The New York Times

Thursday, July 8, 1999

TRIBUNAL

12 War-Crimes Suspects Held by NATO's Police in Kosovo

By CARLOTTA GALL

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia -- NATO military police have detained a dozen people suspected of war crimes since NATO arrived in Kosovo 25 days ago, the result, officials say, of vigorous policing and a new determination on the part of the NATO-member countries.

The 12 arrested men have not been indicted by the tribunal and do not appear on the tribunal's secret list of suspected war criminals, according to Col. Ian Waters, who, as the provost marshal, is the senior military policeman of NATO's forces in Kosovo. He said the 12 had been investigated and detained by military police where there was prima facie evidence.

The men, one Albanian and the others Serb, are all suspected of murder, "murder of a nature that would give it a classification of its own as a war crime," Waters said. The suspected crimes took place during the 10 weeks of war before NATO troops arrived in Kosovo.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague is receiving much stronger support from NATO forces in Kosovo than it has received in Bosnia, a tribunal spokesman said.

"There is no secret that we are giving maximum support" to the tribunal, Waters said in an interview Wednesday.

NATO's efforts to apprehend war criminals in Bosnia were particularly lax at the start and began to improve only after July 1997, when a tribunal spokesman said there was "a sea change in capitals around the world." Since then there have been 13 arrests by NATO forces of people indicted by the tribunal in Bosnia.

Kosovo is different, not least because those publicly indicted -- the top leadership of the country, including President Slobodan Milosevic -- are not in Kosovo but in Serbia proper.

In Kosovo, most of the evidence came from either local witnesses or the military police. In some cases military police followed up on intelligence, Waters said. "We have uncovered the evidence, interviewed witnesses and said, 'Yes, this is good evidence,' " he said.

One of the 12 arrested men has now gone before one of Kosovo's new mobile courts, organized by the U.N. mission, and was ordered held further. "We would wish to continue their detention and pass their cases on to the U.N. police," Waters said.

The men detained may well be lower-level war criminals than those who have been indicted, but it is a good start, said Jim Landale, spokesman for the tribunal. Meanwhile the tribunal is concentrating on establishing evidence to support the five public indictments of Milosevic and four of his ministers.

What has not been made public is a much longer list of secret indictments. In Kosovo only the tribunal liaison has that list. Waters says his military police can check with that person or directly with The Hague within minutes in order to detain someone. Each of the five NATO brigades around Kosovo has a liaison officer from the tribunal working with its troops.

The military police have gathered details on about 200 suspected sites of war crimes in Kosovo and have visited and secured almost every one, Waters said.

This close cooperation, and the speed of access to crime sites so soon after the war, has made the job of the tribunal staff much easier here than in Bosnia, Landale said.

With the tribunal's main suspects out of reach in Serbia, it is the military police who are likely to be the first to bring war criminals to trial in Kosovo. Within two months the number of police should reach 900, and include French gendarmes and a specialist unit of Italian carabinieri.