War Crimes Suspects To Surrender
A former deputy prime minister who is a war crimes suspect has told the Serbian authorities he wants to surrender to a United Nations tribunal, the republic's justice minister said Monday.
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.
Sainovic, who was one of Milosevic's most trusted men in charge of secret missions during the Balkan wars, was the second top war crimes suspect who reportedly said he was willing to give himself up to The Hague after the federal parliament passed an extradition law last week.
A former Yugoslav army chief also is ready to surrender to the U.N. war crimes tribunal, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
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.
"They can arrest me straight away but there is no need as I am not going to run away or hide," Vesti quoted him as saying.
However, Milosevic's Socialist Party spokesman Branko Ruzic denied Monday that Ojdanic or Sainovic are willing to surrender voluntarily
"Those are all manipulations created by the Serbian government," Ruzic said.
The Hague court indicted Ojdanic and Sainovic for alleged crimes against humanity during the 1999 Kosovo war. They were indicted along with Milosevic, who is currently standing trial at the tribunal for alleged war crimes during the wars in the Balkans in 1990s.
Former Serbian police chief Vlajko Stojiljkovic, also a Kosovo war crimes suspect, shot himself in the head in front of the parliament Thursday to protest the law. He died in a hospital Saturday.
Stojiljkovic's suicide and the potential arrest of suspects have heightened tensions between hard-liners and pro-Western politicians in Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic.
The Socialist Party, which lost power when 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."
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.
The new law calls for a two-week court procedure before their extradition to The Hague.
In a show of defiance against the law, walls in downtown Belgrade were covered Monday with Karadzic's posters saying, "Every Serb Is Radovan." The posters were plastered by an ultra-nationalist youth group.