Belgrade: Peace Initiative

The increasingly agile and ambitious Serbian Democratic Center recently launched an interesting project covering a delicate topic: the international position of Serbia/FR Yugoslavia.

Lawyer Slobodan Vukovic, chairman of the Center's foreign relations committee, said his initiative was motivated by the lack of inventiveness in Yugoslavia's diplomacy which he said "hasn't had any foreign policy initiative for a long time", i.e. it just reacts to what the great powers force it into.

The specific form to achieve the goal would be a new conference on former Yugoslavia under UN and Contact Group auspices. That international gathering would result in the mutual recognition of all the republics of the former Yugoslavia and would secure guarantees for the implementation of the Contact Group plan for Bosnia and Z-4 plan for Croatia. Conference participants would accept two key multi-lateral documents whose implementation would contribute to building up trust. One document would cover disarmament under UN control ("at levels needed to prevent aggressive action"), and the other would cover restoring trade and traffic with no customs or other limitations on the movement of goods and people.

The precondition for that conference is the presence of all the parties involved in the Yugoslav crisis, including Slovenia and Macedonia. Vukovic said joint efforts would be invested in a recovery (economic and political) of all the states created by the breakup of former Yugoslavia.

Kosovo: Albanians On Trial

The trial of 71 ethnic Albanians ended in the Pristina district court last Monday when sentences were passed on them for what the media called masquerading as "para-police of the republic of Kosovo".

The tribunal sentenced 18 of them for "associating with the intent of carrying out hostile activities" (article 136 of the FRY criminal code) linked to the crime of "endangering territorial integrity" (article 116) to between four and eight years in prison. Another 50 got one and a half to four years in prison for joining the group, two were freed of the charges and another will stand trial separately.

Those sentences are the end of one of the last trials against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo for setting up para-police formations. Under the charges, those formations grew out of the legally registered union of former employees of Serbia's security services and placed themselves in the service of the self-proclaimed republic of Kosovo, the declared goal of the ethnic Albanian nationalist movement.

Before Pristina, the first of the series of trials ended in Pec in April, then moved to Gnjilane in early June, and one is continuing in Prizren.

In Pec, two groups (seven and nine men) got one to five years in jail. The Gnjilane court passed more lenient sentences. Of the 28 accused, 16 got six months to three years, eight fled Kosovo, four were released and all the accused were released on bail.

Defence lawyers all said these are construed political trials. Unofficially, one of them said there is no possible defence and that the epilogue will be what the authorities want. He said maneuvering space was limited for lawyers.

The authorities said what they had to say in Pec, Gnjilane and Prizren and dropped the hot potato. Form their point of view, their wish is understandable: clear up the mess so the neighbors don't see it.

The end of the Prizren trial is not in sight yet. It started on May 3 with 43 Albanians and a Turk on trial. It recessed on Monday. The Prizren group is charged with creating an association to use force to change the territorial integrity of the FRY and break away an integral part Kosovo from Serbia.

"That trial is pure improvisation," defence lawyer Nikola Barovic told VREME. Lawyer Orhan Nevzati said this is an illegitimate trial in the service of political needs.

Unlike the other trials, this one covers four groups of people who have nothing in common, they said. The first group are the parallel (republic of Kosovo) local council of Orahovac; the second are former policemen; the third are Turkish national party leader Sezair Saipi, his nephew and a former local judge; the fourth are two peasants, who are not related with any of the former groups, though the police found a machinegun in one of the peasant's house.

Barovic and Nevzati said this trial is a pure political construction with Saipi jammed in to neutralize his opposition party.