War Crimes Suspect Defiant
A top associate of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic refused to surrender to police Wednesday, defying Serbian plans to deliver top suspects to the U.N. war crimes tribunal.
"I'm not afraid to be arrested," retired Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic said in a statement relayed to The Associated Press by his family. "But I will surrender only if a law on cooperation with The Hague tribunal is passed in the Yugoslav parliament."
Ojdanic, who commanded the Yugoslav army under Milosevic during the 1999 NATO air strikes against the country, is one of four top suspects listed by the Serbian government to be extradited to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica has also opposed extraditions without a special domestic legislature. However, the government of Serbia, the larger of Yugoslavia's two remaining republics, has said it has no time to waste for the law to be passed before the arrests are made because of the threat of punitive U.S. sanctions.
Yugoslavia missed a U.S. deadline last Sunday to demonstrate cooperation with the tribunal and found aid from Washington, worth about $40 million, frozen.
Officials have, however, signaled people accused by the court in The Hague will soon be handed over, stressing Belgrade's need for money rather than the need for justice.
"Without pressure nothing would happen. They would never do it willingly," said Sonja Biserko at the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, a non-governmental organization. "Cooperation with The Hague is presented as a necessary evil."
Threatened with a similar ultimatum in March last year, the authorities arrested Milosevic just ahead of Washington's deadline. Three months later, he was shipped to the tribunal, a day before a donors' conference which yielded $1.3 billion.
Serbia has said it will arrest and extradite Ojdanic, Milan Milutinovic, the current Serbian president; Nikola Sainovic, Milosevic's top security adviser and former deputy prime minister; and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, a former Serbian interior minister.
Kostunica, whose powers are mostly ceremonial, has little leverage. Serbian authorities delivered Milosevic to the U.N. tribunal last June, despite Kostunica's opposition.
Ojdanic, who has left Belgrade for an undisclosed location in Yugoslavia, said in the statement that he "feels fine" despite the pressure.
Dusan Bajatovic, a spokesman for Milosevic's party, said Sainovic and Stojiljkovic are in Yugoslavia and that they don't intend to "surrender voluntarily."
A diplomat in Belgrade, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Milosevic's loyalists had tried to arrange for the war crimes suspects to escape to another country. The initiative was rejected, the diplomat added, declining to give details.
Meanwhile, the Serbian parliament started debating the republic's new union with Montenegro, the smaller Yugoslav republic.
In an accord reached under the European Union's auspices, Kostunica and Montenegro's president Milo Djukanovic agreed to radically restructure Yugoslavia into a loose union that would be renamed "Serbia and Montenegro." The deal must be ratified by parliaments in both republics by June.
The start of the debate Wednesday was marked by another clash between Kostunica's deputies and officials allied with Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic. Kostunica's deputies walked out of the parliament session after Djindjic's deputies voted not to allow Kostunica to address the parliament at the end of the debate.