lawyers for the men have called for their release saying that no reliable evidence against them has been presented during the trial.
But human rights activists in Belgrade say they have the eye-witness testimony from a Kosovar Albanian which proves that three of the defendants are guilty of murder.
The five men were arrested a year ago and accused of terrorism and spying for the French secret services.
The former Yugoslav authorities said the men belonged to a shadowy organisation called Spider and that they planned to assassinate former President Slobodan Milosevic.
Death penalty call
This last charge did not appear on the indictment.
The prosecutor appealed for all five to be convicted of espionage and asked for the death penalty for three of them accused of murdering two Kosovo Albanians.
The Spider affair is a complicated case.
Human rights activists agree with the defence team that the trial was politically motivated, an attempt by the former regime to blame war crimes in Kosovo on foreign agents rather than Serbian security forces.
But they have come into conflict with the defence by producing a witness statement from Kosovo which, they say, proves the murder charges against three of the accused.
The prosecutor has accepted this evidence, a decision which human rights lawyers describe as a breakthrough in a legal system which was, until recently, tightly controlled by the government.
Kostunica Rules Out Purge Of Yugoslav Army, Police
BELGRADE, Nov 13, 2000 -- (Reuters) Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica said on Sunday there was no need for hasty personnel changes in the security forces, resisting pressure to dismiss former allies of ousted leader Slobodan Milosevic.
"I am sure that it is not the will of people at this moment to destroy institutions such as the army and police," Kostunica said in an interview with the pro-government daily Politika.
"Nor is the will of the people to replace everybody in the various institutions just because they were members of (Slobodan Milosevic's) Socialist Party of Serbia."
Kostunica's backers, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), responded with dismay and one source close to the leadership forecast a split with the president, who rode to power in September on a wave of popular support.
The 18-party DOS is pressing Kostunica to remove the army's chief-of-staff, General Nebojsa Pavkovic, and the head of state security, Rade Markovic, arguing they were close Milosevic allies in the last two years of his repressive rule.
The DOS and another opposition group, the Serbian Renewal Movement, have said they would boycott Serbia's new transitional government unless Markovic was replaced.
"Some think the most powerful people in the army and police should not be replaced to avoid the destruction of these institutions," Zarko Korac, a DOS leader, said in a television interview late on Saturday.
"But I think the opposite. These people will destroy these institutions. People are watching this and wondering what are they (the DOS) doing now?"
A source close to the DOS leadership told Reuters on Sunday that Kostunica was wrong to try "to decide what people want and what they do not want".
"This sounds a bit like Milosevic who always used the term people when he wanted to excuse himself for deciding on his own," said the source, who asked not to be named.
He said a split with Kostunica appeared increasingly likely after parliamentary elections in Serbia on December 23.
Momcilo Perisic, another DOS leader, tried to play down talk of a split, however. "There is no conflict that could lead to a confrontation on the eve of the elections," Beta news agency quoted him as saying.
BBC:Belgrade back in fold
Friday, 10 November, 2000, 16:33 GMT
The new Yugoslav authorities have accepted an invitation to rejoin the European security organisation, the OSCE, after an absence of eight years.
An OSCE official visiting Belgrade said Yugoslavia could become a member by the end of the month, which would mark the latest step in Yugoslavia's rehabilitation by the international community.
In a separate move, the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia gave a cautious welcome to a statement from Belgrade that it was now willing to co-operate with war crimes investigators.
But the tribunal emphasised that co-operation had to be complete, including the arrest and handing over of those charged with war crimes.
President Vojislav Kostunica on Monday handed over a letter to Austrian Foreign Minister and OSCE chairwoman Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who is part of a team visiting Belgrade.
War crimes suspects
In it, he acknowledged that Federal Yugoslavia was only one of the successor states to the former Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia - a vital condition for membership of the OSCE.
The other four former Yugoslavia republics - Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Croatia - have been admitted to the OSCE as independent states.
Mr Kostunica also discussed with Ms Ferrero-Waldner the Yugoslav authorities' decision to allow the war crimes tribunal to open an office in Belgrade.
Earlier on Monday, Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said the Serbs could not avoid facing the consequences of war and the responsibility for crimes.
But beyond the opening of the tribunal office, he did not spell out the extent of Yugoslavia's co-operation.
Mr Kostunica reportedly told the Austrian foreign minister that the move did not indicate a shift in position over the fate of former President Slobodan Milosevic, wanted for trial for crimes against humanity.
So far, the new authorities have indicated that he is unlikely to be handed over, and that war crimes would not be a priority for the fledgling government.
Back in the UN fold
Yugoslavia is believed to be sheltering a number of suspects accused of war crimes during the Bosnian conflict.
In particular, the tribunal wants former Bosnian Serb political and military leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to be handed over.
The new Yugoslavian government is still considering putting people on trial in Yugoslavia.
But the BBC's diplomatic correspondent, Barnaby Mason, says the tribunal, headed by chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte, has the prior claim on war crimes and other crimes against humanity.
He says tribunal officials say Yugoslavia must meet exactly the same conditions as Bosnia or Croatia, which under its new government is handing over suspects and giving full cooperation.
The Washington Post:In Yugoslavia, a Revolution in Limbo
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 11, 2000; Page A26
BELGRADE –– On the evening of Oct. 5, Yugoslav democracy activist Milan Stevanovic led a small team of commandos to capture a strategic Belgrade radio station from forces loyal to President Slobodan Milosevic. The following day, with the help of heavily armed reinforcements, the same men took over the state customs service, regarded by many as the financial pillar of the Milosevic government.
The logical next step, Stevanovic recalls thinking, was the arrest of Milosevic himself. This was a man who had been indicted for war crimes by an international tribunal and had just attempted to steal a democratic election. Stevanovic says he spent much of Oct. 6 waiting for the order. The decision rested with a crisis committee of opposition leaders that was effectively running the country.
The order never came.
"It was a big mistake," says Stevanovic, a Belgrade marketing executive responsible for shaping the anti-Milosevic propaganda message during the late summer election campaign. "The population voted for a change of system, not just a change of government."
Yugoslavia's newly elected president, Vojislav Kostunica, strongly disagrees. The Serbian people, he says, are tired of "radical" solutions to the country's problems. They crave peace and stability and democratic gradualism. He acknowledges he has been labeled a procrastinator, but insists that time will prove him right. "One should have patience," he says.
A month after the street uprising that forced Milosevic to recognize his Sept. 24 election defeat, Yugoslavia's democratic revolution is in a state of limbo and self-questioning. There are those who would like to push forward much faster, revealing the "crimes" of the Milosevic era immediately for all to see. And there are those--led by Kostunica--who reject the whole idea of revolutionary upheaval.
In the meantime, groups in the ruling coalition have formed informal alliances with rival wings of the police and armed forces, some of which were implicated in war crimes during Yugoslavia's decade of ethnic conflict.
The result is a confused political situation in which power is effectively shared among Kostunica, his frequently squabbling coalition allies and erstwhile Milosevic supporters.
And there are plenty of that last group. The commander of the Yugoslav army is a former Milosevic associate, as are the newly appointed Yugoslav prime minister, the president of Serbia and the head of the Serbian secret police. (The republics of Serbia and Montenegro are all that is left of the rump Yugoslav federation, following the secession in the early 1990s of Slovenia, Bosnia, Croatia and Macedonia.)
The next step in this multistage revolution is set for Dec. 23, when parliamentary elections are scheduled in Serbia. The political parties, all 18 of them, that backed Kostunica for Yugoslav president say they will campaign in the Serbian election as a united coalition under the banner of DOS, which stands for Democratic Opposition of Serbia. But few expect DOS to survive intact for very long after the election.
"We disagree on everything with the exception of two key points," said a DOS strategist, who asked to remain anonymous. "One, Milosevic had to go. And two, in order to fully rid ourselves of Milosevic and his remaining supporters, DOS has to stay together, at least through the Serbian elections."
The ideological spectrum within DOS ranges from the conservative Serbian nationalism of Kostunica to the liberal, pro-Western views of the party headed by Zoran Djindjic. Djindjic's party has the strongest organizational base, with hundreds of branches around the country.
But Kostunica is way ahead of Djindjic in the opinion polls, with a current approval rating of more than 80 percent. During the Yugoslav presidential campaign in September, Djindjic recognized that Kostunica had the best chance of defeating Milosevic and agreed to serve as the DOS campaign manager. But tensions between the two men persist.
The strongest disagreements within DOS have concerned the security services, and particularly the Serbian secret police, which continues to be led by a Milosevic appointee, Rade Markovic. Djindjic supporters have accused Markovic of being behind a string of murders and kidnappings, including the April 1999 killing of an independent newspaper publisher, Slavko Curuvija. They allege that the secret police engaged in a wide variety of dirty tricks on behalf of Milosevic, including tapping the phones of political opponents and overseeing a huge smuggling network.
Kostunica has rejected demands from Djindjic and other DOS leaders for Markovic's immediate removal from office. The president explained in an interview that he was afraid of opening "a Pandora's box" and preferred to wait until a new Serbian government had been formed after the Dec. 23 election.
"We need a government that will deal in a very principled way with that problem, and how to control that service," he said. "To do so now [before the election] would be very unsafe."
Some analysts said Kostunica sees Markovic as a political counterweight to pro-Djindjic elements in the security forces. Such people include General Mihajlo Ulemek, commander of the Special Operations Unit, alleged by Western human rights groups to have committed atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. Ulemek himself is better known by his assumed wartime name, Legija, or Legion, which he acquired as a result of service in the French Foreign Legion.
According to several sources, Ulemek approached Djindjic in the days leading up to the Oct. 5 street demonstrations that finally toppled Milosevic. He promised that he would not allow his troops to be used to break up the street protests, and would oppose any move by the army to crush the demonstrations. Djindjic aides now speak admiringly of Ulemek and his Red Berets as people who can still perform a valuable service to the Yugoslav state and need to be "protected" from retaliation by Markovic.
The ability of people like Markovic and Ulemek to survive Milosevic's overthrow and find new patrons in DOS is a bad sign, said Sead Spahovic, a co-minister of justice of Serbia who was nominated by the Serbian Renewal Movement, which refused to join DOS. "Markovic symbolizes the essence of what is left of the Milosevic regime," he said. "As long as people like him are around, we are not going to solve the mysteries of the past few years."
Still, Kostunica and his camp contend that the events of Oct. 5-6 set in motion democratic change that is irreversible. Already, in cities and towns all over Serbia, workers and pro-democracy activists are ousting Milosevic allies from their positions. Truth commissions are being formed to investigate the corruption and skulduggery of the Milosevic years, a process that could end with the arrest and trial of Milosevic himself.
But the pessimistic view is that the old order, even without Milosevic at its head, could adapt itself to the new, and undermine Serbia's new democracy. In an interview last week with the Belgrade weekly Vreme, Djindjic compared the Milosevic government to a hydra-headed monster that has been shattered into dozens of component parts, each of which is capable of functioning autonomously, without direction from above.
Jail improvements promised amid riots
Nis: Serbia's new authorities vowed immediate action to improve living conditions at run-down jails in an effort to end a spreading prison revolt, which entered its third day yesterday.
Mr Dragan Subasic, co-Minister of Justice in the transitional Serbian Government, said emergency funds would be provided for three jails where riots have broken out among prisoners demanding better living conditions and an amnesty.
Speaking after visits to the prisons, he also promised that the Government would prepare an amnesty law if the protests ended, though he gave no details.
"Living conditions are far from satisfactory in all three prisons we visited," he said, after talks with inmates in the prison in the southern city of Nis.
"The main reason for that is the general poverty. Not a single prison hospital has drugs, and the prison management is not able to provide sufficient food."
Special Justice Ministry commissions would be formed to inspect Serbian prisons and to look into possible abuse of positions by senior prison officials, Mr Subasic said.
Unrest spread to a third prison when hundreds of inmates rioted at a jail near Pozarevac, the home town of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
Inmates of Sremska Mitrovica prison, in northern Serbia, launched a revolt on Sunday night, and on Monday a prison in Nis erupted with violent protests.
The prison revolts added to the long list of woes needing urgent attention from the pro-democracy alliance backing Yugoslavia's new President, Mr Vojislav Kostunica, who took office a month ago after defeating Milosevic in elections.
At the United Nations in New York, the Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, issued a statement urging the new Government "to take all necessary measures to ensure the security and well-being of all prisoners and, in particular, the Kosovo Albanian detainees".
One Nis inmate died in hospital yesterday after falling from a prison roof. Two prisoners and a guard were injured in Pozarevac, Beta news agency said.
In Nis, 35-year-old Bosiljka, who gave only her first name, said she and three other women had been evacuated from prison custody yesterday. She said she had been hiding in the dark all night, fearing rape.
"There are wounded people in there," she said. "I never saw anything like this even in the movies; everything was on fire last night. I saw a man who had his ear cut severely because he refused to join the rebellion." The moderate ethnic Albanian leader Dr Ibrahim Rugova has urged Western governments and Belgrade to recognise Kosovo's independence from Yugoslavia, saying it would settle tensions in the region.
Associated Press
The New York Times: Marks Only in Montenegro
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
PODGORICA, Yugoslavia, Nov. 9 — Montenegro will stop using the Yugoslav dinar next week, ending a dual-currency system in which both the dinar and the German mark were used. The republic, Serbia's often reluctant junior partner in the remnants of the old Yugoslavia, decided last week to set up its own central bank but chose not to issue currency. Accounts and cash will be converted at a rate of 36 dinars to the mark, officials said.
Kostunica seeks Yugoslav membership in Council of Europe
STRASBOURG, Nov 9 (AFP) -
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica sought membership Thursday for his country in the 41-nation Council of Europe, the latest step to pull Belgrade out of international isolation.
He was to put his case to a meeting of the Council's foreign ministers arguing for Belgrade's admittance now that Yugoslavia is back on a democratic path after the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic.
The foreign ministers are also considering requests for membership from Armenia and Azerbaijan in the body which focuses mostly on human rights and social affairs.
Later in the day, Kostunica will meet members of the Council's parliament.
Since taking power in Belgrade last month, Kostunica has already managed to recover Yugoslavia's seat at the United Nations and on Friday the country will be officially admitted to membership of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
He has also met the 15 leaders of the European Union who issued a special invitation to him to attend their meeting last month in Biarritz, southwest France.
The Council of Europe was created as the first major pan-European institution following World War II.
But it has since seen its influence wane as other, more politically powerful, organisations entered the breach.
Although eclipsed in sheer importance by the European Union, NATO and the European Commission, the Council has regained much of its prestige and a major role in the continent since the collapse of the Soviet bloc and absorption in the Council's ranks of eastern and central European states.
A summit of 10 western European countries agreed to form the Council in London on May 5, 1949.
The aim was to reinforce cooperation in areas linked to the continent's common heritage and "economic and social progress" -- as the first article of the Council's statute proclaimed -- but the organisation made quick inroads in areas such as human rights and social protection.
The European Convention on Human Rights, drawn up by the Council in 1950, provided the basis for all later initiatives on the issues, including that of a European Court of Human Rights, established in 1959. A parallel convention known as the European Social Charter was signed in 1961.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the council's work has been reinvigorated by a tide of new membership from eastern and central Europe, enabling the organisation to focus its attention on sharing sound democratic practice and tips for restructuring moribund public sectors.
Have a Seat : Yugoslavia Joins the UN
By Brian Pozun
Nov 10, 2000 -- (Central Europe Review) On Wednesday 1 November, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRJ) became the newest member of the United Nations (UN). Yugoslav President Vojislav Koštunica sent a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan last Friday, formally requesting membership for Yugoslavia, and the international community—reportedly under pressure from US Permanent Representative Richard Holbrooke—jumped into action.
On Wednesday, just five days after the request, the Permanent Representative of France introduced a draft resolution concerning the formal application of Yugoslavia for membership, supported by all members of the Security Council, as well as the other successor states to the former Yugoslavia. The General Assembly passed the resolution unanimously without discussion. The flag of the former Yugoslavia, which had flown in front of UN Headquarters in New York since 1945, was lowered at the end of the General Assembly session and the flag of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was hoisted in its stead.
Yugoslavia and the United Nations
In 1945, the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) was a founding member of the United Nations. In 1992, after the fall of the joint state, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina (BiH) and Macedonia all joined the UN as new members, while Slobodan Miloševic insisted that his Yugoslavia was the only legal successor to the old SFRJ and thus had no need to apply for a new membership.
In 1992, although the General Assembly decided that the FRJ was not able to maintain the seat of the SFRJ and had to submit a new application, Yugoslavia was permitted to continue to maintain representation at the UN and to receive and circulate documents. The FRJ Mission to the UN was, however, led by a Charge d'Affaires instead of a Permanent Representative, since a Permanent Representative would have to present credentials to the Secretary General, who would not have been able to accept them.
Koštunica's decision to seek a new membership also follows several letters to the General Assembly by Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia demanding that the FRJ be excluded from the United Nations until it submits a membership application. In recent months, United States Permanent Representative Richard Holbrooke echoed those demands.
Implications for the successor states
A new seat at the UN for the FRJ is of great importance for Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia, since it clearly shows Koštunica's Yugoslavia has backed down from the position that the FRJ is the sole legal successor to the former, pre-1991 Yugoslavia. This paves the way for resolutions to issues related to the collapse of the former Yugoslavia that have been deadlocked for a decade.
The five states should now be able to make progress in talks to divide the assets and debts of their former joint state. Talks had begun in Brussels in 1992, but the FRJ stance precluded any agreement. Slovenia recalled its representation to those negotiations six years into the process, in 1998, in frustration.
The assets of the SFRJ may amount to as much as USD 100 billion. This includes assets held by federal bodies, such as the National Bank, JAT national airlines and the People's Army, as well as embassies around the world and other international property. The gold and foreign currency reserves of the SFRJ would also be divided amongst the five countries. The SFRJ's debts only amount to some USD 17 billion. It was the decision of the Contact Group for the Former Yugoslavia that all five successor states would get a share of the assets (and debts) as they stood at the end of 1990; however, that may be revised given that the assets may have accrued more value in the interim.
Diplomatic relations after a decade?
Croatia established loose diplomatic relations with the FRJ in 1996, but like Bosnia-Hercegovina, Slovenia has no diplomatic relations with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. This situation has made it impossible for Slovenia to collect tax monies owed to it, among other relatively minor problems, but it has also created a situation disturbing to the Slovene public: with no diplomatic relations, the Slovene government can do nothing to help Slovene citizens accused of crimes or imprisoned in Yugoslavia.
This was highlighted in early August, when two Slovene citizens were arrested in Montenegro. While one was released after three days, the other was held in custody for several days awaiting trial for photographing sensitive military objects. Fortunately, he received only a light sentence. Both returned to Slovenia about 20 days after the initial arrest.
Slovene Foreign Minister Lojze Peterle gave a press conference on Thursday where he said that he is pleased with Yugoslavia's new membership in the UN, but that this does not affect Slovenia's relations with Montenegro. In recent months, Slovenia has emerged as a staunch supporter of Podgorica in the face of Belgrade. Peterle also said, however, that the government of Slovenia has named a special representative to assist with humanitarian aid to Belgrade.
Bosnian Permanent Representative to the UN Mohamed Saèirbej addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday and said that his country was one of the many co-sponsors of the draft resolution, even though the FRJ must co-operate fully with the International Tribunal at the Hague. BiH, however, believes that this should be a prerequisite for FRJ membership in the UN.
The Permanent Representative of Croatia to the UN, Ivan Simonoviè, also addressed the General Assembly on Thursday, and reiterated Saèirbej's concerns about Yugoslav co-operation with the Tribunal.
Regardless of the concerns, Yugoslavia becoming a new member of the UN can only be seen as a huge step forward for regional stability. When the Stability Pact for Southeastern Europe was created last year, it was understood that no real stability could be created in the Balkans without Yugoslavia. Now, with talk of the FRJ becoming a member of the Pact, it seems that, while real stability may be generations away, the first important steps are being made.
Real diplomatic relations among the successor states to the Former Yugoslavia are of tremendous importance to even the average citizen of those states, and the resolution of the open questions surrounding the collapse of the former federation would automatically create a significantly higher degree of stability in the Balkans.
France Names Ambassador for Yugoslavia
PARIS, Nov 9, 2000 -- (Reuters) France effectively resumed diplomatic relations with Yugoslavia on Wednesday by nominating a new ambassador to Belgrade.
Yugoslavia broke ties with France during last year's NATO air war but the recent downfall of president Slobodan Milosevic has opened the way for a return to normality.
French government ministers agreed at a cabinet meeting to appoint Balkan expert Gabriel Keller to head France's diplomatic mission to Yugoslavia, saying that it was now up to Belgrade to approve the choice.
"This proposed nomination marks the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Paris and Belgrade," government spokesman Jean-Jack Queyranne told reporters.
France and Yugoslavia have traditionally had close ties and French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine was one of the first western European ministers to travel to Belgrade last month after Vojislav Kostunica replaced Milosevic as president.
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Croatia Looks to Yugoslav Market after 10 Years
ZAGREB, Nov 9, 2000 -- (Reuters) Representatives of some 150 Croatian companies will visit Yugoslavia next week, as former foes rush to establish economic ties after 10 years of wars and instability, the Croatian Chamber of Economy said on Wednesday
Chamber head Nadan Vidosevic will hold talks with his counterpart Milutin Cirovic about opening representative offices in Zagreb and Belgrade, it said in a statement.
The highlight of the trip will be a "match-making" event on November 16 in Belgrade, where Croatian businessmen will have an opportunity to meet their potential partners from Serbia.
The warm-up in relations comes after Serbia's long-time dictator Slobodan Milosevic - widely seen as the main culprit for a decade of wars and misery in the Balkans - stepped down last month among popular protest.
Milosevic yielded power to Western-oriented reformist Vojislav Kostunica, whose opening remarks were received with cautious optimism in Zagreb.
But many top Croatian companies made clear they were very interested in returning to the familiar Yugoslav market of more than 10 million people, which is at their doorstep.
Most enthusiastic are top flight companies, such as drugs firm Pliva and food group Podravka, whose brands are widely recognized in the neighboring country.
Oil and gas group Ina and oil pipeline operator Janaf were the first to say they could supply energy-strapped Yugoslav market with oil derivatives and crude.
Ina owns a network of 187 petrol stations and seven storage facilities in Serbia, which were expropriated in 1990. It still hopes to get them back through succession talks, due to start soon after years of blockade by Belgrade.
OPTIMISTIC SCENARIO
Croatia was a republic of the federal Yugoslavia before the federation's violent break-up in 1991, and its economy never quite recovered from the loss of the common market.
Croatian exports to Yugoslavia rose fivefold to USD 70 million in the first nine months of the year, with imports growing at a much slower pace of 25 percent to USD 18 million.
But before trade picks up in earnest, the two countries will have to remove a number of obstacles ranging from highly sensitive political issues to merely technical ones.
First and foremost, Zagreb expects an official apology for what is said were crimes Yugoslav troops committed during the 1991-95 war.
Then there is the potentially explosive issue of dividing the property of the former federation, including the former central bank gold reserves, embassies abroad and access to former government archives.
Finally, the neighbors will have to find ways of lowering extremely high trade barriers with duties currently ranging from 50 to 100 percent for most products, according to the economy ministry.
They will also have to re-establish a mutual payments system, which does not function at the moment. Firms trade on a cash basis.
Economy Minister Goranko Fizulic recently said Croatia's exports to Yugoslavia could surge to USD 1 billion in the next two to five years.
He based this optimistic prediction on a simple calculation that exports to Bosnia - another former Yugoslav republic half the size of and much poorer than Serbia - grew in recent years to more than USD 500 million.
If this scenario takes place, Serbia will once again become Croatia's Number One export market, topping long-term partners such as Italy, Germany and Slovenia.
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Serb Protests Hit 2 More Prisons
By DRAGAN ILIC, Associated Press Writer ,Wednesday November 8
NIS, Yugoslavia (AP) - Protests by Serb inmates spread Wednesday to two more prisons despite government promises to improve conditions and reduce some of their terms as part of a proposed amnesty law that originally was to apply mostly to ethnic Albanians.
Unlike in previous days, when inmates rioted, burning buildings and reportedly raping female inmates at one facility, Wednesday was quiet. Although prisoners still roamed outside their cells at Sremska Mitrovica, Nis and Pozarevac, and guards were forced to remain outside the prisons, there was no violence reported in the fourth day of the protests.
However, hundreds of inmates at Padinska Skela prison just outside Belgrade and at a juvenile detention center in the central Serbian town of Valjevo joined in Wednesday, refusing to perform work assignments and in some cases declaring hunger strikes to back protesters' demands.
Three days of rioting left at least one prisoner dead, an unspecified number of people injured, and several buildings damaged by fire. There were also allegations of rape at the Nis prison. Justice ministry and corrections officials have not commented on the allegations.
Ahead of crucial elections in Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic, the unrest presented another challenge to the new Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica (news - web sites), whose government is faced with the consequences of 13 years of authoritarian rule, corruption and mismanagement by Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites), his predecessor.
Whoever controls Serbia effectively controls Yugoslavia. Although Kostunica supporters are the overwhelming favorites six weeks ahead of the Dec. 23 parliamentary vote, the prison unrest could bolster the popularity of Milosevic's Socialists, who argue that anarchy is spreading under Kostunica.
In talks with the convicts, Dragan Subasic, one of three justice ministers in Serbia's new government, said the ministers pledged to ``form a special committee which will carry out inspection in all prisons,'' and look into allegations about ``the obviously inhumane living conditions.''
The unrest was triggered last week in part by reports that authorities were considering amnesty for about 900 ethnic Albanian prisoners, two-thirds of them jailed on charges of terrorism during the government crackdown on their independence movement in Serbia's southern province of Kosovo.
Angered by what they perceived as discrimination, Serb convicts started rioting, taking control of the detention facilities, amid fears their violence would target ethnic Albanian convicts. Government officials, however, said the ethnic Albanian and Serb convicts were together, negotiating as one group in the talks with the authorities.
Subasic also said that provided there is no more violence, authorities would in coming days look into one of the prisoners' demands - expanding the amnesty law to include sentence reductions for some crimes by a third for first-time offenders and almost a third for multiple offenders.
The amnesty law would be adopted when the new Serbian parliament is formed, following the parliamentary elections.
Subasic confirmed the prisoners had been given extremely low-quality food, were frequently mistreated by some prison guards, and that health care in the prisons was virtually nonexistent.
He said that Trivun Ivkovic, chief warden of the prison in Sremska Mitrovica, had been arrested. Inmates had also demanded dismissals of corrections officials appointed under former Milosevic, accusing them of corruption.
In New York, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the Yugoslav government ``to take all necessary measures to ensure the security and well-being of all prisoners, and in particular, the Kosovo Albanian detainees,'' a U.N. spokesman said.
Guardian:Inmates Resent Milosevic Regime
Thursday November 9, 2000
SREMSKA MITROVICA,Yugoslavia (AP) - They're doing time for murder, armed robbery and other violent crimes. But the inmates at the core of prison riots that threatened Yugoslavia's new pro-democracy government with anarchy say the real criminals still haven't been punished.
And it isn't difficult to know whom they're talking about. Like most Serbians, the thousands of inmates who rioted demanding reduced sentences and better conditions say the real bad guys were linked to the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, the ousted strongman-president.
``We are guilty,'' declared Milan Jeremic, one of those who negotiated the convicts' demands. ``But we are small fish, compared to the real criminals and Mafiosi, who robbed the whole nation.''
Jeremic was one of the leaders of the prisoners' uprising that started at Sremska Mitrovica prison Sunday. Over the next three days it spread to four other correctional centers, including some of the biggest detention centers in Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.
Buildings were burned, shots fired, rapes reported and one person killed. The violence ended early Wednesday after government negotiators agreed to the main demands in exchange for a pledge of a return to normality.
Although inmates continued to have the run of the prisons, plans were to slowly permit guards back in, starting Friday, the inmates said. If that happened, Serbia's justice ministry pledged to expand a law originally meant to grant amnesty to ethnic Albanian political prisoners jailed during the Kosovo conflict. It would now include sentence reductions for Serbs jailed for some types of nonpolitical crimes.
Resentment of Milosevic and his cronies grew during his 13 years in power, with growing perceptions that his clique was growing richer even as poverty enveloped Serbia because of his ruinous economic policies and the Balkan wars he fomented.
With Milosevic's ouster last month after he lost presidential elections, the administration of his successor, Vojislav Kostunica, has started investigations against Milosevic, his family and friends on suspicion they bilked the country of billions of dollars. Other close associates are suspected of involvement in political murders.
No wonder that Jeremic and his pals feel they deserve some consideration.
``We don't ask to be released,'' said Jeremic, as other grim-faced convicts nodded, arms crossed over beefy chests clad in prison garb of rough homespun wool. ``But we committed crimes in a regime where ... the state of law didn't exist.
``We ask for just a bit of forgiveness.''
He and others detailed mindless torture under chief warden Trivun Ivkovic, a 1994 Milosevic appointee arrested Wednesday. One inmate, chained to his bed for 12 days for fighting, tried to bite through his wrists as soon as he was unlocked, in a desperate suicide bid, said convict Dragan Drovnjik.
Inmate Sasa Jokic said guards swung baseball bats at will at prisoners. Food was horrid, medical care next to nonexistent.
Ivkovic was fired soon after Kostunica took office last month, raising hopes that conditions would soon improve, ``but even afterward, the mistreatment continued,'' said Jokic's buddy, Dragan Dimitrovic. That's when ringleaders decided to riot.
Despite the calm at Sremska Mitrovica, Nis and Pozarevac, the protests were not over. Hundreds of inmates at Padinska Skela prison just outside Belgrade and at a juvenile detention center in the central Serbian town of Valjevo joined in Wednesday, refusing to go on work detail and in some cases declaring hunger strikes.
Ahead of crucial elections in Serbia, the unrest presented a new challenge to Kostunica. His administration must move carefully, allowing the release of some frustration pent up under Milosevic's rule, without letting the country slide into anarchy.
Although Kostunica and his supporters control the federal government, whoever controls Serbia effectively controls Yugoslavia. While Kostunica supporters are the overwhelming favorites six weeks ahead of the Dec. 23 vote, the prison unrest could bolster the popularity of Milosevic's Socialists, who argue that lawlessness is spreading under Kostunica.
The unrest was triggered last week in part by reports that authorities were considering amnesty for about 900 Kosovo Albanian prisoners, two-thirds of them jailed on charges of terrorism during the government crackdown on their independence movement in Serbia's southern province of Kosovo. Angered Serb convicts claimed discrimination.
Serbian Prime Minister in Car Crash that Kills One
BELGRADE, Nov 9, 2000 -- (Agence France Presse) Serbian Prime Minister Milomir Minic, an ally of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic, avoided injuries when his vehicle collided with another car whose driver died of his wounds, Belgrade's Vecernje Novosti newspaper reported in its Thursday issue.
Minic suffered no injuries, nor did his driver and another passenger in his BMW, but Goran Jovanovic, the driver of the other car, died of wounds on the way to the hospital, the daily said, quoting an investigative judge.
On October 24, Minic was elected Prime Minister in the Serbian power-sharing interim government which is to rule Serbia until early elections set for December.
U.S. Won't Wait On Belgrade Repairs To Restore Ties
WASHINGTON, Nov 9, 2000 -- (Reuters) The United States expects to restore relations with Yugoslavia "very soon" and will not wait until it fixes up its damaged embassy because that could take several months, the State Department said on Wednesday.
The United States sent inspectors to look at the Belgrade building in the hope that diplomats could start working there as soon as the two countries restore ties.
But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that would not be possible. "The old chancery is not currently in a physical condition to serve as a working office. We expect it will be several months before the building can serve as fully functioning embassy," he said.
"But we continue to proceed with the procedures that are involved in reestablishing relations... and we expect to formally establish relations very soon," he told a briefing.
Yugoslavia broke off relations with the United States in March 1999 after NATO planes attacked Yugoslav targets in the war over the province of Kosovo.
Newly elected Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, who defeated Slobodan Milosevic in presidential elections in September, has agreed to restore relations.
Boucher said the United States was rotating diplomats in and out of Belgrade from its embassy in the Hungarian capital Budapest. They have found places to work in Belgrade.
Fire, Shooting in Serbian Prison
By DRAGAN ILIC, Associated Press Writer
NIS, Yugoslavia (AP) - Fire and shooting broke out Tuesday in one of three Serbian prisons where inmates rioted to demand better treatment as well as amnesty for some convictions, while riot police sealed off another facility as inmates jeered them from rooftops.
The spreading unrest was the newest demonstration of the problems facing the government of the new president, Vojislav Kostunica (news - web sites), as he tries to prevent the pent-up discontent that accumulated under the past regime from spilling over into anarchy.
Spectators who gathered outside the prison in Pozarevac, east of Belgrade, saw flames shooting from at least four buildings inside the compound and heard gunfire immediately afterward. The fires appeared to have burned out or been doused several hours later and the situation appeared calm.
The prison's warden, Stipe Marusic, said guards shot in the air. But some of the inmates told reporters contacted by telephone that they were shot at and that several prisoners were injured - at least two seriously.
Police vans were seen driving overnight into the prison - one of the largest in Europe - in the city about 80 miles east of Belgrade.
The riots at Pozarevac, Nis and Sremska Mitrovica appear linked by common demands focusing on an end to alleged ill treatment and inclusion of Serbs jailed for some criminal activities into a proposed amnesty law that would free Kosovo Albanian political prisoners who had been put behind bars under former President Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites).
It was not disclosed which crimes the inmates wanted covered in an amnesty.
The amnesty law, suggested by Kostunica, is still at the discussion stage. It would affect Kosovo Albanians arrested for activity in or support of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army.
At Pozarevac, witnesses saw inmates perched on the prison's rooftops, some brandishing signs: ``We go out, JUL goes in.'' They were alluding to the neo-communist Yugoslav Left party that ruled Yugoslavia together with Milosevic's Socialists until the former president lost elections and was then toppled in a revolt on Oct. 5.
Other signs hoisted by inmates since the unrest began Sunday have expressed support for Kostunica, in an indication that backing for his pro-democracy policies and rejection of the Milosevic era extends deep into all segments of Serbian society.
Still, the unrest could hurt Kostunica and his supporters.
They now control government on the federal level but not in the two Yugoslav republics. With elections in Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic, only six weeks away, the riots give their pro-Milosevic opponents fresh ammunition in allegations that the new authorities are unable to deal with growing anarchy that would not have been tolerated under Milosevic.
Although opinion polls now project a solid victory for Kostunica's Democratic Opposition of Serbia in the Dec. 23 elections, his camp is worried that their support could erode until then, as pro-democracy euphoria is replaced by disenchantment over price hikes, growing energy shortages and other hardships. While the economy was destroyed under Milosevic, there is fear that his successors will harvest the blame.
In the southern city of Nis, hundreds of helmeted riot police, toting submachine guns, took up positions around the prison Tuesday, while hundreds of jeering inmates climbed to the rooftops inside the compound.
The prisoners had earlier rejected an offer to meet with chief warden Miodrag Djordjevic and other prison officials, and said they would wait instead for senior justice ministry officials to negotiate on demands that they be included in the proposed amnesty for Kosovo Albanian prisoners.
About 1,000 inmates at Nis began a hunger strike Monday in a show of solidarity with Serbian prisoners in the northern city of Sremska Mitrovica. The inmates in Sremska Mitrovica began rioting late Sunday; they claimed they were beaten by guards and demanded an expansion of the proposed amnesty law.
Police stormed the prison in Nis late Monday, firing tear gas in an attempt to contain the riot, but they withdrew as Serbian inmates burned their cells and took to rooftops.
One prisoner, 30-year-old Vasilije Kujovic, slipped and fell from a rooftop early Tuesday. He later died a hospital in the southern city of Nis after suffering brain damage, the state Tanjug news agency reported.
Later, three more inmates, suffering minor injuries from the overnight rioting, walked out of the prison compound and were driven away by ambulances.
An ethnic Albanian inmate who spoke to The Associated Press by telephone said all 300 Albanian prisoners in the prison were locked in a separate block, sitting in the dark because the electricity had been turned off. The inmate, who did not give his name for fear of reprisal, said the Serbs had asked them to join the riot but that they declined.
Beyond the demand that the proposed amnesty law be expanded to cover Serbs doing time for certain criminal offenses, the Nis inmates also wanted jail terms in general to be reduced and prison management replaced.
The Pozarevac unrest began with almost 200 prisoners starting a hunger strike Monday, said the Beta news agency. It did not specify their demands. By Tuesday all the Serbian inmates - about 900 - had joined in, said Beta. The prison also holds more than 300 ethnic Albanians.
Prison officials in Sremska Mitrovica, west of Belgrade, said ethnic Albanian political prisoners there were evacuated and taken to an undisclosed location, and three people were hospitalized with slight injuries.
The New York Times:Yugoslavs Bicker Over Army and Secret Police
By STEVEN ERLANGER
BELGRADE, Serbia, Nov. 7 — A bitter conflict has broken out between the new Yugoslav president, Vojislav Kostunica, and his political allies over the fate of the director of the Serbian secret police and the commander of the Yugoslav Army, both of whom were major pillars of the government of Slobodan Milosevic.
Mr. Kostunica, a constitutional scholar trying to consolidate his position, wants to keep the main instruments of state power under his control. He says he will retain the secret police commander, Radomir Markovic, and the army chief of staff, Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, at least for now.
But Mr. Kostunica's coalition allies, led by the Democratic Party leader, Zoran Djindjic, want them fired. They have put particular focus on Mr. Markovic, who they say is working with former President Milosevic to destabilize the country before the crucial Serbian parliamentary elections on Dec. 23.
The public squabble has limited the work of the temporary Serbian government at a time when sudden shortages of electrical power, price increases on basic foods and even uprisings in Serbian prisons have complicated the post-Milosevic period, leading to unproven accusations of organized destabilization by those loyal to the old government.
Mr. Milosevic's Socialists are struggling to redefine their party and find a new leader before the elections, and Mr. Kostunica and his allies remain widely popular.
Mr. Kostunica's own popularity has soared since his election, with recent opinion polls giving him a favorable rating of more than 85 percent. But the public splits within the coalition and the new uncertainties and struggles of daily life could undermine that popularity.
On one level the fight over Mr. Markovic is about the benefits and the dangers of Yugoslavia's self-limiting revolution, which has left in place many of the top officials appointed by Mr. Milosevic, especially those in charge of security, even if they are thought to have blood on their hands.
Is it less dangerous and destabilizing to leave them in place for now, as Mr. Kostunica believes, or to remove them, as some of his allies argue? Those allies include Mr. Djindjic and Momcilo Perisic, who once had General Pavkovic's job and knows something about the security forces.
Mr. Kostunica, his aides say, wants a duly elected government in Serbia, the larger part of Yugoslavia, before making significant changes, to preserve legality and the popular will. Mr. Markovic, for example, heads the Serbian state security agency, so legally Mr. Kostunica cannot fire him. His allies want Mr. Kostunica to agree to fire him anyway.
But Mr. Kostunica said in a weekend statement: "The hasty removal of people from leading positions in the state and the army undoubtedly runs counter to state interests, since it inevitably leads to destabilization of those very institutions and society as a whole and can endanger democratic change." He noted that neither the police nor the army had fought to save the Milosevic government.
Mr. Djindjic and others say that the momentum of the popular revolt that overthrew Mr. Milosevic on Oct. 5 is already ebbing, that Milosevic allies are regrouping and that the Serbian people want more rapid and fundamental changes in their government and their lives.
Mr. Djindjic has demanded that Mr. Kostunica explain his reasons for keeping Mr. Markovic and Mr. Pavkovic and argues that those members of the security forces who sided with the revolt are at risk now from an unchanged leadership.
"It is sure that Milosevic has his fingers in everything that is happening in the part of state security where Markovic is the boss," Mr. Djindjic said.
Mr. Perisic said that Mr. Markovic and Mr. Pavkovic "are protecting Milosevic and his interests," and that "if they are not removed, the police and the army will be destabilized," part of a general effort by Milosevic supporters to sabotage normal life, including electricity supplies and prices.
But on another crucial level, the battle is about who will control the army and the secret police and all of its files. How will those files be used and to what end, Mr. Kostunica asks, and who will name the successors to Mr. Markovic and General Pavkovic and have the best access to the secrets of the old government?
There have already been leaks from some of those files, of uncertain authenticity, intended to undermine Mr. Markovic's position and embarrass Mr. Kostunica.
One document purports to be a surveillance report on Slavko Curuvija, an anti-Milosevic publisher, from the day he was murdered, April 11, 1999, during the NATO bombing campaign. While it is widely believed that Mr. Curuvija was killed by the Milosevic government, probably by people working with state security, the document, even if authentic, proves only that surveillance ended before the murder.
More important, the files are presumed to be full of information damaging to most of the leaders of the democratic opposition, especially those like Mr. Djindjic, who has been a political and commercial player in Serbia for many years. Mr. Kostunica, who was a relatively marginal political figure and had no connection with Mr. Milosevic, is thought to have little to fear from the files.
Mr. Kostunica evidently does not want Mr. Djindjic to control the secret police or the files, while Mr. Djindjic and others in the opposition do not want the old leadership to control them, either.
On another, broader level, the struggle is over political power in the new Serbia. While Mr. Kostunica is the federal president, real power lies in Serbia, which makes up 95 percent of the country, with its tiny sister republic, Montenegro, accounting for the rest. That is why the Serbian elections on Dec. 23 matter so much.
Those around Mr. Kostunica need Mr. Djindjic and his well-organized party, which was the backbone of the anti-Milosevic coalition, but they do not trust him. They believe that Mr. Djindjic wants to control Serbia and be its prime minister, and that other political leaders, in particular the current deputy prime minister of the temporary Serbian government, Nebojsa Covic, would be a better choice.
Their view is that Mr. Djindjic, by making such an issue of Mr. Markovic, is trying to tie Mr. Kostunica to a defense of an indefensible part of the old government. While those around Mr. Kostunica insist that they have no illusions about Mr. Markovic and his efforts to save himself, they also say that he has behaved responsibly, offering help to the new Yugoslav president and not trying to blackmail anyone.
For the Serbian elections, the 18- party coalition that backed Mr. Kostunica, still known as the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, or DOS, will stay together and run a single list of candidates. The coalition wants Mr. Kostunica's name on the ballot, so the list would be called, "DOS — Vojislav Kostunica."
But officials close to the coalition say that Mr. Kostunica is not willing to allow his name and popularity to be used to bring Mr. Djindjic to power in Serbia, and that Mr. Kostunica is pushing for a list of candidates that will include more of his own party members and supporters.
The Christian Science Monitor:Bringing Milosevic to justice
By Ellen L. Lutz , NOVEMBER 8, 2000
MEDFORD, MASS.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica may have been swept into power by the strongly democratic yearnings of his people, but he now faces a host of daunting challenges, not the least of which is how to bring to justice the man who masterminded the "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia and Kosovo.
Slobodan Milosevic's victims and many human rights advocates fear that, notwithstanding his indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, Mr. Milosevic will escape justice because Yugoslavia or some other nation will grant him safe haven.
But Yugoslavia's new democrats have higher priorities than dealing immediately with Milosevic. They now are focused on consolidating their hold on government and rebuilding their country's desecrated political and economic institutions.
Whether a trial happens sooner or later, in Yugoslavia or at The Hague, victims and observers should have patience, because bringing Milosevic to justice is in everyone's interest. History shows that a thriving democracy with lasting peace can only be assured when crimes of the past are acknowledged and peoples' need for justice is met.
Even though Mr. Kostunica does not support The Hague tribunal, his administration chose not to "cut a deal" with Milosevic before driving him from power - even after Jiri Dienstbier, the UN human rights envoy for Yugoslavia, announced that he was in favor of granting immunity from prosecution in return for Milosevic's resignation.
Furthermore, Yugoslavia's new foreign minister, Goran Svilanovic, supports the formation of a truth commission of independent experts to investigate responsibility for crimes and the suffering of victims of all parties to the Yugoslav wars, and the opening of an office of the ICTY.
Significantly, Kostunica has not ruled out the possibility of trying Milosevic in Yugoslavia.
But Kostunica has his hands full trying to unify his country, and he doesn't want to alienate any of the constituencies he needs. Those who would rush Milosevic to justice ahead of the other priorities set by Kostunica need to imagine themselves in the new president's shoes before condemning his choices.
At the same time, demands for justice do not disappear with time, as evidenced in the recent upsurge in legal proceedings against Nazi survivors for crimes committed at the time of World War II. Whether Kostunica wants them to or not, those demands will assert themselves onto a democratic agenda and force their way up the priority list.
In time, they will supplant other priorities that he now puts on the front burner. This is what happened in Chile. From the day Augusto Pinochet ceded power, many Chileans called for his prosecution for human rights abuses. Anti-cipating this demand, Mr. Pinochet declared himself "senator for life," with accompanying amnesty from judicial prosecution.
But the longtime dictator's arrogant assumptions caught up with him; he failed to anticipate a dramatic shift in international norms in the 1990s. Following the creation of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and large-scale consensus to create a new International Criminal Court, self-amnesties lost their legitimacy.
Once European governments were willing to arrest Pinochet for crimes he committed in Chile, Chileans demanded the right to bring one of their own to justice. In August, a decade after Chile's return to democracy, the country's Supreme Court stunned the world by declaring that Pinochet, and many of his "amnestied" cadres, could be tried under Chilean law.
The pace of justice in Chile was painfully slow for victims and their families, as it may be in Yugoslavia. But Chile shows that patience pays off.
While the international community seeks to try Milosevic before an international tribunal, The Hague is a long way from Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav people may want to bring Milosevic to justice themselves for the full panoply of crimes he committed, including not only war crimes and crimes against humanity in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, but political fraud, corruption, and massive repression of his own citizens.
As Yugoslavia creates a new democracy, headed by a man whose reputation is founded on his respect for law and the independence of the judiciary, Milosevic's trial in Yugoslavia should not be rejected out of hand by the international community. Ultimately, justice is local. If it can be accomplished close to or where the crimes took place, and with genuine assurances of fairness and due process, then The Hague may not be the best forum. But in the tumult of transition, even that cannot be determined. Kostunica's current reluctance to do more than ensure that Milosevic is permanently politically disabled is understandable.
Peace and justice in Yugoslavia must go hand in hand if future abuses are to be prevented and an enduring democracy established. The Clinton administration's decision to lift sanctions while linking foreign aid to Yugoslavia's cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal reflects its respect for the complexity of the problems Kostunica is juggling and its recognition that democracy, peace, and justice are inextricably linked.
Kostunica needs the support, patience, and understanding of the United States - indeed, the international community - as he struggles to set Yugoslavia aright. At the same time, he must understand that if he sweeps justice under the rug, his efforts to secure lasting peace and democracy will be in vain.
Ellen L. Lutz is executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
Milosevic Eyed in Unlawful Building
Monday November 6 3:07 PM ET
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - It's unclear when, if ever, Slobodan Milosevic will be prosecuted on war crimes charges, but the former Yugoslav strongman is already entwined in legal action over far less serious allegations: He is accused of unlawful renovations on his house.
The Democratic Party , part of the 18-party alliance that runs the new Yugoslav government, said Monday that Milosevic has made contact - through his lawyer - with a Belgrade district authority that has started legal proceedings against him for construction at his residential complex.
Milosevic is not currently living at the house in question, a complex worth millions of dollars in Belgrade's richest neighborhood. He has taken refuge at a heavily guarded home nearby since he conceded defeat in the Sept. 24 election and stepped down in the face of mass protests.
When city building inspectors turned up at Milosevic's longtime residence last week, guards who identified themselves as Serbian police showed them what they claimed was a permit for the reconstruction - and showed them the door.
City officials had earlier said Belgrade authorities never issued a permit for the work, and the inspectors, who were turned away twice last week, issued an order requiring Milosevic to submit permits by Tuesday.
In a statement Monday, the Democratic Party praised Milosevic for responding to the allegations - but added a warning suggesting accusations of more serious wrongdoing are to come.
``The Democratic Party welcomes the fact that Milosevic has started respecting the law,'' it said. ``At the same time, we express hope that Milosevic will be equally cooperative in other lawsuits that Serbia intends to bring.''
Milosevic has been indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in connection with the Kosovo conflict. But the new president, Vojislav Kostunica has made it clear he does not intend to extradite Milosevic or other Serbs to the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands
Milosevic still could face trial at home for crimes allegedly committed during his 13-year rule.
The Independent:Belgrade to co-operate with war crimes tribunal
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
7 November 2000
Yugoslavia's new government moved yesterday to deepen diplomatic cooperation with the West, indicating that an office of The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) will open in Belgrade shortly.
"The date hasn't been set yet for the opening of an ICTY office, but it will happen soon," the Yugoslav Foreign Minister, Goran Svilanovic, said yesterday. "We should not and we cannot avoid facing either the results of the Balkan wars in the 1990s, or the accompanying responsibility for war crimes."
Mr Svilanovic also outlined plans for a "truth commission" in Yugoslavia to hear evidence in an effort to fully establish the deeds of the former regime.
The decision breaks one of the last taboos maintained by the ousted president Slobodan Milosevic: that there were no crimes against non-Serbs in the wars that broke up the former Yugoslavia. Milosevic propaganda presented Serbs as the sole victims of Croat, Muslim or Albanian aggression.
In effect the decision means that both ICTY and local experts will gather evidence on war crimes with the full cooperation of Belgrade. The war crimes tribunal has indicted Mr Milosevic and four of his top aides for atrocities committed in Kosovo.
Mr Svilanovic, a long-time human rights activist, belongs to the Civil Alliance, the legal brains of Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). The Alliance has been the most prominent anti-war party in Serbia since 1991: its leaders were constantly accused by the former regime as "disregarding Serbs as a nation" or being "anti-Serb".
Along with the new Yugoslav President, Vojislav Kostunica, Mr Svilanovic was among the rare opposition leaders who avoided contact with the Milosevic administration. He was sacked in 1998 from Belgrade's law school after he opposed a repressive university law imposed by Mr Milosevic's allies.
In a recent interview, Mr Kostunica described cooperation with ICTY as "unavoidable", saying it followed logically from the Dayton peace accords on Bosnia signed by Mr Milosevic. But he made it clear that Mr Milosevic's extradition to The Hague is not a priority yet
For the time being, the new Yugoslav administration is busy with the task of international reintegration. After being re-admitted to the UN last week, Yugoslavia is also set to rejoin the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). President Kostunica reapplied to the OSCE yesterday, eight years after Yugoslavia was expelled from the organisation.
Austrian Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero Waldner, whose country is chairing the OSCE at the moment, visited Belgrade yesterday and said the move represented "a very important day for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia".
For the first time in years, the OSCE will be allowed to monitor elections in Yugoslavia, Ms Ferrero Waldner said. Serbia is to have early parliamentary elections on 23 December.
Meanwhile, Mr Milosevic is also facing legal problems on much lesser scale: illegal reconstruction at his house. The DOS said yesterday that Mr Milosevic contacted through his lawyer a Belgrade district authority which has started legal proceedings against him for illegal work on his house in Belgrade's Dedinje district.
Plainclothes guards apparently loyal to the former Yugoslav president last Thursday turned away building inspectors attempting to investigate.
* Serbian inmates angry over alleged torture by prison guards and a possible amnesty for jailed ethnic Albanians only, rioted yesterday, forcing guards to retreat and call in policereinforcements. The riot, in one of Yugoslavia's largest prisons, began late on Sunday. Footage shown on Serbian TV showed an unidentified prisoner with head bandages complaining: "They used to beat us like horses."
The Guardian:Prison rebels Amnesty plan prompts riots at Serb jail
Special report: Serbia
Srdjan Ilic in Sremska Mitrovica
Tuesday November 7, 2000
Serb inmates angry about poor living conditions and a possible amnesty that would apply only to jailed ethnic Albanians held talks with justice ministry officials yesterday, after a riot that forced guards to pull back to the outer perimeters of their prison.
The riot, in the prison at Sremska Mitrovice, 50 miles northwest of Belgrade, began late on Sunday at one of the jail's three buildings. It spread early yesterday to the second and third buildings, where about 150 Kosovo Albanian prisoners are held.
The prison houses 1,300 inmates, including 50 foreigners and six prisoners on death row.
The Beta news agency reported that the prisoners were demanding that they be allowed to air their demands on state-run Serbian television.
The amnesty law, suggested by President Vojislav Kostunica, is still at the discussion stage. It would affect political prisoners, most of them Kosovo Albanians. More than 600 ethnic Albanians, arrested under former president Slobodan Milosevic, remain in detention on charges or convictions related to the fight for Kosovo's independence.
Dragan Subasic, one of three senior Serbian justice ministry officials negotiating with inmates, told the state Tanjug news agency yesterday that the "rebellion was under control," and that "more serious consequences were avoided".
He also said that the inmates were demanding that the new amnesty law be broadened to include prisoners who have committed some non-political crimes.
Unconfirmed reports said that the prisoners had set fire to the printing press and the carpentry workshop, as well as a cabinet containing inmate records. A prison security officer, Milorad Peric, denied earlier reports that that three or four inmates were injured in the riots.
Smoke was still seen rising from within the prison compound late yesterday as more riot police troops were deployed around the prison compound.
Some of the prisoners appeared to be brandishing iron bars as they stood near windows or on roofs.
LA Times: Yugoslavia Forms New Government in Bid to Rejoin Global Community
By DAVID HOLLEY, Times Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2000
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia--After eight hours of sometimes bitter wrangling, the Yugoslav parliament approved a new federal government Saturday in a key step toward ending this country's international isolation and consolidating democratic change under newly elected President Vojislav Kostunica.
New Prime Minister Zoran Zizic, who previously supported ousted President Slobodan Milosevic, told a joint session of parliament that the "return of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to the international community [while] keeping national and state dignity" will be the government's first priority.
Its other top goals, Zizic said, will be to quickly secure foreign economic and humanitarian aid; to improve relations between Serbia and Montenegro, the two republics that make up Yugoslavia; and to implement social, economic and legal reforms that will make Yugoslavia's formerly Communist system much more like those of West European countries.
The new government was formed by an unwieldy coalition of former rivals. It combines the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, an 18-party group that brought Kostunica to power, and two Montenegrin parties that had supported Milosevic: the Socialist People's Party and the Serbian National Party.
The two sides see a common interest in promoting orderly, constitutional change rather than a revolutionary overthrow of existing institutions, and both want quick acceptance of Yugoslavia back into the international community.
Kostunica's alliance received nine of the 16 ministerial posts. It named new Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic and also got the top spots in the police, justice, traffic, health, agriculture, telecommunications, sports and ethnic minorities ministries. New Defense Minister Slobodan Krapovic and six other ministers were chosen from the Socialist People's Party.
The coalition was needed to form a federal government because pro-independence parties that support Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic, a Milosevic rival, boycotted the Sept. 24 national presidential and parliamentary elections. That left all of the republic's parliamentary seats controlled by pro-Milosevic forces.
"We must use all institutions like this parliament to try to ensure peaceful transition, not to declare revolution and cancel these institutions," Democratic Party President Zoran Djindjic, a key leader in the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, said in an interview.
"We think we are strong enough to make this compromise, although it is very, very painful for us to be in government with former supporters--very, very enthusiastic supporters--of Milosevic," Djindjic said. "But we think the goal to bring this country back to Europe again is important enough to make this compromise."
Yugoslavia hopes to rejoin the International Monetary Fund in December, Djindjic added.
"This government needs to do many things rather quickly," said Zarko Korac, president of the Social Democratic Union, a part of the pro-Kostunica alliance. "There are huge electrical power cuts in Serbia. This is becoming a serious human and political problem. We have no money. The country's bankrupt, basically. The government has to fight on many fronts."
But Vojislav Seselj, leader of the ultranationalist Radical Party, blasted the new coalition as an unholy marriage of convenience.
"This is not the rule of continuity but the rule of compromise--between you from the Socialist People's Party who represent continuity, crime and corruption and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia as representatives of discontinuity and putsch," he declared.
Saturday's session, which lasted far longer than scheduled because of the fierce debate engendered mainly by the Radicals, was held in Serbia's parliament building because the federal parliament was looted and set ablaze during the Oct. 5 mass uprising that forced Milosevic to recognize Kostunica's electoral victory.
In his speech, Zizic, 49, who is also a vice president of the Socialist People's Party, repeatedly criticized "aggression" against Yugoslavia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a reference to NATO's 78-day bombing campaign last year to force Milosevic to end his repression of ethnic Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo. But Zizic still called for ties with NATO members.
"We will gradually move in the direction of restoring diplomatic relations with those European countries with which relations were interrupted by the NATO aggression on our country," he said. Yugoslavia, which rejoined the United Nations last week, is expected to restore diplomatic ties with the United States and some European countries within the next few weeks.
Zizic accused international peacekeeping forces and the U.N. administration in Kosovo of "support [for] the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Montenegrins and all non-Albanians conducted by the allegedly transformed Kosovo Liberation Army."
A majority of the estimated 200,000 Serbs who lived in Kosovo before the NATO bombing fled after a peacekeeping force entered last year, many of them together with the withdrawing Yugoslav army but others in subsequent weeks after a wave of revenge attacks on Serbs by ethnic Albanians.
Zizic said that cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, which has indicted Milosevic for war crimes, "is not a priority of the federal government to which it would subordinate any other tasks."
Independent: Yugoslavia may allow war crimes tribunal to move into Belgrade
By Misha Savic
6 November 2000
Yugoslavia could patch up diplomatic relations with the United States and major European powers in a week or two and start cooperating with the U.N. War Crimes tribunal, the country's new foreign minister said Sunday.
"It's only normal that we have close cooperation with the United States, with Russia," Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic told Beta news agency, one day after the new government was inaugurated.
Svilanovic, an ally of Yugoslavia's new President Vojislav Kostunica, also said relations could be restored within the next couple of weeks with countries who severed ties last year during NATO's air campaign, including the United States, Germany and Great Britain.
Following the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic, Kostunica has been struggling to end a decade of Yugoslavia's international isolation.
Svilanovic became the foreign minister in a parliamentary vote late Saturday when the country's first non–communist government in more than half a century, was sworn in. Kostunica's Serbia–based, 18–party DOS alliance and the Montenegro–based Socialist People's party make up the new Cabinet.
Restoring relations with Western countries, as well as speeding up privatisation and carrying out reforms by European Union standards, are also goals of the country's new Prime Minister Zoran Zizic. He also pledged to respect international obligations, such as peace deals for Bosnia and Kosovo, signed by Milosevic.
Milosevic and three of his associates were indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal at The Hague for alleged atrocities committed in Kosovo.
While both Kostunica and Zizic have expressed skepticism about the court's impartiality and ruled out immediate extraditions of the suspects, Svilanovic said the country must take responsibility for war crimes.
"We cannot and must not avoid to face the consequences of the war," he said. "We need to do everything to reveal to our public everything that was done, whether in the name of alleged Serb national interest or against Serbs."
He suggested the tribunal could reopen an office in Belgrade to help war crimes investigators in gathering evidence, as well as the formation of a truth commission for Kosovo, similar to the one in South Africa.
In addition he said Yugoslav embassies will get new personnel, including ambassadors in key places, such as the U.N. headquarters in New York and Moscow, where Milosevic's brother Borislav has held the post.
Shortly after its inauguration late Saturday, the Cabinet held its first meeting in the early hours Sunday. Vice prime minister Miroljub Labus said ministers were busy "formulating economic policy and defining budgets for the next year."
Svilanovic also announced efforts toward full diplomatic relations with the former Yugoslav republics, especially with Slovenia and Bosnia–Herzegovina, that seceded from the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
The new Cabinet also said it would try "harmonise" relations internally, between Serbia and Montenegro, Yugoslavia's two remaining republics which each have their own government.
Montenegro's government is controlled by pro–independence parties which boycotted the recent federal elections, demanding constitutional changes to make the federation a loose union of virtually sovereign Serbia and Montenegro.
The ruling parties in Montenegro severed most ties with the central government in Belgrade by 1998, protesting against Milosevic's autocratic rule. They have now praised Kostunica's democratic credentials, but reiterated Sunday that they intend to ignore decisions made by the federal government.
Independent: Reformists cement hold on Yugoslavian cabinet
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
6 November 2000
For the first time in 55 years, Yugoslavia has a non-communist dominated government, strengthening the reformist administration of President Vojislav Kostunica.
The formation on Saturday night of the new 16-member cabinet cemented the electoral victory of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) political coalition, whose sympathisers took to the streets last month to force Slobodan Milosevic to admit his defeat in the country's presidential elections.
DOS now holds nine of the 16 portfolios in the new cabinet, including the key ministries of economics, foreign affairs and the interior. The seven other portfolios, including that of prime minister, are held by the Montenegrin Socialist People's Party (SNP), once a staunch Milosevic ally. The new Yugoslav Prime Minister is Zoran Zizic, 47, who promised to keep following the reformist programme of DOS, "in whom the people put their trust" in the September elections.
The post of Deputy Prime Minister went to Miroljub Labus, 53, an economist who has worked in the United States. He belongs to the think-tank responsible for drawing up the DOS economic programme. The new Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic, 37, is a long-time human rights activist, a lawyer by education. He attended last week's ceremony in New York where federal Yugoslavia was readmitted to the United Nations.
Mr Svilanovic told reporters that he expected relations with four big Western powers – the United States, France, Britain and Germany – to be re-established in coming days. The Milosevic government cut all diplomatic ties at the start of the Nato air campaign in March 1999.
Mr Svilanovic backed the idea of opening a Belgrade office of International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), based in The Hague, which has indicted Mr Milosevic and four of his top aides for war crimes in Kosovo.
He said: "It is correct that [President] Kostunica said that Milosevic's extradition to The Hague was not a priority, but he also said that the ICTY office will soon be opened in Belgrade and that it would be able to investigate whatever it needs to." One of the new government's most important tasks is to have good relations with neighbouring ex-Yugoslav republics, Mr Svilanovic added.
Zoran Zivkovic, 40, mayor of Serbia's third-largest town Nis, became Interior Minister. He promised to put Mr Milosevic behind bars and fight organised crime, adding: "We'll open all the secret police files too."
The programme of the new federal government is essentially the opposite of the Milosevic administration. It calls for swift re-establishment of relations with the major international institutions and pro-market reforms. One of its tasks is to bring Yugoslav legislation into line with EU legislation, in the hope that Yugoslavia will eventually qualify to join the EU.
The federal administration has relatively little power but it does have a leading role in fostering international relations.
The parliamentary session that appointed the new government had to be held in Serbia's parliament building. The federal parliament was damaged during the uprising which toppled the Milosevic regime.
Independent News: Law knocks at the gate of Milosevic's bolt-hole
The wheels of justice begin to turn in Belgrade, closing in on the former dictator's family and atrocities by his secret services
By Vesna Peric Zimonjic in Belgrade
4 November 2000
Slobodan Milosevic, ousted a month ago as Yugoslav president, still lives behind closed doors in one of his residences in the exclusive Dedinje neighbourhood of Belgrade. But not for long. In a small way, the wheels of justice in Belgrade are beginning to turn.
Despite a flurry of rumours at the time of the popular uprising that swept his regime from power on 5 October, there is no evidence that Mr Milosevic has left the premises on Uzicka Street since that day.
Holed up with him are his wife, Mira Markovic, and their 36-year-old daughter, Marija, with his loyal bodyguard, the police general Senta Milenkovic, and a special élite guard unit of the Yugoslav army.
"Milosevic knows that only while he is in there will the guard protect him," says Zoran Djindjic, a leader of the victorious Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) coalition.
When Mr Milosevic resigned, he talked of returning as leader of the the Socialist Party. But the chances of that look slim. Several requests for criminal investigation against him and his family have been submitted to the public prosecutor. Mr Djindjic says: "We only have to wait until the judiciary system starts functioning."
One inquiry deals with Mr Milosevic's attempt to tamper with the election results, to cover the victory by Vojislav Kostunica. If found guilty, he faces up to three years in prison. Another inquiry may begin after a two-part account of backstage events on the day of the revolution appeared in the Belgrade weekly Nedeljni Telegraf.
Quoting military sources, the paper said Mr Milosevic presented a list of 50 people to his military top brass on 5 October, allegedly demanding the execution of six key DOS leaders. The author of the story has been questioned by an investigating judge, who is demanding that Mr Milosevic submits to the same procedure.
And this week city planners visited a major construction site in Dedinje, where the Milosevic family lived until July 1997. The site belongs to Mr Milosevic and it does appear that a huge house is being built there illegally.
But many Serbs think solid evidence will surface on much more serious crimes committed by Mr Milosevic and his family. They say they want him to be tried for thoroughly ruining their lives and their country for the past decade. The responsibility for wars in former Yugoslavia and war crimes can be established later, they say.
That view is shared by President Kostunica, who insists Mr Milosevic should be tried in Belgrade for crimes against his own nation before facing the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague. Only Mr Milosevic's 28-year-old son Marko can rest easy, for a time. The unscrupulous "businessman" who became rich through smuggling fled to Moscow on 7 October with his wife and baby son.
The forged Yugoslav passport he used, with the name "Marko Jovanovic", means two years in jail. Marko tried to enter China later, but was forced to return to Moscow because of visa irregularities.
Now he lives in the Yugoslav embassy in Moscow where his uncle, Milosevic's brother Borislav, still holds the title of Belgrade's ambassador.
Marko's kitsch Madonna discotheque, and several firms he ran in his parents' hometown of Pozarevac, were ransacked by an angry mob in October. Local authorities are still trying to establish if Marko had any ownership documents for all the property in Pozarevac and also where he got the funds to build his empire.
The chance of finding answers is small: the smuggling of cigarettes, gasoline and narcotics, widely accepted as the basis for Marko's fortune, leaves few traces.
His sister, Marija, has suffered a nervous breakdown. She is trying to sell her TV station, Kosava. It was founded years ago with funds siphoned from several Serb firms connected to her parents. The companies include a bank, Beogradska Banka, run by Borka Vucic, and Jugopetrol, a fuel-supply business.
Two days before the revolution, Marija waved a gun around in the Kosava studio in an effort to prevent the staff from taking the station off the air. Her threats were in vain.
Now it is unclear who lives at Marija's luxurious three-floor house in Dedinje that she shared with her chubby, bald lover, Dragan Hadzi Antic, who headed the largest Serbian newspaper company, the pro-regime Politika.
On the day of the revolution, he fled the Politika headquarters through a back door, and is now hiding in a monastery in south-western Serbia.
Mira Markovic could be in trouble too. She is rumoured to have ordered the assassination of at least one of her political adversaries, the journalist Slavko Curuvija, gunned down in Belgrade last year. After the leak of surveillance reports, it is clear the secret police were involved in his murder.
Mrs Markovic is also believed to be involved in the murky business transactions of JUL, the neo-Marxist party that she leads. The party has been heavily involved in extortion from the few remaining successful businesses in Serbia.
When she created the party in 1994, Mrs Markovic allegedly asked her associates what was the most successful organisation in the world. The Mafia, they said. "That's how we'll work," she replied. The results were soon visible all over Serbia.
CNN: Deal seals new Yugoslav government
President Kostunica: Deal with Montenegro set to boost hold on power
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Backers of Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica have signed a deal to create a new federal coalition government, promising economic reforms and international cooperation.
The Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) signed the pact on Friday cementing a new federal administration with two parties from Montenegro, Serbia's sister republic in the Yugoslav federation.
Within Serbia, however, the government of the dominant republic remained deadlocked after former President Slobodan Milosevic's secret service chief refused to heed calls for his resignation, a Cabinet member said.
The country's new pro-democracy leadership insists that the resignation of Rade Markovic, one of Milosevic's top associates and head of the notorious secret service, is a key condition for Serbia's transition to democracy.
"Markovic's dismissal is necessary so that we can turn to important issues on the Cabinet's agenda," Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Spasoje Krunic told reporters.
"Milosevic's Socialist Party does not consider our demand being justified," he said. "We shall walk out of a government that does not function."
The deadlock meant that while the various "ministries were functioning and doing their jobs, the Serbian Cabinet was not meeting nor making any decisions," Krunic added on Friday.
Energy crisis spreads
Power cuts also spread across Serbia on Friday sparking the worst energy crisis in years and signalling the enormous task Yugoslavia's new leaders face in modernising the country.
Nearly 40 percent of the republic was left without electricity as authorities stepped up power rationing.
"We apologise to the citizens because of the restrictions," said Momcilo Cebalovic of Serbia's state power company, EPS.
"We are doing all we can, both technically and financially, to improve the situation."
Serbia's power system is in an alarming state because of years of poor maintenance under Milosevic and an overall economic decline.
Last year's NATO bombings crippled Serbia's power system
The power grid was further damaged in last year's NATO bombing and is believed to be in need of a major overhaul. EPS officials say only 30 percent of necessary regular repairs have been made this year.
Severe drought in the Balkans over the past several months has added to the hardship because Serbia partly relies on hydroelectricity to supply power.
Cebalovic said that the increased power restrictions were required to prevent the system from breaking down altogether, the Beta news agency reported.
He warned that levels in the Danube and the Sava rivers were so low that drawing water from them might be halted.
Residential areas were primarily affected by the selective blackouts, with hospitals and other crucial users not affected, officials said.
According to EPS officials, Serbia is short of about 20 million kilowatts of electricity daily.
Deal aimed at rebuilding
Reformers hope securing the deal with Montenegro will be an important sign that they are beginning the rebuilding process ahead of Serba's elections in December.
Parliament is due to appoint the new government on Saturday.
The coalition pact pledges Yugoslavia will enter all international political and financial institutions after a decade of isolation under Milosevic, who was shunned by the West for his role in four Balkan wars in the 1990s.
"We are pleased with the contents of the coalition contract and especially with that part dealing with the economy," said Deputy Prime Minister-designate Miroljub Labus after signing the deal in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica.
Zoran Zizic of the Socialist People's Party (left) becomes Prime Minister under the deal organised by Kostunica's (right) supporters
Labus, an economist and the top DOS representative in the government, will play a key role in co-coordinating international financial relations as the new rulers try to revive an economy ruined by corruption and state mismanagement.
Montenegro's Socialist People's Party, previously in coalition with Milosevic's Socialists at the federal level, is the DOS's main coalition partner. It provides the new prime minister, Zoran Zizic.
A much smaller Montenegrin party, the Serb People's Party, is the other member of the coalition.
The federal administration has relatively little power in comparison with the governments of the two republics but its formation will allow the reformers to strike international agreements and restore full diplomatic ties with the West.
BBC News: Poll threatens Yugoslav unity
Milo Djukanovic: Favours alliance of sovereign states
The Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro is pressing ahead with a planned referendum on loosening ties with Serbia, despite the democratic changes in Belgrade.
I think it would be a great error to erect barriers between us
Montenegro's pro-Western government agreed to hold the referendum by the end of next June.
But it is still unclear whether voters will be asked about full independence, or a looser confederation with Serbia.
That depends on the outcome of talks - expected to start early next year - over Montenegro's relations with Serbia.
Montenegro and Serbia are the last partners in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, after Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina broke away.
Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic said on Thursday that he favoured an alliance of separate sovereign states with certain common aspects.
'No rush'
He told Serbian TV: "Our proposal is for an alliance between Montenegro and Serbia covering three key functions: a common army, a common foreign policy and a common currency."
However there was no rush, the Montenegrin president said, to find a suitable framework for redefining ties between the two countries.
Vojislav Kostunica has backed democratic change for Montenegro
"It is in Serbia's and Montenegro's interest to find quality solutions which are acceptable both to our citizens and to the international community," he said.
Mr Djukanovic said that the proposal would need revisiting after the Serbian general election, expected to be on 23 December.
"Even if we were two independent states, I think it would be a great error to erect barriers between us," he said.
Although he welcomed Yugoslavia's re-entry into the United Nations, Mr Djukanovic signalled that he would seek international recognition of Montenegro's sovereignty.
"My view is that our states could have two seats at the United Nations if the people of Serbia and Montenegro opt for this solution," he said.
New era
Relations between the two partners came under massive strain earlier this year when then Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic pushed through constitutional changes that diminished Montenegro's standing in the federation.
But Vojislav Kostunica, who defeated Mr Milosevic in 24 September presidential elections, has insisted that things have now changed.
He says that, with the new situation in Serbia, "the conditions will be met for the democratic authorities" in the two republics to "make a democratic decision over the future destiny of their peoples".
Serbia deadlocked over spy chief fate
A row over the head of Serbia's secret service is threatening to paralyse the country's new interim government.
The refusal of Rade Markovic, a staunch ally of former President Slobodan Milosevic, to resign is causing a split in President Vojislav Kostunica's interim cabinet.
Key members of the government, made up of Milosevic's Socialist Party, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) which backs President Kostunica, and the opposition Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), failed to reach agreement on Mr Markovic's future at an emergency meeting on Thursday night.
There have been repeated demands of Mr Markovic's resignation following allegations from human rights groups, that he was involved in a series of politically-related murders.
Political crisis
President Kostunica attended the crisis meeting as did Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, who is expecting to lead the inter-party government until next month's elections.
The pro-Milosevic Socialists have rejected calls for Mr Markovic's resignation.
But DOS and SPO ministers insist that they will not participate in the work of the government until Mr Markovic resigns.
"Milosevic's Socialist Party does not consider our demand being justified," says Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Spasoje Krunic. "We shall walk out of a government that does not function."
Negotiations continue
Further meetings are planned for Friday to try to end the deadlock.
Nebojsa Covic, the DOS deputy prime minister, said that Mr Kostunica had instructed the government to "continue with talks and find solutions so the work of the cabinet can be unblocked."
Mr Markovic, who has been under intense pressure to resign following Mr Milosevic's departure last month, has denied that his secret service department was involved in politically motivated crimes in Serbia.
But the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre (HLC) says it has documentary evidence that Mr Markovic was behind the killing last year of newspaper editor Slavko Curuvija, a harsh critic of former President Slobodan Milosevic.
Hit men
The HLC claims that Mr Curuvija was under surveillance on the orders of Mr Markovic, but that the undercover agents were withdrawn a few minutes before Mr Curuvija was gunned down.
"For years we have had the feeling that some dark things are happening within the secret service," says Natasa Kandic, the head of HLC. "This is the start of revealing those secrets."
His newspaper the Dnevni Telegraf was banned in 1998 for "spreading fear, panic and defeatism" about possible Nato air strikes on Yugoslavia.
The Telegraph:Serb police chief linked to murder
By Alex Todorovic in Belgrade
SERBIA'S democratic movement and human rights groups yesterday demanded the immediate resignation of Rade Markovic, the secret police chief, after a leaked document implicated the security agency in last year's assassination of a dissident journalist.
Slavko Curuvija was murdered in April last year shortly after the start of the Nato bombing campaign. At one time he had been friendly with the former first family, Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, Mira Markovic, but later became one of their fiercest critics.
The state security document leaked to the Belgrade press describes the last hours of Curuvija's life, based on surveillance monitoring by security agents. It appears to indicate that an order was given to suspend the surveillance shortly before he was killed.
"At 16:27 the subject emerges from the restaurant with his wife and further control is stopped by agreement with the department chief . . . The subject did not display obvious signs of caution," the document reads.
Curuvija was shot dead by three assassins 40 minutes later in front of his wife, Branka Prpa. Many in the opposition suspected that state security was involved, but the document is the first hard evidence pointing to the DB, as the agency is known.
The disclosure has intensified the pressure on Mr Markovic, the DB chief since 1998, to step down. High-level discussions on his fate were under way in the transitional government last night. Curuvija published a glossy magazine and a newspaper, both of which were considered among the best independent journals in Yugoslavia.
His stinging editorials reportedly enraged the Milosevic family. Curuvija pointed to the string of high-profile Belgrade murders that reached a peak during Mr Markovic's tenure at state security. Mr Markovic is friends with the Milosevic family and personally escorted Milosevic's son, Marko, to a civilian plane bound for Moscow the day after the Yugoslav revolution last month.
Serbia's democratic opposition is refusing to participate in Serbia's newly constituted transition government until Mr Markovic resigns. Zoran Djindjic, president of the Democratic Party, said: "We don't care how he goes, as long as he goes.
"We lived in a country where the state and mafia were linked and where there were political assassinations. Even if state security wasn't behind them, Mr Markovic's very presence makes people nervous."
In further moves to confront the abuses of the Milosevic regime, President Vojislav Kostunica of Yugoslavia began releasing Albanian political prisoners from Serbian jails on Tuesday. Among the first to be freed was Flora Brovina, a paediatrician and poet who was arrested in Kosovo by Serb police during Nato's bombing campaign and sentenced to 12 years for terrorism.
She was greeted by hundreds of Kosovars on her return to Kosovo and immediately highlighted the plight of more than 800 Albanian prisoners still in Serbian jails. Three other Albanian men were released with Dr Brovina and 11 more are to be freed tomorrow.
The Washington Post:Kostunica Hesitant On Talks With U.S.
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 3, 2000; Page A24
BELGRADE, Nov. 2 –– Yugoslavia's new president, Vojislav Kostunica, has met with the president of Russia, the foreign minister of France, the former secretary general of NATO, and a host of other top foreign dignitaries. But he draws the line at a meeting with President Clinton or Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.
"It might be too early," Kostunica said in an interview today, four weeks after ousting Slobodan Milosevic in Eastern Europe's last great anti-communist revolution. "One should heal the wounds, not hurt them."
According to well-placed Yugoslav sources, Clinton and Albright have sent separate informal feelers to Kostunica, suggesting that they would like to visit.
Albright has personal reasons for wanting to visit Yugoslavia. The daughter of a Czechoslovak diplomat, she lived in the capital, Belgrade, both before and after World War II. According to Yugoslav sources, Albright sent a friendly handwritten letter to Kostunica last month in which she mentioned her long experience with Serbs, a message greeted with some derision here.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a State Department official said: "The two sides have agreed to have normal relations at all levels with specific meetings arranged at an appropriate time as part of the process of reestablishing ties. Albright sent a note to that effect, and also expressed congratulations and good wishes."
While Kostunica appeared to rule out an early Yugoslav-U.S. summit, he made clear he welcomed the dramatic improvement in relations with Western countries since the collapse of the Milosevic government. Formal diplomatic ties between Yugoslavia and leading NATO countries, including the United States, could be reestablished as early as next week, according to Western diplomats.
Milosevic severed relations with the United States and other Western countries at the outset of last year's NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, in which hundreds of civilians died in "collateral damage."
One Yugoslav official described both Albright and Clinton as symbols of NATO aggression, and therefore personae non gratae.
Kostunica said he thought a visit by the president or secretary of state should wait for the change of administration in January. He added, however, that events can move "very quickly" in the Balkans.
In general, conditions in Yugoslavia "have been changing for the better, and it is an impressive change," said Kostunica, who was an outspoken critic of the NATO air offensive, which battered Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic. The campaign was aimed at forcing Milosevic to accept a U.S.-brokered peace settlement in the Serbian province of Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians are the majority population.
Kostunica, who is a Serb, said he was particularly encouraged by the crumbling of what he depicted as a psychological wall around Serbia. The Western news media engaged in "the satanization of Serbs" during the Milosevic period, he said.
Kostunica and his aides have made clear over the past few weeks that they place a higher priority on relations with European nations than with the United States. They resent the fact that the so-called "outer wall" of sanctions--limiting Western aid and investment in Serbia--remains technically in place.
Last month, Congress approved a $100 million aid package for Yugoslavia, with the proviso that the assistance be cut off after March 2001 if Belgrade failed to cooperate with an international war crimes tribunal in The Hague. Among other things, the tribunal has insisted that Yugoslavia extradite a dozen Serbian leaders, including Milosevic, whom it indicted last year.
Kostunica said he was ready for some form of cooperation with the tribunal, which he described as "a fact of life." Such cooperation, Yugoslav officials said, could include allowing the tribunal to open an office in Belgrade and gather evidence. The Yugoslav constitution bars extradition of Yugoslav citizens to foreign courts.
The Herald Tribune:Like 'Tumbling Pigeons, 'Some Serbs Switch Sides
Milosevic Backers Derided for Quick Shift
By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Service
BELGRADE - A few days after the massive street demonstrations that brought down the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, an opposition activist, Zeljka Ilic, showed up at the radiological institute where she works, her face swollen after a police beating.
The institute's director, a member of Mr. Milosevic's Socialist Party, greeted her as if she were a returning heroine.
''Congratulations!'' he said effusively. ''We won!''
Mrs. Ilic, who had spent 10 year struggling against the Milosevic government, looked at him in amazement. A week before, he had treated her like a dangerous troublemaker and had displayed no sign of political dissent.
''What do you mean 'We won?''' she asked indignantly. ''In the past, you refused to have anything to do with me.''
''I have always been a sympathizer of the opposition,'' the director replied. ''Only I could not show it.''
The phenomenon of political turncoats is so widespread in Yugoslavia - a country that has gone through a succession of bewildering ideological changes in the last 15 years, from communism to nationalism, and now, tentatively, to democracy - that there is a special phrase for them in the Serbian language. Such people as the director are known as ''tumbling pigeons,'' after a breed of pigeon that performs dazzling flips and somersaults in flight.
Tumbling pigeons can be found everywhere these days in the wake of the revolutionary upheavals that put an end to the 13-year Milosevic era: in politics, in the media, in business and in the security services.
After years of loyal service to Mr. Milosevic, newspaper editors, hospital directors, police generals and businessmen have spent the past weeks desperately trying to ingratiate themselves with Yugoslavia's new leaders.
''It's disgusting,'' said Milan Paunovic, curator of the Belgrade Museum of Natural Sciences, who feels the comparison with the animal world is grossly unfair to the pigeons.
''The pigeons can't help themselves. They are bred for this kind of behavior, over many generations. Humans, on the other hand, are fickle. They know exactly what they are doing.''
Political turncoats are hardly unique to Yugoslavia. The same phenomenon occurred on a large scale a decade ago in East European nations after the collapse of communism. In many cases, the Communists-turned-democrats of Eastern Europe proved more effective at administration than people with impeccable dissident credentials, and were able to work their way back to responsible positions after a brief period of disgrace.
The beginnings of the same process are already evident here.
Yugoslavia's most successful private businessman, Bogoljub Karic, is a fine example of the human ''tumbling pigeon.'' Over the last decade, he has accomplished a series of spectacular political somersaults, alternately befriending the Milosevic family, using his political connections to promote his business interests and distancing himself from the regime when the going got tough.
A former accordion player from Kosovo, Mr. Karic, 46, runs a multimillion-dollar business empire with assets stretching from Uzbekistan to Canada. In Serbia, he owns the largest private bank, the leading mobile telephone company and a popular Belgrade television station. Putting together such a vast empire would have been impossible without ties to people in power, as he himself concedes.
''I had to cooperate with the regime to a certain extent,'' said Mr. Karic, who remains on a list of about 400 prominent Yugoslav politicians and businessmen barred from traveling to the United States or to Western Europe. ''Otherwise, I would have been expelled from the country and lost everything.''
Although Mr. Karic denies that he was ever close to Mr. Milosevic, he acknowledges that he was at one time on friendly terms with his politically influential wife, Mirjana Markovic, whom he depicts as a kindred spirit in the battle against Serbian nationalism. Mr. Karic financed publication of Ms. Markovic's memoirs in a half-dozen countries, including Russia, Canada and Ukraine.
Guards Block Milosevic Villa Access
BELGRADE, Yugoslavia (AP) - Plainclothes guards apparently loyal to Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites) on Thursday turned away building inspectors attempting to investigate reports of an illegal addition at the former president's private home.
When the city building inspectors turned up at the entrance of Milosevic's residence in the exclusive Dedinje district, guards who identified themselves as Serbian police showed them what they claimed was a construction permit for the addition and told the inspectors to leave.
The city officials had earlier said that no construction permits had been issued by Belgrade authorities for work at the residential complex. The officials' first attempt to inspect the premises failed Wednesday after they were turned away by guards.
Although the residence at 33 Tolstojeva Street is officially Milosevic's family address, the former president now resides at his other home on nearby Uzicka Street.
Since Milosevic conceded election defeat in the Sept. 24 election and stepped down in the face of mass street demonstrations, he and his wife have seldom ventured outside the building on Uzicka Street. There, they are guarded by a paramilitary force of some 100 men and Milosevic's longtime trusted bodyguard. The couple's daughter, Marija, is believed to be staying with them.
The house on Uzicka Street is part of a complex of renovated villas that used to be attached to Milosevic's official residence, which was destroyed by NATO (news - web sites) bombs last year. Milosevic is believed to receive visitors only rarely, and communicates with close aides and remaining friends by telephone.
Yugoslavia Admitted to U.N.
Thursday November 2, 2000 7:40 am
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - After years of ostracism, Yugoslavia entered the United Nations with a promise to be a trustworthy new member and a good neighbor in the troubled Balkans - but without a commitment to hand over ousted President Slobodan Milosevic.
At a meeting to admit Yugoslavia's new democratic government into the United Nations on Wednesday, the United States and others reminded Belgrade that membership carries obligations that include turning over suspects to the U.N. war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
``Nobody can bring back the victims of the hostilities in southeast Europe,'' Croatia's U.N. ambassador, Ivan Simonovic, told the assembly. ``However it is our legal, political and moral duty to cooperate in prosecuting war crimes, in resolving the destiny of missing persons and in preventing a repetition of the tragedy.''
His comments, which reflected the continued unease of Yugoslavia's former republics with the new leadership in Belgrade, came after the 189-member assembly overwhelming approved Yugoslavia as a new U.N. member state.
The decision was greeted by a loud round of applause in the assembly hall. It ended eight years of international isolation for Yugoslavia, which had refused to apply for U.N. admission as a new country following the breakup of the Yugoslav socialist republic in the early 1990s.
As a result, Yugoslavia was barred from speaking or voting in the General Assembly, although it remained a U.N. member and the communist-era flag flew at U.N. headquarters.
On Wednesday, that flag was lowered for the last time and the flag of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia - identical to the old red, white and blue one but without the red star in the middle - was raised in a nighttime ceremony.
``This indeed is a historic day for the United Nations, and for the Balkans - for all of Europe, indeed for all of the world,'' U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said. ``We welcome Yugoslavia as the United Nations' newest member.''
But Holbrooke stressed that following its pledge to respect the U.N. Charter, Yugoslavia must understand that it should cooperate with the tribunal.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica has made it clear he does not intend to extradite Milosevic or other Serbs to the U.N. war crimes tribunal - which many Serbs regard as a tool of the Americans - even though he has admitted that Yugoslav forces did commit crimes during the Serb crackdown on Kosovo last year.
Milosevic still could face trial at home for crimes allegedly committed during his 13-year rule. On Wednesday, three Serb soldiers went on trial in a Yugoslav court on charges of killing an ethnic Albanian couple for refusing to leave their home during the Kosovo conflict - the sort of prosecution human rights groups are hoping to see more of under Kostunica's government.
Kostunica's envoy to the United Nations, Goran Svilanovic, promised to respect the ``noble goals and principles'' of the U.N. charter, but made no specific pledge to surrender suspects to the tribunal.
Svilanovic, who is considered the leading candidate to be Yugoslavia's next foreign minister, offered ``assurances'' that Belgrade was willing to work with governments, in particular its neighbors, to overcome the problems that divide them.
``To that end, Yugoslavia will be a trustful neighbor and a conscientious member of the international community and will invest its best efforts to promote peace and stability in the region as well as worldwide,'' he said.
He thanked ambassadors for welcoming Yugoslavia back into the U.N. family and asked that they continue supporting the country as it tries to recover from years of economic mismanagement and isolation under Milosevic.
At the flag-raising ceremony, Svilanovic urged governments to help provide the children of Yugoslavia and its neighbors with a stable and prosperous future, saying, ``This is what they deserve and this is the promise we have to keep.''
As the flag flapped in the chilly night air, he added: ``Thank you very much for this bright moment in the history of our country.''
The New York Times:Kosovo Albanians Cheer the Return of a Doctor Freed in Serbia
By CARLOTTA GALL
PRISTINA, Kosovo, Nov. 1 — Flora Brovina, a prominent doctor, poet and activist for Kosovo Albanians, was freed from a Serbian prison today by a special pardon from the new Yugoslav president. Arriving home to a tumultuous welcome, she dropped to her knees to kiss the ground as she crossed into Kosovo, her home province.
Her first words were for some 800 Kosovo Albanians still in Serbia prisons. "I cannot feel myself free until all those mothers, fathers and brothers feel the same as I do," she said. "I am tired, and upset, full of emotions. It's not easy to leave your friends behind even though I have promises they are going to be released soon."
Several hundred people, including children from an emergency medical center she set up during the war in Kosovo last year, were at the provincial border to greet her, singing, cheering and waving banners that read, "Welcome to Kosovo, our mother."
Dr. Brovina, 50, a pediatrician, was arrested outside her Pristina apartment by the Serbian police on April 20 last year during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. She was sentenced to 12 years in a Serbian court last year on charges of conspiring to commit terrorism and aiding the rebel force, the Kosovo Liberation Army.
She was one of 2,000 Albanian detainees transferred from Kosovo when Serbian forces withdrew and NATO-led peacekeeping troops took control of Kosovo after the war ended in June 1999. Over half have been gradually released, and the return of the remaining 818 has become an urgent concern for the United Nations officials running Kosovo, who say the prisoners are an obstacle to the reconciliation of Serbs and Albanians.
Dr. Brovina's release indicated that President Vojislav Kostunica, who has been in power for less than a month since a popular revolt forced Slobodan Milosevic to step down, regards the issue as one of human rights. A presidential representative, Filip Gobulovic, accompanied Dr. Brovina all the way from the women's prison in Pozarevac — Mr. Milosevic's hometown — to the Kosovo border. "It is a start of the procedure for the release of every political prisoner," Mr. Gobulovic said. "Here is no difference, whatever nationality they are."
Two prominent Serbian journalists, both considered political prisoners by human rights organizations, have been released from prison since Mr. Kostunica became president, as have two Britons and two Canadians detained on what their countries called trumped-up charges. Most Albanians in prison are also considered political prisoners because many were picked up by the police, often from refugee columns during the NATO bombing, and sentenced on scant evidence of wrongdoing, lawyers say.
Three Kosovo Albanian men, all arrested during the NATO bombing campaign, were released at the same time as Dr. Brovina, and arrived this evening. They had completed 18-month sentences. Eleven other Albanian men, still awaiting trial, were released on Saturday.
Bernard Kouchner, head of the United Nations administration in Kosovo, welcomed Dr. Brovina's release and praised Mr. Kostunica for making a "crucial step toward healing the wounds that exist between Serb and Albanian communities."
In a statement, he urged the release of the rest of the Albanians being held. "That would be justice, that would be a major stride toward a meaningful dialogue and a lasting peace," he said.
Independent:Kosovo status remains open, says Holbrooke
By Anne Penketh
2 November 2000
The future status of Kosovo remains an open question as far as the US administration is concerned, Richard Holbrooke, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said yesterday.
Reacting to a report in The Independent, quoting a State department official, Mr Holbrooke denied that the United States had changed its policy on Kosovo by deciding that the UN resolution which set up an interim administration for the Serbian province provided for Kosovo independence.
He said that during his recent trip to the Balkans, "all I was doing was reaffirming something Madeleine Albright and I have long said. We do not believe UN Security Council resolution 1244 precludes independence as one possible option". The UN Security Council adopted in June last year the resolution which recognises the "sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia".
Mr Holbrooke said the resolution left the door open on Kosovo's future by providing for an international conference. While Russia and China believed the resolution decided that Kosovo would remain part of Yugoslavia definitively, "the US believes that issue is open". Asked whether Kosovo should become independent, Mr Holbrooke told the BBC World Service that that was "up to the people of the region to decide".
The Washington Post:Serbs Seeking Secret Police Chief's Ouster
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 1, 2000; Page A25
BELGRADE, Oct. 31 –– Serbian democracy leaders called today for the dismissal of Serbia's chief of secret police following the circulation of a document purporting to link him to the murder last year of a prominent critic of ousted Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic.
The demands for removal of the police chief, Rade Markovic, threatened to plunge Serb-led Yugoslavia into a new political crisis, upsetting the delicate balance of power that has been established here since Milosevic, defeated at the polls, was overthrown in street protests Oct. 5. Markovic is one of the key holdovers of the old regime and a symbol of the country's unfinished revolution.
Widely regarded as a trusted Milosevic henchman, Markovic remained head of the shadowy State Security organization by publicly transferring his loyalty to Yugoslavia's new rulers. But his position has been seriously undermined by the emergence of evidence suggesting that the secret police may have played a role in the April 1999 slaying of Slavko Curuvija, a newspaper publisher who fell out of favor with the Milosevic family.
The evidence comes in the form of a two-page document that is allegedly a report from secret policemen assigned to trail Curuvija on the day of his killing. The document indicates that the tail was removed on instructions from State Security headquarters 13 minutes before the publisher was gunned down outside his Belgrade apartment by three killers who escaped by car.
If the document is genuine, legal experts said, it likely will lead to demands for a full-scale investigation of the secret police agency's role in a series of assassinations of opponents and associates of the Milosevic family over the last two years. The removal of the police tail on Curuvija just before his murder would strengthen widespread suspicions that State Security either ordered the killing or knew what was about to happen.
It is also possible that the document is a clever forgery circulated by Markovic's opponents in the security forces in an attempt to force his removal. The document was mailed to opposition politicians and human rights activists in Belgrade, along with an anonymous note accusing Markovic and one of his subordinates of responsibility for the murder.
The document recounts Curuvija's movements on the day of his killing, including a visit to a restaurant in central Belgrade and a stroll in the park with his wife, Branka Prpa. According to friends, Prpa is convinced of the accuracy of the document and will announce at a news conference Wednesday that she plans to initiate legal proceedings against Markovic.
The document, a copy of which has been seen by The Washington Post, identifies Curuvija by the code name "Curav," Serbian for "turkey." It says that the surveillance order for the newspaper publisher was signed by the head of the Belgrade branch of State Security, Milan Radonjic, a direct subordinate of Markovic.
Curuvija's killing took place on the Orthodox Easter, during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia. The week before the killing, a commentary had appeared in a pro-government newspaper accusing Curuvija of being a traitor who had urged NATO to bomb Yugoslavia in the conflict over Kosovo. It said that such acts would neither be "forgiven nor forgotten."
Pro-democracy leaders said today that if Markovic is not fired, they will withdraw from the caretaker government that has been appointed to run Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic, until parliamentary elections in December. The transitional government includes representatives of Milosevic's Socialist Party and opposition parties supporting his elected successor, Vojislav Kostunica.
Shock of Serbia's October revolution brings hope to industry
BELGRADE, Oct 31 (AFP)
The defining moment of Yugoslavia's October revolution may have been the storming of Belgrade's parliament four weeks ago, but the political upheaval soon spread to other bastions of Slobodan Milosevic, notably to Serbia's boardrooms and its factory floors.
The ousting of the former president has turned Yugoslavia's cash-strapped industry upside down, with near-anarchy prevailing in some cases, and dozens of company bosses being sacked by emboldened workers impatient to reap the benefits of headline-grabbing change.
Since the October 5 uprising, pro-reform supporters of new Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica have nominated so-called "crisis committees" in the main state-controlled companies run by former Milosevic placemen.
Nowhere is the daunting scale of the much-needed reconstruction more apparent than in the boardroom of the GOSA heavy engineering firm, whose new managing director Slavomir Radomirovic was swept to power in a boardroom coup two weeks ago.
Established with French capital in 1923, and later renamed after a Serb World War II hero, GOSA is a national emblem in more ways than one, a weathervane of Yugoslavia's catastrophic decline over 13 wasted years of Milosevic misrule.
During that time the firm continued to employ 7,500 people -- more out of solidarity with its workers than because it had orders to fill -- the company's year-on-year balance sheet all too graphically mapping the impact of world trade sanctions.
Still blinking at the rapid turnaround as he sits in the GOSA boardroom in downtown Belgrade, Radomirovic concedes the bottom line has been rock bottom for as long as he can remember.
Turnover at the firm's Smederevska Palanka plant, 40 kilometres (25 miles) southeast of the capital, has shrunk from over 100 million marks (43 million dollars) in 1987, the year Milosevic grabbed power in Belgrade, to only 4.9 million marks (2.1 million dollars) in 1999.
"The political changes encouraged the workers to speak out, to demand a new team for a new challenge, that of revitalising the company, but this is not just about personalities. It is also a race against time," Radomirovic told AFP.
"The wheel of history never rolls backwards. We won't get back to 1987, and there will be no more of Milosevic. All we're asking for is the unconditional lifting of international sanctions.
"Our problems are political conditions, the aftereffects of Kosovo, Dayton (the 1995 accord that ended the Bosnia war), The Hague (seat of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia), not the economic ones, like prices and debts, you always hear people talking about."
Yet Radomirovic's appeal to laissez-faire principles, and his urging that all Yugoslav companies really need is a level playing field to compete, was punctuated by appeals for the faster delivery of international aid.
Soon after Kostunica took office on October 7, the European Union announced a 200-million-euro (172-million-dollar) package to get fuel, emergency medicine and food supplies to Serbia before the harsh winter sets in.
But EU Commissioner for external affairs, Chris Patten, informed Kostunica during a landmark visit to Belgrade last week that the package would be held up until the end of November.
Budimir Miladinovic, GOSA's new deputy boss, says Yugoslavia's long-term need is for foreign investment, not aid dependency, but he acknowledges that the EU money will at least stop fuel shortages bringing industry to a standstill this winter.
"I like to put essential problems before everyday ones, but that doesn't mean everyday do not exist. Let the European Union not hold up its aid indefinitely. Because as soon as we can buy Russian gas, production can start up and we can get down to the real job of helping ourselves," he said.
During talks with Kostunica in Moscow last Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged to resume gas supplies to Yugoslavia, cut off due to the 300-million-dollar (360-million-euro) bill run up by the previous regime in Belgrade.
Miladinovic said GOSA had been hit by the widespread fuel shortages created by the gas crisis, observing that power cuts had halted production at Smederevska Palanka for three hours on each of the two preceding days.
"It is of course implicit that we need foreign credits to kick start production, in our case this would involve updating equipment, but we have world-class expertise here," he said.
"Given the right tools, we would be able to reintegrate into world markets in a very short time, if only we were allowed to work freely.
"We have everything here to make a success in business -- a full production system, competitive prices, regular clients, new offers, big markets -- all we are asking is that sanctions be removed in practice, and not just in words," Miladinovic added.
Herald Tribune: Jailed Ethnic Albanians Await Belgrade Decision
'Hostages' a Thorny Issue for Kostunica
Paris, Wednesday, November 1, 2000
By Michael Dobbs Washington Post Service
POZAREVAC, Yugoslavia - ''I consider myself a hostage of war,'' the Kosovo student leader, Albin Kurti, announced as he was escorted into a chilly prison interview room by his Serbian jailers.
Arrested by Serbian police during the Kosovo conflict last year and sentenced to 15 years in prison on terrorism charges, Mr. Kurti is one of approximately 800 ethnic Albanians still being held in Serbian jails nearly four weeks after the street revolution that overthrew the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic.
The question of what to do with them has emerged as one of the most thorny issues facing Yugoslavia's new president, Vojislav Kostunica, as he attempts to consolidate power. The United States and other Western countries have called for their immediate release. Mr. Kostunica has suggested he wants to do that, but there is little political support for such a step within Serbia, Yugoslavia's main republic, at a time when hundreds of Serbs are missing in Kosovo.
Mr. Kurti and the other ethnic Albanian detainees, members of Kosovo's majority population, were rounded up during the 11-week NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last year. They were transferred to prisons outside Kosovo just before the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav Army withdrew from Kosovo and NATO forces took over.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Serbian authorities at one time held around 2,000 ethnic Albanian prisoners, but the number has decreased sharply as a result of partial releases over the past 18 months. Many of those who remain in Serbian jails have been sentenced to long prison terms.
In a rare interview with a foreign visitor, Mr. Kurti, 25, projected an image of total defiance, insisting that his prison experience had strengthened his determination to fight for a fully independent Kosovo, which remains officially a part of Serbia. While welcoming Mr. Milosevic's overthrow as a ''very positive event,'' he depicted Mr. Kostunica as no better than his predecessor on the question of rights for ethnic Albanians.
The remaining ethnic Albanian prisoners are scattered in jails throughout Serbia, including in Nis, Sremska Mitrovica, and in Pozarevac, Mr. Milosevic's hometown. Mr. Kurti said he shared a 21 foot by 30 foot (6.3 meter by 9 meter) prison cell with 40 other ethnic Albanian prisoners, most of whom were detained during the war.
Like other prisoners, Mr. Kurti complained of harsh beatings by his Serbian jailers during the early days of his detention, particularly when he was still being held in Kosovo. But he said that conditions had generally improved since his transfer to Pozarevac. He spends much of his time in jail reading books sent to him by relatives in Kosovo, including works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Joyce and Bertolt Brecht.
The prison food, said Mr. Kurti, is so poor that he and other Albanians rely almost entirely on food packages from Kosovo. ''Usually, we eat only the bread,'' he said.
In the interview, he spoke in English, but his words were translated into Serbian at the insistence of two Serbian prison guards who monitored the interview.
While most of the ethnic Albanians being held in Pozarevac have been sentenced for political crimes, such as subversion and conspiracy, a minority are ordinary criminals, convicted of crimes such as robbery and murder. Mr. Kurti called on the Serbian authorities to release all the Albanian prisoners at once.
''The ordinary criminals should be sent to serve their sentences in Kosovo,'' he said.
Initially, Mr. Kostunica linked the release of Kosovo Albanian prisoners to progress on tracking down an estimated 1,000 Serbs who had disappeared in Kosovo since the end of the war. More recently, however, his aides have said the president is considering a general amnesty for Albanian political detainees, to be submitted to the Yugoslav Parliament in a few weeks. Attempts to arrange the early release of a prominent Albanian physician and poet, Flora Brovina, who is being held in the Pozarevac women's prison, have run into a series of snags, according to Kostunica aides.
The outgoing Yugoslav minister of justice, Petar Jojic, who belongs to the extreme nationalist Radical Party, refused to authorize Mrs. Brovina's release, arguing that she had committed ''very serious crimes.''
The Justice Ministry of Serbia readily agreed to a reporter's request to visit the Pozarevac jail, but said it was unable to authorize a meeting with Mrs. Brovina on the grounds that her case was still under review by the courts.
ABC News: EU summit in Zagreb faces tricky Yugoslav issue
ZAGREB, Oct 31 (Reuters) - The upcoming European Union summit in Zagreb is expected to welcome Yugoslavia into the family of EU aspirants but its organisers face the tricky issue of who will represent the troubled federation. "With the recent democratic changes, Yugoslavia has met conditions to activate its status in the so-called Stabilisation and Association countries," Neven Madej, a Croatian foreign ministry official who heads the organising committee for the November 24 summit, told a news conference on Tuesday. The SAA was created by the EU to encourage Balkans countries -- Croatia, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Macedonia and Albania -- in their efforts to win associated and eventually full membership of the EU, after a decade of ethnic conflicts. Presidents or prime ministers from the 15 EU countries will attend the high-profile summit along with the five SAA countries and Slovenia, another former Yugoslav republic. Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, who replaced veteran leader Slobodan Milosevic after popular protests forced him to concede defeat in September"s election, is also expected to attend although his office has yet to confirm it officially. But while Yugoslavia still formally includes Montenegro and Kosovo, last year"s conflict in the province and autonomy moves by Montenegro have raised questions over its borders. "(U.N. administrator) Bernard Kouchner will probably be the only one from Kosovo," Madej told reporters, adding that ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, whose party emerged strongest at recent local Kosovo elections, was not likely to attend. Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic may also not come. "That is a very sensitive political issue which we cannot comment on now," added Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Drobnjak. CROATIA HOPES TO START TALKS WITH EU Croatia, which split from Socialist Yugoslavia in 1992, expects to open talks on an SAA agreement with the EU on the day of the summit provided the European Commission gets the go-ahead from the EU ministerial council in Brussels four days earlier. "But the talks (on associated membership) will begin in earnest in December and if everything goes well may be completed in some six months," Drobnjak said. A centre-left reformist coalition ousted nationalists from power in Zagreb in January and set about redrawing the country"s image abroad by implementing democratic and economic reforms. The associated membership is the first step towards the EU and does not automatically guarantee that a full status will be achieved at a later stage.
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