The New York Times

Thursday, May 27, 1999

THE INDICTMENT

Tribunal Is Said to Cite Milosevic for War Crimes

By ROGER COHEN

CHARGED UNCLEAR

Arrest could be long in Coming but case may tangle diplomacy

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- The International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague has decided to indict Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav President, for war crimes and will formally announce the action on Thursday, Western officials said Wednesday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to specify the crimes for which Milosevic is to be indicted. But Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor of the tribunal, began an investigation into responsibility for war crimes in Kosovo last year, and has intensified her inquiries in recent weeks.

The indictment of Milosevic, whose almost 12 years in power in Serbia have coincided with wave after wave of violence in the Balkans, will pose great difficulties for the diplomatic quest to end the war in Kosovo.

Milosevic has been the object of steadily harsher condemnation from NATO leaders, who have recently dropped all diplomatic niceties in referring to him. But he has remained the sole interlocutor in Belgrade for Russian-led efforts to end the war that have been broadly supported by the United States and its allies to end the war.

"In effect, this decision has pulled out the rug from under the negotiating process," said one court official. Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian envoy to the Balkans, is due to visit Belgrade Thursday for a meeting with Milosevic.

Paul Risley, a spokesman for the tribunal, said the court's decision would be announced at a news conference Thursday afternoon, but would give no further details.

If the past is any precedent, Western governments may find themselves obliged to shun Milosevic, who has always denied any responsibility for Serbian war crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo.

When the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, and his top military officer, Gen. Ratko Mladic, were indicted for war crimes in Bosnia by the tribunal in 1995, Western leaders took the view that all official contacts with them should cease.

Although the indictment will formally oblige Western governments and other authorities to seek the arrest of Milosevic, it is unclear whether they will energetically pursue that aim. Karadzic and Mladic were indicted four years ago and their whereabouts are well-known to the NATO troops stationed in Bosnia, but neither man has been arrested. Unlike those two men, Milosevic is a head of state, which may make any attempt to detain him even more complicated.

If Western governments determine that they can no longer do business with Milosevic, the only alternative would appear to be his defeat and removal from office. But NATO has said repeatedly that this is not one of its war aims.

"The tribunal is an independent body, and we respect its decision," said Michael Steiner, the chief diplomatic adviser to Gerhard Schroeder, the German chancellor. "There is no point complaining or applauding. Now we will just have to see how the whole legal, military and diplomatic cocktail works."

It has been just four years since Milosevic was invited to the United States to participate in the Dayton peace conference and became the Balkan politician around whom the Clinton administration built a tenuous peace accord.

But the brutality of the Serbian campaign to expel about 1 million ethnic Albanians from Kosovo since NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began two months ago appears to have convinced President Clinton and many other Western leaders that stability in the Balkans is incompatible with Milosevic's rule.

Arbour, who only two months ago complained about the degree of cooperation from Western governments, has received extensive assistance from Western intelligence agencies in recent weeks, notably during visits to London; Bonn, Germany, and Washington, officials said.

This information has complemented the research of court investigators who have been questioning ethnic Albanian refugees in Kosovo and Macedonia. A month ago, Arbour said that her aim was to establish the responsibility for war crimes in Kosovo in "something close to real time."

The slow-moving investigation into Milosevic's responsibilities for crimes in Bosnia and Kosovo -- an inquiry that was started shortly after the court was established in 1993 -- has accelerated dramatically in recent weeks.

What precisely Milosevic will be charged with is unclear. Several western politicians -- including the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping -- have called the crimes in Kosovo "genocide." It is possible, but not certain, that the Yugoslav leader could be charged with genocide.

If Milosevic is ever brought to trial in The Hague, it appears certain that the primary difficulty of the investigators will be in establishing a credible link between him and the killing, looting, rape and other crimes that appear to have been committed by the Serbian forces marauding through Kosovo since the NATO bombing began.

Milosevic has argued that Albanians have been fleeing Kosovo because of the NATO bombing, which his government has described as an act of "genocide" by Western governments.

The Yugoslav leader has long honed the art of "plausible deniability" -- setting foot in Bosnia only once during the war, claiming ignorance of the actions of his army commanders, and avoiding written communication that has his name on it.

For example, he has long maintained that Bosnian Serb forces had no link to the Yugoslav army during the Bosnian war, although all the officers were on the Yugoslav army payroll. Similarly, he dismissed the Serb-run prison camps for Muslims in Bosnia as "Muslim propaganda."

Although the tribunal is avowedly not political, its decision to indict Milosevic comes at a time when a sea change has occurred in the attitude of Western governments toward the Serbian leader.

Until the events of the last two months, Western leaders refrained from direct criticism of a man who had been the lynchpin of the Dayton agreement.

This approach was consistent with the attitude that enabled Milosevic to be invited to the London peace conference on Yugoslavia in 1992 just weeks after an archipelago of brutal Serbian camps in Bosnia had been discovered. Similarly, three years later, he was invited to Dayton just months after the massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica.

But in recent weeks, Robin Cook, the British foreign secretary, has threatened Milosevic with extraordinary directness. "We know who you are," he said. "We know what your troops are doing. There will be no hiding place."

At the same time, Jacques Chirac, the French president, has started called Milosevic "le dictateur" -- an extraordinary departure from Gallic formality in addressing an elected head of state, albeit one heading a notoriously repressive system.

And Clinton has not hidden his radical rethinking of the Balkan conflict, apologizing for past statements in which he attributed the killing to "ancient tribal rivalries" and addressing Milosevic's responsibilities with a new and punishing directness.

The Serbian acts in Kosovo, in so far as it has been possible to determine them up to now, appear to bear a striking resemblance to actions in Bosnia, where over 750,000 Muslims were driven from their homes between April and September 1992.

But seven years later, a Western readiness to confront these actions through judicial methods and the use of force appears to have emerged after a long period of uncertainty. How, or if, these methods can be combined with diplomacy involving Milosevic remains unclear.

"If you are just looking at a tactical, day-by-day approach, this may look like a setback," said Steiner, the German diplomat. "But perhaps in terms of long-term strategy, it will not prove to be a setback after all."