War Crimes Suspect Dies In Suicide
Veteran Serbian politician and war crimes suspect Vlajko Stojiljkovic, who shot himself in the head outside the Yugoslav parliament on Thursday, died in a Belgrade hospital Saturday.
Stojiljkovic put a bullet through his head just hours after parliament passed a law under heavy U.S. financial pressure to send him and other war crimes suspects to the U.N. Hague Tribunal. He had since remained deeply unconscious and in a critical condition.
The Socialist Party, which lost power when Slobodan Milosevic was ousted in 2000, commemorated Stojiljkovic's death Monday, saying in a statement that the late police chief "will be remembered by all patriots in this country as a hero who chose death rather than be tried by the enemies he fought against."
Two other indicted war crimes suspects have said they will surrender voluntarily to the United Nations tribunal.
Nikola Sainovic, who was a top security adviser to then-President Slobodan Milosevic, "has clearly expressed his desire to voluntarily surrender" to the international war crimes court in The Hague, Netherlands, said Vladan Batic, the justice minister, on Monday.
Former Yugoslav army chief of staff General Dragoljub Ojdanic said he would not try to evade his legal obligation to appear in The Hague, the Frankfurt-based Serbian language newspaper Vesti said Sunday.
The Hague tribunal is seeking a total of 33 fugitives, about 20 of them believed to be in Yugoslavia or Bosnia's Serb republic. The most wanted are Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both charged with genocide.
Branko Djuric, head of Neurology at Belgrade Emergency Center, said doctors had succeeded in restarting Stojiljkovic's heart but could not get him to breathe without a life support machine. The bullet caused massive and irreperable damage to his skull and brain.
The burly white-haired former minister had been considered a prime candidate for an early handover to the court, where ousted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is on trial.
Stojiljkovic's dramatic suicide underscored how divisive and politically explosive the war crimes issue has become. In a note he blamed Yugoslavia's reformist leaders for his act, which provoked small but vocal protests of solidarity from nationalist sympathisers.
Analysts have said the deed seriously raised the stakes for bringing more fugitives to trial alive.
As interior minister, Stojiljkovic had responsibility for Milosevic's feared police force which has been widely accused of war crimes in Kosovo. More than 4,000 bodies have been recovered from mass graves in the province since the end of the war.
Many Serbs, however, see the campaign by their forces in Kosovo as an anti-terrorist operation to quell a guerrilla uprising. Stojiljkovic said in a 15-page handwritten suicide note that he was proud of his work at the interior ministry.
"I want to join the ranks of heroes — my policemen, members of the army and people who, showing patriotism, unprecedented heroism, readiness and decisiveness, gave their lives defending their country and their people from criminals," he wrote.
The law passed by parliament on Thursday, after more than a year of arguments among reformers and their allies, authorises the handover of suspects already indicted by the tribunal.
Yugoslavia's dominant republic Serbia has already handed over several suspects, including Milosevic. But it had balked at acting again without a law, fearing the political fallout.
The authorities' failure to surrender more suspects before a March 31 deadline set by the U.S. Congress triggered a freeze in U.S. financial aid and support in international lending bodies.