World

Kostunica Mum On Extraditions

January 25, 2001 / 10:13 AM EST / CBS/AP

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica on Monday promised "step by step" cooperation with the U.N. war crimes tribunal, but refused to say whether that would eventually include extraditing former President Slobodan Milosevic for trial.

Kostunica suggested that leaders of NATO and the West also should answer to the tribunal for their part in the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia to force Milosevic, his predecessor, to end his crackdown on Kosovo.

"Our willingness to cooperate, it exists," he said, of the tribunal.

"We are going to go step by step," he added, pointing to the recent visit of the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, and the opening of a tribunal office in Belgrade. "But nowhere is it written that cooperation should be reduced to the extradition of any one person."

At the end of her visit last week, Del Ponte criticized Kostunica for turning down her demand for the extradition of Milosevic and others indicted by the tribunal on suspicion of complicity in war crimes during the last decade of Balkan wars that accompanied the independence strivings of non-Serb nationalities within the federation.

The Accused

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, created by the United Nations Security Council in 1993, is located in The Hague, Netherlands, and consists of judges from 14 countries, including the United States.

It has indicted 96 people. Thirty-four are detained, 27 are at large and 31 have either died, been acquitted or had the charges against them dropped.

Click here to read the indictment against Slobodan Milosevic.

Click here to see the charges against Radovan Karadzic.

Kostunica argues that Yugoslav law does not permit the extradition of citizens to be tried by foreign courts, a stance that even some of his supporters question, by pointing out that the tribunal is extraterritorial because it is run by the United Nations.

At a news conference at the World Economic Forum of business and government leaders, Kostunica sidestepped a question about whether he would like to see Milosevic surrender voluntarily, like former Bsnian Serb president Biljana Plavsic did this month.

"It depends on the person," he said. "Then we're also in need of more people (surrendering), not only Milosevic and not only in Serbia."

He mentioned not only Bosnia and Croatia, but also NATO and Western political leaders responsible for the bombing of Yugoslavia during 1999. The bombing ended in mid-1999 after Milosevic agreed to pull his forces out of Kosovo, a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.

Kostunica, Yugoslavia's first democratically elected president, left the forum after the news conference, skipping a planned afternoon panel on Yugoslavia. No reason was given, but Yugoslav media reported it was due to the latest violence near the Kosovo boundary.

Four Yugoslav army soldiers were injured Sunday amid reports of new skirmishes involving government troops and ethnic Albanian rebels.

At the news conference, Kostunica said "more radical solutions" were needed to stop the violence in the Presevo Valley area. He said he was not advocating "using violence or force," but rather shrinking the five-kilometer (three-mile) buffer zone around Kosovo that heavily armed Serb and Yugoslav forces are barred from under Kosovo peace terms.

He said he had "fruitful discussions" with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Sunday about sending international or European Union monitors to the region.