3 November 2003 Afternoon Edition

Kosovo News

· Senior Nordic defense officials visit troops in Kosovo (AP)
· Allies resist call to clear up lethal aftermath of war (The Independent)

Regional News

· We’ll surprise you with elections, says PM (Beta)
· Trials in Serbia (Washington Post)

Other News

· Balkans negotiator Owen says Milosevic could have ended war in Bosnia early (AFP)
· Milosevic made mistakes but was no racist -Owen (Reuters)

Senior Nordic defense officials visit troops in Kosovo

CAMP VICTORIA, Serbia-Montenegro (AP) _ Senior defense officials from Nordic countries arrived Monday in Kosovo for a two-day visit to their troops serving as peacekeepers in the NATO-led force in this troubled province.

Defense ministers from Sweden, Finland, Denmark and a Norwegian state secretary kicked off their visit at Camp Victoria, the Swedish peacekeepers' base some 10 kilometers (6 miles) east of Kosovo's capital Pristina.

The ministers were scheduled to meet with the top U.N. official in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri, and the head of the NATO-led peacekeepers here, Lt. Gen. Holger Kammerhoff.
The battalions of Nordic countries are part of the 21,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force here, known as KFOR. Finland has about 800 soldiers deployed in Kosovo; Sweden has 700, Norway 400 and Denmark 350.

Kosovo has been administered by the United Nations and NATO-led peacekeepers since June 1999 when the alliance's air war forced a halt to a crackdown by Serb forces on independence-seeking ethnic Albanians.

Allies resist call to clear up lethal aftermath of war

By Severin Carrell – The Independent

Blair waged war illegally, say leading lawyers
WMD hunters switched to security duties
Allies resist call to clear up lethal aftermath of war

'We did not know what it was. We saw it for a moment before it blew up'
The British and US governments have significantly watered down efforts to create a legal obligation to clear up millions of unexploded bombs and mines in former war zones such as Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Laos, aid agencies say.

The protocol is due to be finalized during the last round of negotiations among more than 90 countries, including Russia and China, in Geneva later this month. It is designed to extend and strengthen the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons, but there are fears that the negotiations could collapse because of deepening divisions over the scope of the new rules.

Ministers face intensifying pressure this week to cut back on use of controversial cluster bombs, blamed for causing 50 casualties every week in Iraq. British aid agencies, including the Princess Diana Memorial Fund, yesterday launched "landmine action week", a series of protests and fundraising events designed to highlight the global plight of civilians exposed to unexploded armaments.
However, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Britain's Landmine Action have accused the UK and US of weakening attempts to legally require signatories to clear up all undetonated and faulty bombs, missiles and landmines. They claim the draft protocol, which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday, greatly reduces the obligations on military powers to take responsibility for their unexploded bombs during and after a war.

Instead, the latest draft suggests military powers can refuse to clear up battlefields, pay for independent clear-up operations or merely give out detailed information on their use of these bombs, if their opponents or the local controlling power will not co-operate with them directly.

The draft also regularly uses phrases such as "where appropriate", "as far as feasible", "as far as practicable", "in appropriate circumstances" and "subject to their legitimate security interests". These conditions, critics claim, offer signatories a series of major loopholes and allow them to duck their obligations.

Observers believe that Britain, while publicly endorsing calls for a legally binding declaration, has privately supported US reservations about the protocol in an attempt to keep the Bush administration on board. The Foreign Office is thought to want to avoid repeating the case of the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, which the US refused to sign. China and Russia, however, are said to favour much tougher rules.

Richard Lloyd, the director of Landmine Action, said: "Although the protocol could be a legally binding piece of international law, its measures are either extremely weak or essentially voluntary." Lou Maresca, the ICRC's legal adviser on landmines, agreed. "We have concerns that the latest draft is rather weak," he said, adding: "It's vague on a number of key issues and it relies on the notion of co-operation, which allows claims of non-cooperation to be a justification to do nothing. For a party reading this instrument, it's not necessarily clear what they should or shouldn't do."

The Foreign Office insisted last week it would push for a legally binding agreement, but refused to be drawn on its contents. "Negotiations are still ongoing," said one source. "At the moment, they're prejudging the situation." The disagreement will heighten the controversy over Britain's use of cluster bombs in Iraq, where UN agencies estimate that at least 1,000 people have been hurt since the war ended.

The Ministry of Defense’s efforts to clear up unexploded bombs in Iraq have been criticized by aid agencies as being far too slow. They are also limited to areas of military value, and are paid for from British overseas aid funds rather than by the MoD, the agencies add. The UN says 17,000 Afghans face injury or death over the next decade because US and British mine- and bomb-clearing efforts are too slow and poorly funded.

We’ll surprise you with elections, says PM (Beta)

BELGRADE -- Monday – Zoran Zivkovic today hinted at the possibility of early elections, but gave no indication of when they might be called.

“You may all be surprised when parliamentary elections are called: pleasantly surprised,” the prime minister told the Serbian Parliament.

He also accused the Serbian Radical Party of being prepared to drop their motion of no confidence in his government if the party premises in Zemun, from which they have been evicted, are returned to them.

The prime minister claimed that the Radicals had approached the government with that proposition.

The deputy caucus leader of the Radical Party, Gordana Pop Lazic denied Zivkovic’s allegation, saying that the party’s MPs would rather be murdered in the parliament than give up the debate on the government’s record.

“The information presented by the prime minister is a lie,” she said.

Trials in Serbia

Washington Post

BY THE YEAR 2008, the Bush administration wants to have closed down the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, which meets in The Hague. It favors moving all remaining war crimes trials and investigations to Serbia and to the other former Yugoslav republics where the original atrocities took place. In principle, this is the right thing to do. If conducted fairly and if based on real evidence gathered by real investigators, trials of this kind will always have the most impact, morally and politically, in the countries that perpetrated the crimes. The trials of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, and his henchmen do not serve their full purpose if Serbs themselves are able to dismiss the process as irrelevant, something that is happening "abroad."

Nevertheless, moving the tribunal to Serbia serves no purpose either if the process would become corrupt or be dropped altogether. Although five years remain before The Hague tribunal is due to shut down, the portents aren't good. According to Natase Kandic, leader of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade -- one of the few Serbian organizations that collects documents about war crimes and monitors the present-day activities of Serbian police and government -- there is still much resistance to the idea that Serbs were anything but victims of the 12 years of Balkan wars. On a recent trip to Washington, she explained that all of the new states of former Yugoslavia remain obsessed with crimes committed against their own people and reluctant to discuss crimes of their own. Following the appointment of a Serbian special war crimes prosecutor last summer, for example, Serbia's justice minister publicly announced that the prosecutor's main task would be the indictment of foreign nationals, not Serbs.

To some extent, outsiders recognize this problem. In a speech last summer, Pierre-Richard Prosper, America's ambassador at large for war crimes, spoke of the need to build a "system that will enable the free and fair prosecution of war crimes cases in Yugoslavia's domestic jurisdictions." But five years isn't very long to prepare the cultural changes needed to make these trials work. Such preparation has to include close work not only with the government and courts of Serbia but also with independent organizations such as the one run by Ms. Kandic. She is trying to set up war crimes documentation centers in all of the former Yugoslav republics, which could become independent repositories of evidence such as that collected at The Hague.

Thinking now about the long-term future of this issue is important and not only in order to ensure that some form of justice is done. A thorough understanding of the past, and of the atrocities committed by all, will also help prevent these still-fragile political entities from going to war with one another again. If America's involvement in the Balkans is to have any long-term impact, these are issues that American diplomats should be thinking about now.

Balkans negotiator Owen says Milosevic could have ended war in Bosnia early

By Stephanie van den Berg

THE HAGUE, Nov 3 (AFP) - Balkans peace broker David Owen testified Monday that former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic had the power to end the bloody war in Bosnia two years earlier by forcing rebel Serbs to accept a peace deal.

"He was in charge of a government that could stop them from shelling Sarajevo, stop ethnic cleansing. If he would have done that, it would have brought peace to Bosnia two years earlier," Owen testified at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Owen, a former British foreign minister, was the European Union's peace envoy to the former Yugoslavia during the wars from 1992 to 1995. He was co-author of the 1993 Vance-Owen plan, one of the first overall peace plans for Bosnia and Croatia.

Owen said that Milosevic exercised "strong power" over rebel Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia at the time the Vance-Owen plan was presented between January and May 1993.
The EU envoy blasted Milosevic for not using his influence to stop the bloodshed but said he "shared" responsibility for the failure of successive peace plans with the international community.

"Pressure should have come from Milosevic ... but it also should have come from the West," Owen said.

"The responsibility was shared ... but the greatest responsibility was for the people of the former Yugoslavia who should have behaved differently."

Peace finally came to Bosnia with the US-brokered Dayton agreement signed in December 1995.

Owen, dressed in a dark blue suit with a thick mane of grey hair, told prosecutors that after May 1993, Milosevic's influence over the Bosnian Serbs waned but that he still had the power to force the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table.

Owen's testimony bolstered Milosevic's claim that at the time of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the bloodiest episode of the Bosnian war, he had no control over Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

Over 7,000 Muslims were slaughtered after Bosnian Serb troops led by Mladic overran the Muslim enclave in July 1995. The Srebrenica massacre is the key element in the genocide charge against Milosevic.

The former president 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 Bosnian war 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 his cross examination, Milosevic admitted that he gave aid and assistance to the Bosnian Serb army but stressed this did not imply he controlled the troops.

"Broadly speaking all their main supply lines ran through your country, that gave you leverage," Owen retorted.

"I think there was a measure of command at times in your relationship with Karadzic and Mladic," he said.

The former Balkans negotiator is the latest in a string of high-profile 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.
Unlike the other witnesses, Owen was not a witness for the prosecution. The former negotiator said he wanted to be called specifically by the court 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.

Milosevic made mistakes but was no racist -Owen

By Abigail Levene

THE HAGUE, Nov 3 (Reuters) - Slobodan Milosevic was not ``fundamentally racist'' but could and should have used his power over Bosnian Serbs to halt bloodshed in the Balkans, a former mediator told the ex-Serbian leader's trial on Monday.

Lord David Owen of Britain, who negotiated at length with Milosevic over Croatia and Bosnia, said the accused was a pragmatist rather than an ``ethnic purist'' but could have helped stop the Bosnian war two years before it in fact ended.

The co-author of the failed 1993 Vance-Owen peace plan for Bosnia said Milosevic -- charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes -- erred by not cutting off vital supplies Bosnian Serbs needed to wage war.

Owen told Milosevic directly at the U.N. war crimes tribunal that he should have forced Bosnian Serbs to lift the 43-month siege of Sarajevo, where Muslims and Croats were holed up.

``You didn't use your influence to force them to stop it,'' he said. ``You knew it was damaging to Serbian interests worldwide...to continue with this feudal siege of Sarajevo.''
To convict Milosevic over Bosnia and Croatia, prosecutors must link him with atrocities committed there when he was president of Serbia, an office he held from 1990 to 1997 before being elected Yugoslav leader.

Owen said Milosevic had expressed fears in spring 1993 of a ``bloodbath'' or ``massacre'' if Bosnian Serbs entered the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica. When Serbs did take Srebrenica in 1995, they inflicted the worst massacre since World War Two.

``It is my view Milosevic is not fundamentally racist. I think he is a nationalist but even that he wears very lightly. He's a pragmatist... I don't think he was an ethnic purist,'' said Owen, a former British foreign minister.

AID NOT COMMAND
Milosevic, who is defending himself, told the court Serbia provided ``aid and assistance'' to the Bosnian Serbs but said that was not the same as commanding them.
``Why would it be strange if the Serbs helped other Serbs? Aid and assistance does not imply any form of command,'' Milosevic said in his questioning of Owen, who appeared as a neutral court witness rather than for prosecution or defence.

Serbia helped Bosnia's Serbs not to wage war but to ``stay alive,'' and exerted political persuasion on them rather than using threats or force, Milosevic insisted.

The 1992-5 Bosnian war ended after U.S.-sponsored talks in Dayton, Ohio.

Owen depicted Milosevic as a pragmatist who was economical with the truth -- though no more so than other Balkan officials round the negotiating table.

He said Milosevic had desired majority-Serb areas but had not been among those who wanted all Muslims out of Serb areas or who simply believed Muslim and Serb could not coexist.

Though Owen said Milosevic and other officials were often more engaged in pretence than in straight lying, he added: ``But there was also serious lying about what was going on.''

Owen said Milosevic's power over the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs was strong when the Vance-Owen peace plan began to develop momentum in January-May 1993.

Once that plan, co-authored with former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance, had failed, the key was to disrupt Bosnian Serb supply lines, Owen said.

``If Milosevic had done it himself or acquiesced in (the West's) doing it, we'd have brought peace to Bosnia two years earlier,'' he said.