The New York Times

Friday, June 18, 1999

Brits: Serbs Must Give Up Milosevic

By The Associated Press

LONDON (AP) -- Britain said today that Yugoslavia must surrender President Slobodan Milosevic and others accused of war crimes if the country wants to rejoin the international community.

Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said the NATO alliance had a ``very real commitment'' to bringing war crimes suspects accused of human rights violations in Kosovo to trial before the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague.

``It will be expected as a member of the international community to surrender those war criminals inside Serbia,'' Cook said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview.

Cook likened atrocities carried out by Serb forces under Milosevic's rule to the Nazi Holocaust, although not on the same scale.

``It is deeply disturbing that in our age and time such appalling acts of inhumanity could be carried out, because they are based on the poisonous doctrine from Belgrade that the Albanians were somehow ethnically inferior,'' Cook said.

``The appalling mass deportations we saw from Pristina, particularly the use of the railways, is evocative of what happened under Hitler and again under Stalin,'' he said.