SERBS FLED WITH PRISONERS

NATO Made Serious Mistake, Red Cross Says, In Not Demanding Access to Jailed Kosovars

By Paul Watson

Los Angeles Times - International Herald Tribune, June 24, 1999

To the Serbian state, Dr. Flore Brovina's orphanage, her first-aid courses and even her knitting classes were part of a terrorist plot. They were crimes so serious that before President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia gave in to NATO and pulled his forces out of Kosovo, his police moved Dr. Brovina from a provincial jail to another region of Serbia. For her, peace did not mean freedom. As most of Kosovo's residents celebrate what they see as liberation by NATO, Dr. Brovina and hundreds of other ethnic Albanians are locked away in jails elsewhere in Serbia. "I think these people are being held as hostages by Serbia to use them for bargaining," Dr. Brovina's husband, Ajri Begu, said in an interview Tuesday. Dr. Brovina has high blood pressure and is partially paralyzed because of the stress of her prison ordeal, said Mr. Begu, an economist and writer. He has appealed to U.S. diplomats and NATO's commander in Kosovo, British Lieutenant General Mike Jackson, to help Dr. Brovina get medical treatment, but her ca

se is only one on a growing list. Dr. Brovina's court-appointed Serbian lawyer, Zarko Jovanovic, told Mr. Begu that around 1,500 ethnic Albanian prisoners were transferred to 10 Serbian jails outside of Kosovo and remain behind bars, Mr. Begu said. No one outside the Yugoslav and Serbian governments can be sure because, in what the International Committee of the Red Cross considers a serious mistake, NATO did not insist that foreign monitors have access to Kosovo Albanian prisoners as a condition for the peace deal it reached with Mr. Milosevic earlier this month. "We must recognize that in a political agreement like that, humanitarian issues are not on top," Urs Boegli, a Red Cross spokesman, said in an interview in Pristina. "However, we do like them to be somewhere. And if asked, we would definitely have advocated that a place be given to them. Dr. Brovina, a pediatrician, is so famous among Kosovo Albanians for helping war orphans, the sick and the poor that everyone, it seems, knows who you are talking

about when you say the name Flore. Her husband, who spent most of the war in Macedonia, cannot walk anywhere here in the provincial capital without someone asking where she is. Dr. Brovina's orphanage in central Pristina, which once was home for about 25 children at any given time, is empty. No one knows where the children, who lost their parents to the civil war, have gone. Dr. Brovina's husband was in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia and Serbia, when the bombing began in late March, but she refused to flee Kosovo and the people who needed her more than ever. Instead, she moved into a neighbor's apartment, hoping the police might find her home empty and think she and her husband were long gone. But onApril 20, eight Serbian police officers came in two cars and waited secretly in the stairwell and outside for Dr. Brovina to arrive. They grabbed her as she walked through the lobby door. "All the time, she was working," her husband said. "She wanted to help people. She never tried to leave." At first, Dr. B

rovina was taken to a jail in Lipjlan, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of Pristina. But on June 9 or 10, while Mr. Milosevic's government was negotiating final details of the Yugoslav withdrawal from Kosovo, Serbian police moved Dr. Brovina to Pozarevac prison near Belgrade, her husband said. The charges against Dr. Brovina were filed in a Pristina court, with Investigative Judge Danica Marinkovic presiding. The judge is widely feared in the province for decisions viewed as biased in favor of the police. The indictment accuses Dr. Brovina of "joining in enemy duties," committing "criminal acts endangering the territorial integrity" of Yugoslavia, and terrorism. The crimes of which she is accused date back to May 13, 1991, and continued until May 17 of this year, police charge. Among other things, Dr. Brovina is charged with organizing "the making of pullover sweaters and also masks for members of the terrorist band KLA," the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, and with "supplying food, shoes and clothing

for the same people" from her orphanage. In count one, Dr. Brovina stands accused of taking part "in creating a society whose purpose" is to win Kosovo's independence from Yugoslavia. From the start of 1998, "she took part in creating terrorist gangs called the KLA," the indictment added. Dr. Brovina also committed criminal acts by taking part in meetings in March of the Independent Federation of Trade Unions, the Islamic Community and the Humanitarian Society of Mother Teresa, the charge sheet adds. If convicted, she could receive 10 years in jail. In denying bail, the judge said Dr. Brovina must be held while awaiting trial so the defendant could not interfere with witnesses.