The New York Times

Monday, June 7, 1999

THE COURT

War Crimes Investigators Prepare for Kosovo

By MARLISE SIMONS

PARIS -- Investigators of the international tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, are preparing to enter Kosovo with the multinational peacekeeping force to insure that they can gather the freshest possible evidence of war crimes, tribunal and Western officials say.

The details of how they will travel and where they will go are still being worked out, the officials said. But Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor of the tribunal, has received promises from NATO headquarters that its forces will provide logistical support, such as providing security and clearing mines at sites where investigators need to work.

Britain has offered to escort investigators as its troops enter Kosovo to help them start their inquiries immediately.

"We do want to see tribunal investigators go into Kosovo hard on the heels of NATO," Charles Haye, a Foreign Office spokesman in London, said.

If the plan is followed, it will introduce a new and more urgent approach to the court's work. In Bosnia and Croatia, where the tribunal has recorded war crimes, court staff have also received some help from the international forces once they were in place. But the investigators often reached witnesses or burial sites months or even years after the violent incidents they were investigating.

Ms. Arbour has said she expects Kosovo to be a turning point. Her aim is now to do research on the ground as soon as possible following the large scale Yugoslav military operations. She has toured Western capitals to persuade governments of the need to work in "something close to real time" in Kosovo. "It is critical that we enter at the earliest opportunity," she said.

Several countries, including the United States, Britain, France and Germany, have also pledged to send national teams to assist the tribunal in the clearly enormous task awaiting it.

A British government spokesman said that London had put together a team of 15, most of them forensic specialists. In Paris, a spokesman at the Foreign Ministry said that France was providing at least a dozen ballistic experts, forensic doctors and police photographers to assist inquiries. Tribunal staff will direct the national teams.

Evidently, the court already has considerable evidence of crimes against humanity in Kosovo, part of which was used to support the recent indictment of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president, and four of his top officials. The indictment describes numerous incidents of brutality as well as the mass execution of hundreds of civilians and the forced deportation of 740,000 ethnic Albanians.

But officials said much more work was needed to expand the court's larger investigation, which will serve to bolster the existing indictments and to bring future cases. Prosecutors have said there will be other indictments relating to Kosovo. But they say time is of the essence.

"Our investigators must be able to get in there as quickly as possible to secure crime sites, to contact and protect potential witnesses who may not have left Kosovo," said Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor. "There is a lot of forensic evidence to be gathered."

Some of that evidence has already been tampered with, according to NATO, which has provided U.S. spy satellite photographs showing that Yugoslav forces recently opened up mass graves and reburied bodies in individual graves.

The tribunal's work in Kosovo, which began more a year ago, has faced many obstacles. As the conflict there intensified last spring, the court had to raise additional funds before it could hire extra staff and translators.

Human rights workers complained that in several villages court investigators failed to question witnesses to massacres. But tribunal officials said their investigators were being followed by Serb police and they did not want to give away people's hiding places by approaching them then. By September, Yugoslavia had blocked the court's work by refusing to issue visas to its staff.