Milosevic Facing Arrest

Will the authorized district attorney´s office issue a warrant for his arrest due to a justified suspicion that he had committed a criminal act? Will charges be raised against him? Will the former Yugoslav president in the foreseeable future appear in one of the courtrooms of Belgrade´s Palace of Justice to declare whether he feels guilty or innocent? Will he wake up one morning in Belgrade and fall asleep in The Hague? Will someone from the new government sign a decree on his extradition or will someone kidnap him and, like Momcilo Krajisnik, take him to Scheveningen in his pajamas? Is there a possibility that he turns himself in?

HIDDEN GUARD: At this moment, Slobodan Milosevic is peacefully strolling through the garden of the presidential mansion in Dedinje, which – according to the interpretation of deputy prime minister of the government of Serbia and acting police minister Dusan Mihajlovic – Vojislav Kostunica “left at his disposal”. There are two differences in the residence of the former president: members of the guard who are protecting the building are now located in the garden instead of on the street, and there are no more peacocks which made the building compound in Uzicka street so famous. Milosevic himself is otherwise protected by a special unit of the republican Ministry of Internal Affairs (MUP) because (Mihajlovic) “we have to protect him from those who would like to cash in the award which has been posted for him”. The police chief also stated that they know “at every moment where he is and what he´s doing”. He didn´t mention, for example, that his passport has been confiscated.

Those who would like to see the former president in a prison cell, complete with  frontal and profile police photos will probably be disappointed. That, simply, is not done to former presidents. Up to the moment of an eventual trial they remain under house arrest, a category which the law doesn´t officially recognize, but doesn´t forbid either. 

INVESTIGATION: One cannot, however, say that nothing is going on with regards to Milosevic. “The new government in Serbia is quickly collecting evidence in order to raise charges against Slobodan Milosevic for the crimes he had committed in the last 12 years, and that could be completed soon”, the Prime Minister of Serbia Zoran Djindjic said following his meeting with the US Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington on Feb. 2. He announced that the parliament would appoint a public prosecutor and judges in a few days, that they would immediately open up an investigation, but he called collecting evidence a “major task”. The Prime Minister stated that certain results could be expected in ten-fifteen days.

Moreover, the government of Serbia has proposed changes of the Law on Special Rights and Duties of the President of the Republic in parliament which reduces the number of employees which a former president is entitled to. In case the proposal is passed, the former president of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic (and the buildings in which he lives) will be guarded for life and around the clock by one employee, instead of the few as regulated by the still valid law. The former president will be able to enjoy privileges for the rest of his life under the condition that he isn´t convicted of a criminal act to an unconditional prison sentence over six months.

THE HAGUE: Finally, the federal Ministry of Justice is preparing a document which will enable “full cooperation with The Hague tribunal”. Forms of cooperation should be precisely listed in it between the authorized government bodies and the tribunal, i.e. the manner in which information and evidence will be exchanged, the forms of the trials and eventual extradition of the indictees. The Ministry didn´t specify when that document could be completed, but it is rather obvious that that will depend on political decisions since the actual time needed to draw up such an act doesn´t last long, especially since models already exist: Croatia adopted a constitutional law on cooperation with the tribunal, and BiH did the same as well as other countries. In a fairly rare example of cooperation between the federal and republic governments, the justice ministers Momcilo Grubac and Vladan Batic agreed, as Batic stated, that future contacts with The Hague tribunal will be “synchronized”.

In the meantime, news and denials, statements and counter-statements supersede each other on a daily basis, the uncomfortable subject is passed from one minister to the other – while pressure from the West is visibly increasing. Here are a few examples.

SPECULATION: The Nezavisne Novine from Banjaluka, calling upon well informed sources in the Yugoslav MUP, published that a special unit of the Serbian police is preparing to arrest the former Yugoslav president by the end of February. MUP Serbia´s spokesman Vladan Colic immediately denied that information, since that is a “routine assignment and there is no need to engage a special unit”.

The BBC broadcast a report entitled “Milosevic – a broken man” which claimed that Milosevic is never without his gun and that his family and he spend long hours watching romantic movies and listening to Russian love songs, while Moscow´s Nezavisimaja Gazeta published that Milosevic is under house arrest. “Milosevic isn´t under house arrest, nor has his security been removed”, stated the federal police minister Zoran Zivkovic that same day. The Hungarian political journal Nepsabdsag announced that the former Yugoslav president will soon be arrested and handed over to The Hague tribunal. “A bed, a little TV, a wardrobe and a shower cubicle – that´s what the cell prepared for the former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague looks like”, published Berlin´s Welt daily. The Democratic Party of Serbia´s (DSS) vice-president Vladeta Jankovic said at a press conference that Milosevic has to, as the greatest culprit towards his own people, answer in our country first. After that he could be tried abroad…

CONDITIONS: Serbia´s Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic returned from Washington with, as he said “an important and difficult condition to provide sufficient cooperation with The Hague tribunal” until March 31 as the condition for the economic and financial normalization of relations between the two countries. NATO´s general secretary George Robertson listed cooperation with The Hague tribunal as the first precondition for FRY´s entrance into the EU and Partnership for Peace, and generally, The Hague issue has become a ritual part of every meeting of our officials with foreigners.

In Stockholm, Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica requested from the EU time to resolve the Slobodan Milosevic case, as well as to separate that issue from the large amount of aid which the international community, in his words, owes FRY. However, the aggressive Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the court in The Hague, looks upon the Yugoslav government like a Doberman views someone who is holding a cutlet and refuses to hand it over. One of her more recent singled out conclusions is that Belgrade has been “hugely deceitful” and refuses to cooperate with the tribunal. “Their explanations vary from saying that the situation is dangerous, that cooperation will be another element of destabilization and those who are tried by the UN will become heroes, that the tribunal is run by the US, and finally that they cannot cooperate because of NATO´s bombardment in which Serbs were the victims”, she remarked caustically.

Still, even they have slowly started offering something in exchange for cooperation: the tribunal´s spokeswoman Florence Artman stated that an investigation of crimes against Serbs in Krajina in 1995 “exists”, and del Ponte herself mentioned that an investigation has been opened “of Kosovar Albanian forces” in order to establish whether they had committed crimes against the Serbian population in Kosovo.

DEFENSE: In the midst of it all, even Milosevic himself let his voice be heard in one of his rare interviews. He told Torino´s Stampa what he thinks about the ethics of the tribunal and the West in general, also adding that he “doesn´t have a single bank account abroad”, that he had “always lived off  his salary”, that the “new government is threatening him with court cases which have been invented in their offices”, that accusations that he and his family are involved in “dirty business deals” are a “complete lie”. He also rejected the idea that he had in any way contributed to the collapse and conflicts on the territory of former Yugoslavia and to the events in Kosovo. 

Even Milosevic´s political companions are doing their best. The honorary president of the Radical Left Party Nikola Pasic and member of the directorate of the Yugoslav Left Sinisa Vucinic accused Vladan Batic, Nenad Canak, Miroljub Labus and Velimir Ilic of “taking part in creating a plan for kidnapping and assassinating the Socialist Party of Serbia´s (SPS) president Slobodan Milosevic”. Taking on the presentation of the most unbelievable conspiracy from his predecessor in this job Goran Matic, Vucinic described the conspiratorial meeting during which the deputy prime minister of the FRY government Miroljub Labus, who otherwise personifies civilized behavior, had allegedly called together a team of Belgrade´s criminals and told them “I have the money, don´t worry”, and to contact Canak for everything else.

At the meeting between the SPS president Slobodan Milosevic and the party leadership of all levels, they discussed “animating the membership for an organized political battle”, the “most severe protest” was expressed “against the political pogrom which the SPS president Milosevic is subjected to” and it was announced that SPS “condemns and most severely opposes” the attempts of the state´s top officials and DOS leaders to, by  cooperating with The Hague tribunal, contribute to “the amnesty of NATO´s criminals”.

All together, it can be surmised that socialists in the federal parliament will have a lot to say on the announced law on cooperation with The Hague, once it comes up on the agenda. The SPS vice-president Ivica Dacic has already given out indications in that direction, stating that “for cooperation with The Hague tribunal, a national and people´s consensus must exist, and that a discussion on it should be launched in the republic and federal parliaments”.

TRIUMPH: One doesn´t get the impression that the government knows precisely what to do in the case of the former president who truly would have to answer in some way for having totally destroyed his country, viewed from any angle. “If we start dealing with Milosevic again – then that´s his triumph”, said Djindjic upon his return from Washington. 

It is certain that the new government in Belgrade – as well as the majority of the citizens of Serbia – didn´t want to, immediately after DOS has constituted its government, have to face Milosevic as the main political topic, more important than any planned reform in any field. However, that did happen, in a large measure because the West, due to its interest, has visibly intensified pressure for cooperation with the tribunal.

At the same time, the domestic public would on one had like to see Milosevic behind bars because of the financial malversations, and on the other is at odds with itself over the question of extradition to The Hague.

CHANCE: It is slowly being discerned that the majority in the government would most of all like to try Milosevic here, and to see what to do about The Hague later. "A chance should be given to the democratic institutions to prove whether they are capable, on a high level of professionalism and independence, to carry out the task of investigating criminal and penal activities and punishing the perpetrators of those acts”, said Djindjic. In the meantime, cooperation with The Hague tribunal should be conducted on an expert level and in exchanging evidence and information, “and we would gradually, during that cooperation, establish how to resolve the complex problem of punishing individuals for acts committed in the past”.

A similar sequence of events, including the many times mentioned Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was outlined by the foreign minister Goran Svilanovic: to conduct war crimes trials in Yugoslavia, with establishing frameworks for cooperation with the tribunal. Svilanovic mentioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission once again but he didn´t – nor did anyone else – say why that Commission is as elusive as a chimera, why at least some steps in that direction weren´t taken. That is no easy task: the exact task of the Commission needs to be defined, it needs to be decided whether it will operate under the government, a certain ministry or under the auspices of the FRY president, to find people of intact moral integrity, to enable them access to all the facts, to guarantee their personal safety, manner in which to inform the public of their work…

EVIDENCE: On the subject of Milosevic´s possible future trial in the country, Djindjic knew exactly what he was talking about when he mentioned the “major task” of collecting evidence. Material evidence against Milosevic is, or so it seems, extremely scarce. He simply didn´t leave any traces behind him. Experts in that field define his operation style as “operational shrewdness” and in unofficial conversations speak of his “criminalized mental make-up”, and even mention the former president as the “ideal criminal”.

The former president never submitted any report on a single aspect of his activities to anyone. On the other hand, he gave instructions to others personally, often behind closed doors. How could it be proven that, for example, he ordered his close associate and former deputy prime minister of the federal government Nikola Sainovic (who was indicted in The Hague together with Milosevic) to neutralize the Liberation Army of Kosovo (UCK) amongst other ways by killing civilians in Kosovo too; that he told the former Serbian police chief Vlajko Stojiljkovic (another Hague indictee) to murder Vuk Draskovic, Slavko Curuvija or Ivan Stambolic?

There are no notes, let alone shorthand reports from the meetings which resulted in an obvious abuse of function. Conversations with the American envoy Richard Holbrooke were, as we found out, all taped – but well informed people are also asking where those tapes are. Those who are in a position to know, mention that the now former head of the State Security department in Serbia´s MUP Rade Markovic had spent the last few months diligently destroying what little evidence there was. True, in the federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to VREME´s information, a paper was found with hand written instruction of the former foreign minister Zivadin Jovanovic: provide one million dollars for p.r. “P.R.” in the jargon of that world stood for “president of the republic”. However, that would probably be of more interest in an eventual trial of that ministry´s  perpetrators than of Milosevic himself.  

WITNESSES: Therefore, witnesses remain who in the concrete cases could only be his close associates. Assuming that Stojiljkovic or Mirko Marjanovic is willing to testify against their former boss, one can only guess what Milosevic would have to say to them in a courtroom. Beside that, it isn´t impossible that the charged Milosevic would have a lot to say about some of the current DOS leaders, which they would rather not have be known during the trial which would have to be public.

Therefore, on the one hand an objective problem exists that it would be extremely difficult to prove criminal activities of a state which in our case was a source of instability, criminal activities, destruction of the economic substance of society and mental health of its citizens for over a decade. We all know that the state brought about the downward plunge of the people, the majority of the citizens could, without effort, draw up textbooks of complaints which the former regime had committed. How many parents are left without their children and children without their parents during the wars in which Serbia didn´t take part, how much money has been robbed, why is every third citizen poor?

However, how can that be proven in court – even if all the organizational problems of the actual trial are solved and if they could prevent all those who would be interested from killing off half of the police force, prosecutors, judges, witnesses and even the indictees?

On the other hand, there is no doubt that even within the new government internal groups and a conflict of interest with regards to Milosevic´s fate exist. For example, G-17 plus will want one thing. The goal of the new head of public security of Serbia Sreten Lukic will be totally different, who, during the armed conflict, operationally led the police force in Kosovo.

LINE: On top of all that, there isn´t sufficient coordination between the segments of the government – not only because of the political differences and mutual political-trade taking over of positions, but also due to a lack of experience in the task of “governing”. Moreover, every segment – which is only natural – takes up its stand while keeping an eye on the voters and their mood.

When the line is drawn, the new leaders of Serbia and Yugoslavia have to overcome the three-dimensional migraine made up of the increasingly more dangerous crisis in the south of Serbia, its relations with Montenegro, economic catastrophe, demands of the world, the fact that some “pockets” of influence obviously exist which they don´t control - and Milosevic. 

The former president doesn´t have real power anymore but he has the strength of a symbol which, just like when he was ruling, has different meanings for different people. Whatever they decide, whoever decides – carries a certain risk. However, it is time for the new leaders to emerge from political puberty and demonstrate that, for national interests, they have mastered the art of reconciling the desirable with the possible.