The New York Times

Friday, June 23, 2000

U.N. Mission in Kosovo Proposes to Set Up a War Crimes Court

By CARLOTTA GALL

PRISTINA, Kosovo, June 22 -- The head of the United Nations mission in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, plans to create an internationally run court to try war and ethnic crimes in the province, an official in Dr. Kouchner's agency said today.

"This will be the first court of its nature," said the official, Fernando Castanon, who heads the prosecution services in the United Nations administration and who will coordinate the court installation. "It is a response to such a need for justice."

The proposed tribunal, the Kosovo War and Ethnic Crimes Court, would be headed by international judges and prosecutors and supplemented by equal numbers of Albanian, Serbian and other ethnic judges. Experts expect the court to break ground in pursuing justice after the Kosovo conflict, blending the impartiality and scope of an international tribunal with the immediacy of locally executed justice.

Proposed by a commission of Albanian and international legal experts last year, the court plan has languished as an idea, neglected as the United Nations administration tried to establish a local judiciary. But Serbian judges have refused or been intimidated from serving on the local courts, leaving the system hopelessly one-sided. The proposal for the special court has emerged as the crucial element and, perhaps, last chance to bring justice and reconciliation to Kosovo.

The court would be a specialized agency, with precedence over local courts and concentrating on war crimes in the Kosovo conflict and on serious crimes since the war that have racial, ethnic or political grounds. Its mandate would cover war crimes committed by Serbs in the conflict, and the court would try Albanians in the abductions and killings of Serbs and other minorities during and after the war.

Dr. Kouchner is widely expected to sign a regulation to establish the court in 15 days. According to a United Nations official who is close to him, Dr. Kouchner has made his decision in recognition that attempts to give the local judiciary a chance have failed.

"Kouchner thinks we need a credible judiciary," the official said. "Taking stock of one year in office, that is our failure. The only way to kick start it now is with internationals."

As violence continues to simmer between the majority Albanian and dwindling Serbian communities, a judicial system is essential if international peacekeepers, police forces and administrators are to stabilize the province, said Kosovare Kelmendi, an Albanian lawyer who heads the Pristina office of the Humanitarian Center for Law. "It has to start as fast as possible," Ms. Kelmendi said.

A year after the conflict ended and the United Nations took over, Albanian victims of Serbian forces' war crimes have yet to see justice in the courts. The International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has indicted President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia and four others, and it is preparing additional charges. But prosecutors concede that they cannot handle all the cases.