PARIS -- UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan dismissed a suggestion by his Balkans envoy that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic should be granted immunity from war-crimes charges if he agrees to step down.

"He's indicted," Mr. Annan said yesterday in Paris, where he was lending his weight to Mideast peace talks.

"The [United Nations war-crimes] tribunal is waiting for him and, if he's delivered, he will be tried."

Earlier, a spokesman for Mr. Annan, Fred Eckhard, said the UN chief was "surprised" by the recommendation from the UN human-rights envoy for Yugoslavia, Jiri Dienstbier.

Mr. Milosevic, who is facing massive public unrest for refusing to accept what is assumed to be his defeat in the Sept. 24 elections, has been indicted for war crimes in Kosovo.

After returning from Belgrade early yesterday, Mr. Dienstbier told reporters in Prague that punishing Mr. Milosevic should not take precedence over "the future of 10 million Serbs and probably the whole Balkans.

"The only possible deal, and the most important thing for Mr. Milosevic, is to have guarantees that if he leaves power, he will not be prosecuted and will not spend the rest of his life somewhere in prison," the former Czech foreign minister said.

Jim Landale, a spokesman for the 14-judge panel of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, called the reported comments "extremely disturbing." He stressed that the indictment could only be withdrawn by a judge at the request of UN chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.

Ms. Del Ponte's spokesman, Paul Risley, noted the prosecutor's repeated refusal to consider dropping the indictment.

On the contrary, he said, Ms. Del Ponte is working to expand the indictment to include charges of war crimes allegedly committed earlier during the ethnic conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia.

She has also said she plans to charge Mr. Milosevic with genocide, the most serious crime under international law.

Mr. Risley said new indictments would be intended "to underscore the severity of the tribunal's view of Slobodan Milosevic as an actor in the conflict that was created in Yugoslavia."