Official: Milosevic on Way to War Crimes Court
June 28, 2001 01:46 PM ET
Reuters Photo
By Andrew Gray
BELGRADE (Reuters) - Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was handed
over to the custody of the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague
on Thursday, the Serbian government said.
"The former president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia has been handed
over to the Hague authorities," Nemanja Kolesar, a spokesman for Serbian
Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, said in a brief statement to reporters.
Exact details of the handover were not immediately available but a Serbian
political source had earlier told Reuters that Milosevic was on his way to
The Hague.
Belgrade's B92 radio and Beta news agency, citing their own sources, also
reported the handover was under way.
Milosevic, 59, central figure in a decade of Balkan wars, was indicted by
the tribunal in The Hague in May 1999. He is charged with crimes against
humanity and accused of responsibility for mass killings and expulsions of
ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Tribunal prosecutors have said they also plan to charge him for war crimes
committed in Bosnia and Croatia.
Western officials immediately expressed satisfaction at the news of
Milosevic's handover.
"This is where we have always said he belongs. The government and people of
Yugoslavia have made the right choice," a North Atlantic Treaty Organization
official said in Brussels.
Earlier on Thursday, Yugoslavia's Constitutional Court ordered a freeze on
moves to hand Milosevic over to the tribunal.
But reformist Yugoslav leaders, who ousted the longtime leader in a mass
uprising last October, had made clear they regarded the court as an
undemocratic relic of the Milosevic era and would not abide by its ruling.
Milosevic's lawyers had argued that a government decree on cooperation with
the tribunal, pushed through by reformist ministers at the weekend, violated
a constitutional ban on the extradition of Yugoslav citizens.
But backers of the measure said handing a suspect over to The Hague did not
amount to an extradition as the tribunal is a U.N. institution, not a
foreign state.
Serbian News Network - SNN
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http://www.antic.org/
