3 November 2003 Morning Edition

Kosovo News

· Balkan history ethnic cleansing to content cleansing (Reuters)
· 'A second chance to rebuild our home' (Guardian)
· Montenegro, Albania, UN Ink Pact In Organized Crime Fight (AP)
· Covic refuses call to abolish interim Kosovo bodies (FoNet)
· UNMIK bans Nikolic election campaign in Kosovo (FoNet)
· Belgrade supports "standards before status" approach (Serbian Government)
· Ombudsman Nowicki calls for protection of Serbs in Obilic (Serbian Government)

Regional News

· Top candidate calls for compromise over Serb war crimes suspects (AP)
· Svilanovic expects new indictments (B92)
· Three Serb officials probed by tribunal -minister (Reuters)
· Serbia publishes list of presidential candidates (AP)
· Macedonia launches campaign for civilians to hand in illegal weapons (AFP)
· Macedonia's Crvenkovski replaces four ministers (dpa)

Other News

· Former Balkans negotiator Owen takes the stand in Milosevic trial (AFP)
· Swedish police turn up trousers soaked in Lindh's blood: report (AFP)

Balkan history ethnic cleansing to content cleansing

By Zoran Radosavljevic

ZAGREB, Nov 3 (Reuters) - History may be life's teacher, but not in the Balkans. Its most recent chapter, of wars, atrocities and ethnic cleansing, has been banished from school books to keep children and parents happy.

Thousands of refugees remain homeless, villages razed and towns damaged by shells, but for Bosnian pupils --Muslims, Croats and Serbs alike -- the wars which followed the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s have been air-brushed from history.

This part of their school books is content-free. Ethnic leaders and their Western supervisors feel it is for the best.

Modern history in schools does not go beyond Bosnia's 1992 independence. Textbooks say nothing about the war that ripped the young country apart and claimed 200,000 lives.

Albanians in Kosovo, a Serbian province run by the United Nations, will also have to omit recent history to avoid any mention in schools of their conflict with the Serbs, which in 1999 triggered NATO's first war and the bombing of Yugoslavia.

Their counterparts in Serbia learn that the decade after the break-up of the Yugoslav federation in 1991 was a time when Serbs suffered more than any other ethnic group in the region.

The ensuing wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo -- all of which involved Serbs -- merit two lines at best. Slobodan Milosevic, who ruled Serbia for a decade and is being tried for war crimes by a U.N. court in The Hague, is not even mentioned.

A brief review of history books for 14-year-olds in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo shows that politicians, historians and education experts agreed only that recent history was too complex to be taught.

But the children do not suffer from memory loss. They've paid attention to their parent's conversation, to television programmes and playground games, and they are not fooled.
``Milosevic is my reality and many children's reality in Kosovo. His policemen killed my cousin. If I must study Romans and Greeks and their empires, why not Milosevic's regime and his deeds in my neighborhood?'' said Albiona Berisha, a 13-year-old Kosovo Albanian. Her reaction is typical.

DON'T MENTION THE WAR
The problem was summed up by prominent Kosovo historian Fehmi Rexhepi. ``International experts told us that children deserve more light history, without crime or killing, but they have not told us what we should do precisely,'' he said.
Bosnian teachers of all three ethnic groups, taking their cue from Western experts, agreed to sacrifice recent history for the sake of multi-ethnic peace while the country remains as firmly divided into Serb and Muslim-Croat halves as it was in 1995.

From now on, only textbooks cleansed of content and language that can be seen as offensive by other ethnic groups may be published and used in schools.

Teachers are also advised to refer to the war, which pitted separatist Bosnian Serbs, backed by nationalists in Serbia, against Muslims and Croats, as 'the unfortunate conflict'.

Before that, education in Bosnia was divided along ethnic lines: students in Croat-dominated areas used Croatian textbooks and learned Croatian history, while those in the Serb Republic were taught that their region was a separate state with closer links with Serbia than with the rest of Bosnia.

Falk Pingel, a Western education expert, said teachers were asked to settle on uncontested periods in history, where they could agree on a common core.

``We cannot expect that Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks (Muslims) think about the most contested issue -- the last war -- in the same way. Even if we agree on the facts and events, there will be no common interpretation of that,'' Pingel said.

STOP PRETENDING
In Croatia, where about 90 percent of the population are Roman Catholic Croats, everything looked problem-free and no one thought of possible objections from ethnic minorities until now.

The last decade was explained in schools as a heroic time when Zagreb proclaimed independence from Yugoslavia and then fought a four-year war to become finally free, during which thousands of ethnic Serbs fled to Bosnia or Serbia.

But a five-year moratorium on teaching recent history in Eastern Slavonia, the last region with a considerable Serb population, expired in October. It raised the problem of teaching events sensitive to both Croats and Serbs.

Although no one knows yet what new textbooks specially devised for the region will say, officials decided to tackle the problem.

``The easiest thing is to give up and extend the moratorium. But there is a consensus among teachers, local and government officials that we must find a way for all children to learn the same, however difficult this may be,'' an education ministry official told Reuters.

The region returned to Croatia's control in January 1998, after being held by Serb rebels since 1991.
It was the scene of one of the worst atrocities of the conflict -- the siege of the eastern town of Vukovar by Serb and Yugoslav troops, who reduced it to rubble and killed more than 200 patients taken from a local hospital.

Natasa Jovicic, a sociologist who headed an independent expert group which reviewed textbooks in Croatia this year, said she doubted the Bosnian model was good.

``Of course you do need some time distance, but I don't think it has to be that long. I think it is well known what really happened, so they could just as well start teaching it.''
She said the entire education system in the Balkans needed a thorough overhaul. ``Local primary schools still produce young people full of prejudice and hate. That is hardly a ticket for the European Union.''

(Additional reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic in Sarajevo, Gordana Kukic and Beti Bilandzic in Belgrade, Shaban Buza in Pristina)

'A second chance to rebuild our home'

A new sense of optimism is taking hold in Kosovo, despite discontent with its UN administration. Helena Smith reports

Guardian

"Are you a Cooleka?" asks Perparim, the affable owner of Pristina's highly popular Thai restaurant.
"In Kosovo now, Coolers and Coolekas - cool guys, cool gals - are everywhere," he says. "They're people who just want to have a good time, who want to get on with life, who no longer want to hate the Serbs."

It's 1am, and the tall, bespectacled restaurateur is explaining the new, upbeat mood that has taken hold of the province's overwhelmingly young Albanian population.

To illustrate his point, he has taken me from his funky, New York-style eatery to At Eight, a ground-floor bar that is the latest addition to the UN protectorate's flourishing caf¿ society.

Like Bacchus, the fine wine shop next door, this packed establishment provides ample evidence of Kosovo's gradual return to normality, four years after NATO weighed in with an air campaign to bring peace to this part of the Balkans.

"Our intention is to make Pristina a beautiful, fun place, with lots of parks and public art works," says Zake Prelvukay, who opened At Eight this month. "As you can see, things are changing fast."

Kosovo's pre-eminent contemporary artist, Prelvukay is the embodiment of the new civic pride sweeping the once famously inhospitable capital.

Encouraged by Pristina's visionary mayor, the raven-haired artist has been hard at work creating brightly-coloured murals around the litter-strewn city. Such embellishments would have been unthinkable during Slobodan Milosevic's long reign of terror.

Not since Kosovo's golden age in the 70s, when the Yugoslav republic was granted an unprecedented degree of autonomy under Marshall Broz Tito, have Kosovar Albanians had it so good, even if resentment with the UN administration is running high.

"Out of all our non-luck came luck," says Perparim, referring to the vast amount of international aid that has been poured into the province since its liberation following the 1999 war. "It is as though we have been given a second chance to rebuild our own home."

Despite the UN's refusal to hand over total power to the elected, Albanian-led, provisional government, Kosovo is now widely seen as one of the world's most audacious experiments in nation-building.

Last night, the UN security council was able to scrutinize the progress made so far during a rare open session dedicated exclusively to the province.

A report by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, on UNMIK - the UN mission that has ultimate unilateral control over Kosovo's foreign and monetary policy, judicial appointments and budget - was central to the debate.

Constructing the peace has proved to be far from easy. Although life has demonstrably improved under the UN's guardianship, Kosovo's transformation into a modern, multi-ethnic society, the international community's much-vaunted aim, continues to remain elusive.

Addressing the Security Council in New York, Kosovo's chief UN administrator, Harri Holkeri, offered a bleak picture.

"The way of Kosovo is not rosy at all and, for my part, I think it will be an uphill battle," said the former Finnish prime minister, who took up the post in August.

"But Kosovo is not - is not - a mission impossible, as it has been regarded sometimes."
This week, in a stark reminder of the territory's ethnic fault lines, seven Serbs from the village of Banjewere were attacked by unknown gunmen as they headed to their orchards near a village populated exclusively by Albanians.

The ethnic violence explains why so few refugees have returned to the province: even if they do come back, Serbs and other minority communities are forced to live in isolated enclaves under the watchful eye of an estimated 20,000 KFOR international peacekeepers.

But what worries Kosovars more, and sets such a disturbing precedent for Iraq and other trouble spots, is the apparent unwillingness of their international overlords to allow them more self-rule.

How, in its current limbo as a non-state entity, can Kosovo properly develop, they ask? Until its murky international status is settled, the province (which still formally belongs to Belgrade), cannot even borrow credit to prop up an economy that appears to have gone into freefall, with unemployment soaring.

"Our biggest problem is that the west will not let us just govern ourselves," says Bajram Rexhepi, a former surgeon who was elected prime minister in March last year.

"What we want is independence. The UN has this catchphrase that we must meet certain 'standards before status'. But what other country in the world has had to do that? Like this, our people have no hope, no prospects. It's just not fair."

Outside Pristina, in the dirt-poor villages and hamlets that have yet to see a Cooler or Cooleka, the mood seems anything but upbeat.

There, democracy has brought new struggles in the form of day-to-day survival. As they fight just to keep warm, Kosovars of all creeds are united in the conviction that this is likely to be a winter of great discontent.

Montenegro, Albania, UN Ink Pact In Organized Crime Fight

PODGORICA, Serbia-Montenegro (AP)--Top security officials of Montenegro, Albania and representatives of the U.N. administration for Kosovo signed an agreement Friday aimed at closer cooperation in the fight against organized crime.

Montenegrin Interior Minister Milan Filipovic, his Albanian counterpart, Thoma Jano, and Jan Christian Cady of the U.N. police in Kosovo signed the document.

"This will provide an institutional framework within which we are going to work from now on," Cady said. "Policemen on each side of the...border can exchange their information and, therefore, be more efficient."

Porous and mountainous borders in the area, along with years of wars and occasional collapse of law and order, have allowed organized crime to flourish in the Balkans.

Covic refuses call to abolish interim Kosovo bodies (FoNet)

BELGRADE -- Saturday – The chairman of Belgrade’s Kosovo Coordination Centre, Nebojsa Covic, has turned down a request from Kosovo governor Harri Holkeri for the abolition of interim institutions in Kosovo.

Covic said that there could be no compromise about the authorities of the UN representative and that Belgrade would not yield to pressure.

“How can you speak of parallel and multiethnic institutions when, for example, MPs from the Return Coalition arrive at sittings of the Kosovo Assembly in armoured vehicles, when four or five police are needed to guard each MP?” said Covic.

UNMIK bans Nikolic election campaign in Kosovo (FoNet)

KOSOVSKA MITROVICA -- Friday – The United Nations Mission in Kosovo has barred Serbian Radical Party presidential candidate Tomislav Nikolic from campaigning in Kosovska Mitrovica.

Sources close to UNMIK’s Pristina office say that the party was told that Nikolic would not be allowed into Kosovo because his safety could not be guaranteed.

Belgrade supports "standards before status" approach

Serbian Government

New York, Oct 31, 2003 - Serbia-Montenegrin Ambassador to the United Nations Dejan Sahovic gave his support for the so-called "standards before status" approach at a UN Security Council session on Kosovo-Metohija late Thursday, but stressed the importance of identifying clear criteria for reaching the standards required for building a democratic and multiethnic society in the province.

The lack of specific criteria may lead to discrepancies in assesing these standards and would result in future misunderstandings and disagreements, warned Sahovic.

The Ambassador welcomed the start of direct talks between Belgrade and Pristina, adding that such talks on practical issues will help to improve everyday life of Kosovo residents and generally work to boost confidence among ethnic communities in the province.

However, Sahovic voiced concern over the Kosovo government's apparent resolution not to resume talks with Belgrade unless the UNMIK chief passes part of his authorities over to the provincial government.
Describing it as unacceptable, Sahovic underlined that such a demand is in direct violation of the international community's stance on Kosovo-Metohija, according to which the Belgrade-Pristina dialogue should focus on practical issues without discussing the province's political future.

The relations between UNMIK and Belgrade have improved since Harri Holkeri's appointment as head of UNMIK, Sahovic went on to say, stressing that Serbia-Montenegro is now ready to bolster cooperation even further. The state union will also give its full support for Holkeri's priorities in the province, targeting such pressing issues as the rule of law, minority rights, safety conditions, return of displaced persons and economic growth.

Following this Sahovic went ahead to present a letter to the session, written by Nebojsa Covic, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister and Head of Coordinating Centre for Kosovo-Metohija.

Addressing the session, UNMIK head Harri Holkeri said that Kosovo's main problem is that too many people tolerate ethnic violence and stressed that this problem must be tackled.

Holkeri urged Belgrade and Pristina to resume the dialogue and said that the Kosovo government must stop making its participation in the talks conditional on changes to government structures and the setting up of new ministries.

"Such bargaining is not acceptable," Holkeri stressed.

According to the US, Russian, British and German ambassadors to the UN, the situation in the province is showing some improvement, but safety conditions are still far from satisfactory. The ambassadors also condemned attacks of Kosovo Serbs, voicing concern that none of the perpetrators have as yet been brought to justice.

Ombudsman Nowicki calls for protection of Serbs in Obilic

Serbian Government

Pristina, Oct 31, 2003 - Ombudsman for Kosovo-Metohija Marek Antoni Nowicki said that the Serbs in the village of Obilic feel threatened due to the recent attacks on three Serbian houses, and urged authorities in the province to protect the Serbian community.

Nowicki said in a statement that despite the fact that three months have elapsed since the murder of the Stolic family, the perpetrators have still not been apprehended, and attacks in Obilic continue to occur. He also said that the then head of UNMIK, Michael Steiner, offered a reward to anyone who might have any information on who committed the crime.
After the attack on three Serbian houses in Obilic on the night between 25th and 26th of October, local Serbs are too scared to leave their homes. Therefore, the authorities should act immediately and adequately to protect the Serb community and their safety in Kosovo-Metohija, Nowicki said.

Top candidate calls for compromise over Serb war crimes suspects

By MISHA SAVIC

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) _ Serbia's chief presidential contender warned Sunday of unrest in the police and army ranks if four top Serbian generals indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal are handed over for trial.

In an interview with the Belgrade-based Fonet news agency, Dragoljub Micunovic conceded the country ``has to find a solution'' to the extraditions demanded by the tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. The court recently added the four to its list of suspects wanted for alleged atrocities committed during the 1998-99 Kosovo war.

The four top officers had served under former President Slobodan Milosevic _ ousted in a popular revolt in 2000 and later extradited to The Hague along with several associates _ but the generals have ``shown great loyalty to the new, democratic government,'' Micunovic said.

``In the case of the four latest indictments, we have to find the best possible solution in order to avoid unrest among members of the police and army forces,'' Micunovic said.
U.N. prosecutors insist on the prompt and unconditional extradition of former army chief Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic; his ex-deputy, Vladimir Lazarevic; police Gen. Vlastimir Djordjevic; and deputy Interior Minister Gen. Sreten Lukic.

``We cannot leave to fate the people who very actively took part in the reform of the police and the army'' since Milosevic's ouster, Micunovic said.

Micunovic is now speaker of the parliament of Serbia-Montenegro, the two-republic union formerly known as Yugoslavia. Nominated by Serbia's ruling coalition, he leads the field for the Nov. 16 presidential race, which also includes Tomislav Nikolic of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party and three minor candidates.

The top job has been vacant since a Milosevic ally stepped down in January and joined his former boss in The Hague. Two earlier attempts to fill the post failed because of insufficient turnout.

Micunovic urged voters to come out in large numbers and ``help stabilize Serbia,'' where the pro-democracy leadership has been plagued by internal feuds that Milosevic supporters and other nationalists are trying to exploit in a bid to return to power.
Hard-liners recently initiated a parliamentary debate on the alleged corruption and incompetence of the current Cabinet, which could lead to a no-confidence vote and an ouster of Serbia's first democratic government since World War II.

Svilanovic expects new indictments (B92)

BELGRADE -- Sunday – Federal Foreign Affairs Minister Goran Svilanovic said today that the Hague Tribunal is investigating former Croatian Serb leaders Milan Babic and Goran Hadzic and former senior Yugoslav Army officer Blagoje Adzic.

Hague Prosecution press officer Florence Hartman told B92 that she would not confirm the information. adding that the Belgrade authorities are well aware of the number of investigations being conducted by the Hague.

“Those are the last investigations against officials from your country. We are conducting more in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, but they are the last ones and there are only a small number,” said Hartmann, declining to name names.

Svilanovic meanwhile claimed that at a meeting with Carla Del Ponte in The Hague earlier this year he received the information that the Tribunal was conducting dozens more investigations for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

“About ten investigations were being conducted in Serbia-Montenegro,” said Svilanovic, adding that he expected six or seven indictments to result from those investigations.

Three Serb officials probed by tribunal -minister

BELGRADE, Nov 2 (Reuters) - The U.N. war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia is investigating cases against three more former Serb officials, Serbia and Montenegro's Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said in comments broadcast on Sunday.

But Svilanovic told radio B92 they were expected to be the last investigations against Serb officials, regardless of whether they resulted in indictments.
Svilanovic was quoted by the radio as identifying the three as Blagoje Adzic, former Yugoslav army chief of staff, Milan Babic, former president of the self-styled republic of Serb Krajina in Croatia, and Goran Hadzic, former head of eastern Slavonia region in Croatia.
He was speaking less than two weeks after the publication of new indictments against four Serb police and army generals caused anger among Serbs over chain-of-command charges and fear that the list would never end.
The four generals are accused of war crimes during Serbia's bid to crush separatist Kosovo Albanian guerrillas in the teeth of NATO bombing in 1999.
Svilanovic said the U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte had told him more than six months earlier that out of several dozen investigations under way in ex-Yugoslavia about 10 referred to Serbia and Montenegro and that those were likely to produce six or seven new indictments.

``Four indictments have already been issued and as far as I know there are three more investigations under way,'' radio B92 quoted him as saying.

He also said he was discussing with other state officials the possibility of getting the four generals' cases transferred to domestic courts.

Del Ponte has dismissed any suggestion of the generals being tried in Serbia, saying the seriousness of the allegations against them and their seniority ruled that out.

The indictments have been seen as a form of pressure on Serbia to find top fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime leader Ratko Mladic. Serb officials have repeatedly denied harbouring him.

Serbia has been under pressure to hand over war crimes indictees or face economic penalties, especially from the United States.

Serbia publishes list of presidential candidates

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) _ Serbia's election authorities on Friday published a final list of five candidates for the republic's Nov 16. presidential race.

Topping the list were Dragoljub Micunovic, the speaker of parliament, and Tomislav Nikolic of the ultra nationalist Serbian Radical Party. The other three are fringe candidates who managed to collect the minimum 10,000 voter signatures needed to run for president.

With just over two weeks before the election day, Serbia is plagued by feuds between political parties that used to be allied when they jointly ousted Slobodan Milosevic in 2001.

The top post in Serbia has been vacant since January, when a Milosevic ally stepped down and joined the former leader in The Hague, Netherlands, to face war crimes charges before the U.N. tribunal.

Serbia's parliamentary speaker, Natasa Micic, has served as the acting president since.
Two attempts to fill the post, both in 2002, failed because turnout dropped just below the 50 percent legal minimum _ a result of voter apathy, opposition calls for boycotts and disillusionment with the post-Milosevic leadership.

Macedonia launches campaign for civilians to hand in illegal weapons

SKOPJE, Nov 1 (AFP) - Macedonian authorities on Saturday launched a 45-day amnesty for people to hand in illegal weapons without prosecution.

The amnesty will give people owning illegal arms until December 15 to hand in weapons without the usual heavy punishment meted out for such an offence, authorities said.

The collected weapons will be destroyed 90 days after the end of the operation, supervised by the European Union's 400-strong peacekeeping force deployed in Macedonia called Concordia.

Between 100,000 to 500,000 illegal weapons are estimated to be circulating in Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic of some two million people, according to the interior ministry and international non-governmental organizations.

Macedonia has seen an uneasy peace since a seven-month uprising in 2001 when ethnic Albanian guerrillas took up arms against the government to demand better civil and political rights.

"The international community wants to help establish a climate that encourages citizens to hand over (illegal) weapons," said Alexis Bruhnce, the EU's special representative to Macedonia.

The main opposition Democratic Party of Albanians of Arben Xhaferi has refused to cooperate with the campaign, judging it "premature."

Macedonia's Crvenkovski replaces four ministers

Skopje (dpa) - Macedonian Premier Branko Crvenkovski replaced four ministers Sunday in a first reshuffle of his cabinet after the coalition of Social Democrats and former ethnic Albanian rebels-turned-politicians took power last September.

The ministers of finance, economy, transport and justice would be replaced ``as a part of consultations between the ruling parties over the past weeks'', local media quoted Crvenkovski as saying.

Western analysts and local experts had warned recently of stalling in the troubled country's reform process, reducing international interest for investment.

Only 16 million dollars of foreign investment was reported in the first six months of 2003, Skopje's Euro-Balkan Institute said.

The biggest star of the reorganized government will be the moderate and popular parliamentary speaker Nikola Popovski, who takes over as finance minister from the unsuccessful Petar Gosev.

Crvenkovski's government was recently criticized for failing to confront the radicalism of high-profile politicians who openly undermine the crucial Ohrid peace deal, even urging ethnic partition.

``Our main weakness was the lack of readiness to take risks. Instead of exact results, our priorities were not to make any mistakes,'' Crvenkovski said.

Macedonia is struggling to overcome the disastrous impact of 2001 ethnic Albanian insurgency on the country's economy and poor relations between Slavic-Macedonians and ethnic Albanian minority.

Former Balkans negotiator Owen takes the stand in Milosevic trial

By Stephanie van den Berg

THE HAGUE, Nov 2 (AFP) - Balkans peace broker David Owen will give an inside glimpse into the negotiations in the Balkans in the 1990s and the influence of Slobodan Milosevic when he testifies on Monday at the former Yugoslav president's war crimes trial.

Owen, a former British foreign minister, was the European Community's peace envoy to the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995 while the wars in Croatia and Bosnia were ongoing.

The former European envoy is the latest in a string of high profile political and diplomatic witnesses who have shed light on the chain of command in the Balkans.
Former Yugoslav president Zoran Lilic, top international envoy for Bosnia Paddy Ashdown along with William Walker, the US head of the international monitoring mission to Kosovo and Kosovo president Ibrahim Rugova have all appeared in court.

Milosevic has been on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) here since February last year. He faces over sixty charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in the 1990s wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo that tore apart the Balkans.

For the bloody war in Bosnia that left over 200,000 people dead, he faces a separate charge of genocide.

Prosecutors have been trying to show that Milosevic controlled rebel Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia during the 1991-95 wars and thus can be held responsible for atrocities committed there.
In a written statement submitted to the court in September, Owen said he thought that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic distanced himself from Milosevic in 1993. Before that time, Milosevic treated the Bosnian Serb leader "as someone largely under his control".

"After May 1993... I felt a change in Karadzic. He progressively became more independent of Milosevic," Owen said in the statement.

Owen wrote that in August 1993 it was "obvious that Milosevic's influence among Bosnian Serbs had waned... and (Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko) Mladic was increasingly difficult to control".

His testimony could bolster Milosevic's claims that he had no influence over the Bosnian Serb leadership at the time of the slaughter of thousands of Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in July 1995.

The Srebrenica massacre is an important element of the genocide charge against the former Yugoslav president.

But Owen's testimony will also help the prosecution's claim that even though Milosevic was only the president of Serbia at the time of the wars in Bosnia and Croatia he held control over the federal Yugoslav presidency and the Yugoslav army implicated in several war crimes in Croatia.

From 1993 onwards "those who held office in the federal Yugoslav government... had no influence on Milosevic because they were, to all intents and purposes, appointees and toed the Serbian president's line," Owen said in his statement.

He also notes that the Yugoslav army was supplying Mladic with ammunition, fuel and spare parts.

Unlike the other witnesses, Owen was not called to give his evidence by the prosecution but by the trial chamber itself. In a statement the former negotiator said he wanted to be called by the court instead of appearing as a witness for the prosecution so as to preserve the impartial position of international negotiators.

Owen, 65, is now a member of the House of Lords, the British upper chamber of parliament. His testimony is expected to take at least two days.

Swedish police turn up trousers soaked in Lindh's blood: report

STOCKHOLM, Nov 2 (AFP) - Swedish police have found a pair of trousers covered in the blood of the country's foreign minister Anna Lindh which could belong to her murderer, a newspaper reported Sunday.

The Swedish police laboratory confirmed that the trousers, found in a forest, were soaked with Lindh's blood, the Expressen daily said.

"In a precise place in the trousers there was also an object that allows to say technically that the trousers are those of the 24-year-old man," or Mijailo Mijailovic, the key suspect who was arrested on September 24, a policeman told the paper.

This could consolidate the police case against Mijailovic, having already retrieved DNA samples from the bloodied knife and mask that was left behind after the attacker fled the scene on foot.

The Aftonbladet daily said Sunday that analysis of the shape of the nose and dimples of the suspected killer matched those of the man caught on film by a surveillance camera in the NK department store only minutes before Lindh was attacked.

Expressen reported last week that a special three-dimensional analysis of the man on camera, focusing on body measurements and conducted by a Danish expert, proved conclusively that the "NK man" was Mijailovic.

Mijailovic's lawyer has said his client insists he is innocent of the crime, and prosecutors trying to strengthen their case were given a new extension last week, until November 7, to bring formal charges against him.

Prosecutors are expected to request further extensions, but said they hope to press charges before Christmas in a case that shocked the nation and revived painful members of the unresolved 1986 murder of prime minister Olof Palme.

"Proof, in my opinion, is strong," prosecutor Agneta Blidberg told Ekot radio.

A Swede of Serb origin, Mijailovic is said to have suffered from psychiatric problems and had a police record showing he was charged in 1997 for attacking his father with a kitchen knife.

Swedish media said he was fixated on certain famous people and "hated Anna Lindh", notably for backing the NATO air strikes in Serbia during the war in Kosovo in 1999.
The popular Lindh, who was tipped as a potential prime minister, was without a bodyguard, as is customary in Sweden, when the attack occurred.