U.S. threatens Yugoslavia

The Bush administration and Congress have given another ultimatum to Yugoslavia to "cooperate" with the "International Tribunal for War Crimes" in The Hague, or be faced with a cutoff in U.S. aid as well as the withholding of U.S. support on the boards of the IMF and the World Bank for new standby arrangements and debt write-offs.

As a result, on March 27, the government of Serbia, the larger of the two Yugoslav republics, issued an act, without the consent of its Parliament, by which "state organs of the Republic of Serbia shall act under the procedure prescribed by the Statute and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of the [International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague] ... until the passage of an appropriate law."

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This move drew praise the following day from U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who nevertheless went on to add that "there are still steps that the authorities in Belgrade need to undertake if they wish to continue receiving U.S. financial assistance," including granting access to military archives and to other Hague suspects.

The new act was issued in the aftermath of a Yugoslav Supreme Court decision to declare a similar previous act unconstitutional. Present Yugoslav law does not allow the extradition of domestic citizens to other states or international bodies.

It is expected that this move will result in new extraditions to the Hague Tribunal ahead of the March 31 deadline set by Congress, according to a law left over from the Clinton administration. Cedomir Jovanovic, head of the ruling DOS coalition parliamentary group, stated for the Belgrade daily Glas Javnosti that he "expects that all nine persons indicted by The Hague will be extradited by March 31."

Conversely, Yugoslav president Vojislav Kostunica, a legal scholar, has declared that he is "absolutely against illegal extraditions," adding that they may cause "grave consequences" in the form of added political instability and "the further loss of public faith in the law and institutions."

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The issue of cooperation with the Hague Tribunal has been a constant bone of contention in the DOS ruling coalition that came into power after the fall of former President Slobodan Milosevic in October 2000, with the "reformist" wing headed by Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic favoring cooperation as a way to win economic concessions and aid from the U.S. and the E.U., and the "conservative" wing headed by Kostunica being opposed to the extradition of Yugoslav citizens to a court it considers biased and of dubious legality.

A serious political crisis was caused in June 2001, when masked special police units controlled by Djindjic kidnapped former President Milosevic from a Belgrade prison and turned him over to international forces that transported him to The Hague's Scheveningen prison, where he sits while standing trial today.

The Milosevic trial, now well into its second month, has by most accounts proven embarrassing to the Tribunal, which has reportedly failed to demonstrate a convincing case against him, while also raising Milosevic's popularity at home for his pugnacious defense and refusal to recognize the Tribunal's legality or jurisdiction. This has also caused increasing problems for the Djindjic government in Serbia, already faced with increasing economic difficulties under IMF-prescribed economic medicine.

The increased pressure to extradite new "suspects" to the Tribunal is being brought into close connection with the course of the Milosevic trial, as many of the currently "most wanted" were Milosevic's close political associates or advisers during his 13-year rule. It is thought that Hague Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte is desperately trying to come up with any sort of evidence that might prove "incriminating" for Milosevic and, by extension, breathe in some credibility to a tribunal whose legality many dispute.

In a Feb. 28 testimony before the House International Relations Committee, Larry A. Hammond, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Carter administration and a proponent of international criminal courts, expressed concern "that the rights of those charged with crimes [at the Tribunal] have been subordinated to the larger political objective of gaining convictions and maintaining cooperative relations with governments affected by the Tribunal. ..."

A more detailed picture of the workings of the Hague Tribunal was provided in a March 14 letter to the National Post by Canadian lawyer Christopher Black, a member of an international committee to defend Milosevic. According to Black, "Mr. Milosevic has been denied the right of counsel since his illegal transfer to The Hague last June. ... Every conversation has been monitored, every phone call. Documents that have been sent to him have on several occasions disappeared. Arrangements for press conferences have been interfered with by the secret police. ... Mr. Milosevic, for all intents and purposes, has been held and is being held incommunicado, and it is about time the Western press which so prides itself on liberal values demonstrate this by demanding that the Hague Tribunal provide this innocent man the right to counsel without which all other rights are meaningless."

Even Yugoslav supporters of the extradition policy, such as Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic, have recently raised serious questions regarding the Tribunal's selectivity and the inconsistent standards used by the West in demanding "cooperation." In a March 29 open letter to acting president of the U.N. Security Council, Hague Tribunal President Claude Jorda, and Secretary of State Powell, Batic demanded the indictment and extradition of those accused of war crimes against Serbs, adding that the Serbian authorities have provided the Tribunal with "indisputable evidence" of crimes against Serbs committed in the Kosovo region by the Albanian KLA guerilla, which was labeled a "terrorist organization" by the U.S. State Department as late as 1998, and which has been repeatedly linked with the al-Qaida organization and its Balkan network. Batic also accused the U.N. administration in Kosovo and the NATO-led KFOR troops of helping form a new Kosovo government that contains known Albanian terrorists, even though the Serbian government has submitted to the Tribunal 40,000 pages and 4,000 photos of incriminating documents against them.

Aleksandar Pavic in Belgrade covers Yugoslavia for WorldNetDaily.com.