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Defiant Milosevic Refuses to Plead Before Genocide Tribunal
THE HAGUE, Dec. 11 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic refused to enter a plea Tuesday to charges of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The 60-year-old former head-of-state told presiding Judge Richard May that he had been a peacemaker in that country's 1992-1995 conflict, Europe's bloodiest since World War II, and not the architect of mass genocide conducting mainly against Bosnian Muslims during the conflict, of which charges were brought against the former dictator.
The United Nations war crimes tribunal, meanwhile, ruled the 60-year-old Serbian nationalist would be tried separately for the bloodshed in Bosnia and Croatia, and for events in Kosovo, spurning the prosecution's request for all charges to be handled in one single trial.
"This tragic text is a supreme absurdity," Milosevic said. "I should be credited with peace in Bosnia, not for war."
As the tribunal read the 29-count Bosnia indictment including genocide, the most serious legal charge ever put to a former head of state, a small smile sat on Milosevic's lips.
Milosevic, a lawyer by training, displayed the same contempt for the proceedings that he showed in three previous appearances before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
He has repeatedly declined representation by an attorney. "I'm not asking for any advice from anybody," he said.
The court automatically entered a not guilty plea to the list of charges, which also include war crimes, murder and torture, after Milosevic refused to answer to the charges.
The indictment holds Milosevic responsible for the killing of thousands of Muslims and Croats during the Bosnia war, which left 200,000 people dead and one million refugees.
Along with the 1995 massacre of thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica and the three-year siege of Sarajevo, the indictment outlined cases of torture, rape, starvation and mass deportation.
Prosecutors had asked the judges for a single trial for the three indictments against Milosevic for the atrocities in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
They argued that his goal in each area was the same - the creation of an ethnically pure "Greater Serbia" by killing or hounding out non-Serbs in the former Yugoslavia.
The court, however, ruled that there would not be separate trials because Milosevic played a different role in Kosovo than in Bosnia and Croatia.
"Croatia and Bosnia will be joined, however, the Kosovo indictment will not be joined but tried separately and first on February 12th next year," May said.
The war in Kosovo was much later and involved a different kind of responsibility for Milosevic, the judge said.
In the other two conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia, Milosevic exercised power indirectly, the indictments state.
As president of Yugoslavia, Milosevic was the direct commander of Yugoslav and Serbian forces in the province of Kosovo, and took part in the crackdown on ethnic Albanians there in 1998-99.
Meanwhile, Serbia said it is not protecting former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and wartime commander Ratko Mladic, wanted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal for war crimes, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said Tuesday.
"They are not protected. Where they are, I don't know," Djindjic told reporters after meeting Swedish government officials in Stockholm.
He said it was hypocritical of the United States and other Western countries that had for years in Bosnia large numbers of troops which could have tracked down and detained Karadzic and Mladic - who are both on the run - had they decided it was necessary, rather than now lay blame on Serbia.
Karadzic and Mladic "were in Bosnia for five years, from 1995 to 2000, and in these five years, we had 50,000 American soldiers in Bosnia. After these five years, they asked us to find out where they are. I think it is not so fair," he said.
"We have so many problems" to deal with, Djindjic said, citing "economic problems after 10 years of isolation and war" and "problems with Kosovo, Montenegro, south of Serbia and Macedonia."
The chief prosecutor of the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Carla Del Ponte, recently told the U.N. Security Council that Mladic was living in Yugoslavia "under the official protection of the Yugoslav army", an accusation the army has rejected.
The ICTY has indicted Mladic and Karadzic on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for their roles in the 1992-1995 Bosnian war.
The charges against the two relate notably to the massacre of between 7,000 and 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica in 1995, after it had been overrun by Bosnian Serb forces, as Dutch U.N. troops allowed Serbian forces to enter, and did nothing to prevent the ensuing massacre.
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