6 November 2003 Morning Edition

Kosovo News

· Serb woman dies of gunshot wounds (Beta)
· Belgrade probes three Kosovo Albanian leaders for war crimes (AFP)
· Kosovo must meet U.N. standards before talks on future status (dpa)
· US backs “standards before status” (Beta)
· Covic, Grossman discuss "standards before status" policy in Kosovo
(Serbian Government)
· Kosovo Serbia’s cancer, says Doris Pack (Tanjug)
· Serbia launches probe against top Kosovo Albanians (Beta)
· For refugees from Kosovo, a long way back home (Christian Science Monitor)

Regional News

· Tribunal moves to merge Kosovo indictments (B92)
· Political backstabbing in aftermath of assassination? (B92)
· Croatia rejects link between EU membership and war crimes suspect (AFP)

Other News

· U.N. names 58 countries that failed to meet Oct. 31 deadline for (AFP)
· Bill Clinton: Defining the mission of the 21st century (IHT)

BELGRADE -- Wednesday – A 72-year-old Serb woman has died of injuries sustained when she was shot last month by a Kosovo Albanian man in the village of Livoc near Gnjilane.

The family of Sofijanka Jovanovic-Peric said she died yesterday in Belgrade’s Military-Medical Academy.

Ramush Halimi was arrested for the shooting. He is said to have been angry at having to leave Jovanovic-Peric’s home in Livoc, where he had been living since the end of the conflict in Kosovo.

The Jovanovic-Peric family told Beta news agency that members of Halimi’s family continue to live in the house.

Belgrade probes three Kosovo Albanian leaders for war crimes

BELGRADE, Nov 5 (AFP) - Serbia has launched an investigation into three ethnic Albanian leaders accused of genocide and terrorism against Serbs in Kosovo, justice ministry officials said Wednesday.

They said Party of Democratic Kosovo (PDK) leader Hashim Thaçi, Alliance for the Future of Kosovo leader Ramush Haradinaj and Kosovo Protection Force chief Agim Ceku were being investigated by a special prosecutor.

The three were leaders of the rebel ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that fought a war of independence against Yugoslavia in 1998-99.

Belgrade accuses Thaçi and Ceku of waging a campaign of genocide against the ethnic Serb minority in the southern Serbian province, while Haradinaj and his brother Daut are suspected of terrorism.

Thaçi and Ceku were recently arrested in Hungary and Slovenia respectively on international arrest warrants issued by Belgrade, but they were quickly released after intervention from the United Nations.

The United Nations, which has administered Kosovo since the end of the war, said they fell under UN jurisdiction although Kosovo remains technically part of Serbia.

Justice ministry officials said Belgrade's probe was being led by Vladimir Vukcevic, the special prosecutor with the recently established Serbian war crimes court.

Kosovo must meet U.N. standards before talks on future status

Pristina (dpa) - Options on the future status of Kosovo will be discussed only when Kosovo meets standards set by the U.N., U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, Marc Grossman said in Pristina Wednesday.

``In our view all the options are on the table. The U.S. has taken no position one way or another about what the final status of Kosovo is about. And the reason why we have not done so is that we want to keep focus on the standards,'' Grossman told reporters after meeting top U.N. and international officials in Pristina.

Grossman explained that the six-member Contact Group on the Balkans and the U.N. administrator of Kosovo have agreed to direct Kosovo's progress toward U.N. standards ``by mid 2005, even earlier if progress is sufficient''.

``If Kosovo meets these standards we are prepared to begin a process to determine Kosovo's future status. If the progress is insufficient we will together set another review date, some time else in the future,'' he said.

Since the end of the war in June 1999 Kosovo has been a U.N. run protectorate. It has remained formally a part of Serbia and Montenegro, but its status has yet to be decided. The Kosovo Albanian majority wants independence, while the Kosovo Serb minority and officials in Belgrade demand Kosovo is returned to Serbian authority.

``We want to bring this part of Europe into Europe and we want this part of Europe to be connected to the great values that are represented by institutions like NATO and the European Union,'' Grossman said.

He assessed that during the past ten years of international intervention in the region a foundation for ``self-sustaining progress'' in the Balkans has been established though ``much more'' remains to be done.

Prior to his visit to Pristina Grossman visited the Northern Atlantic Council in Brussels and met with Serbian officials in Belgrade to discuss the Euro-Atlantic integration of the Balkans.

From Pristina, were he is yet to meet all major local leaders, he is scheduled to travel for further meetings to the Macedonian capital Skopje, Tirana in Albania and to Paris before returning to the U.S

US backs “standards before status” (Beta)

BELGRADE -- Wednesday – US Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman reiterated today that talks on Kosovo’s final status could only be launched once the province meets certain standards.

Grossman told reporters in Belgrade that such talks could begin in mid-2005 providing the standards set by the international community – regarding democracy, human rights and minority protection – are met.

The US official held talks with a number of Serbian leaders in Belgrade during a tour of the region.

Covic, Grossman discuss "standards before status" policy in Kosovo

Serbian Government

Belgrade, Nov 5, 2003 - Serbian Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Centre for Kosovo-Metohija head Nebojsa Covic met with US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman on Wednesday to discuss ongoing problems in Kosovo and the implementation of the so-called "standards before status" policy.

The two officials agreed that it is necessary to not only clearly define the standards, but also determine the authorities of the relevant institutions involved and persons responsible for the standards implementation, the Centre said in a statement.

Covic and Grossman also called for setting a time frame for this phase of the process of solving the Kosovo problem, which they described as highly important, the statement added.
US Ambassador to Serbia-Montenegro William Montgomery also attended the meeting.

Kosovo Serbia’s cancer, says Doris Pack (Tanjug)

BUDAPEST -- Wednesday – If Kosovo does not win independence, it will become the cancer of Serbia and make integration into the European Union much more difficult, EU envoy Doric Pack said last night.

Pack described Albania as living in a somewhat mediaeval system ruled by clans while the state is run by corrupt politicians.

“The situation is similar in Kosovo where Albanians who used to victims of apartheid now practice this policy themselves.

“Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova is a good man but knows nothing about politics,” she told media in Budapest.

Serbia launches probe against top Kosovo Albanians (Beta)

BELGRADE -- Wednesday – Serbia’s special war crimes prosecutor has launched investigations against four prominent Kosovo Albanians, including the leaders of two of the main parties in the province, on suspicion of genocide and terrorism.

A statement from the Serbian Justice Ministry said that Vladimir Vukcevic had taken over cases against Hashim Thaqi, Agim Ceku and the Haradinaj brothers, Ramush and Daut.

All four are former senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA. Thaqi now heads the province’s second largest political party, the Democratic Party of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj is leader of the third largest, the Alliance for the Future of Kosovo, and Agim Ceku commands the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civil protection unit set up by the United Nations mission from the ranks of the disbanded KLA.

The statement said that Thaqi and Ceku are suspected of committing genocide, while the Haradinaj brothers are under investigation for terrorism.

Vladimir Vukcevic became Serbia’s first ever war crimes prosecutor under legislation adopted in July this year. The justice ministry noted today that he is authorized to prosecute anyone suspected of war crimes, crimes against humanity and violations of international law committed in the former Yugoslavia, regardless of nationality or citizenship.

Agim Ceku was arrested in Slovenia last month on a warrant issued by the current authorities in Belgrade. He was swiftly released on the intervention of the UN governor in Kosovo, Harri Holkeri.

The ministry statement said that Justice Minister Vladan Batic had asked Holkeri to take possession of a number of documents containing evidence of crimes committed by the KLA against Serbs so that they can eventually be prosecuted by the UN judiciary in the province.

For refugees from Kosovo, a long way back home
By Arie Farnam | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

CAGLAVICA AND BELO POLJE, KOSOVO - When he was 5 years old, Yeton saw his grandmother gunned down by black-uniformed Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers. Then, his mother picked him up and ran out of the village toward the Montenegrin border.

"I wish we could go back to our house and our friends," he says, now standing on a road outside a refugee shelter. "I wish we didn't have to be hungry anymore."

Although four years have passed since they were chased from their homes by ethnic-Albanian militants seeking revenge for atrocities committed by the Serbian Army, many Kosovo Serbs, like young Yeton, have not given up hope that they might one day return.
Last summer, leading ethnic-Albanian politicians signed an open letter welcoming minority communities forced to flee Kosovo after the 1999 war here to come back home.
The message briefly revived hope among refugees like Yeton and his extended family, who have lived in refugee camps in Serbia since the war. This year Yeton and an aunt tried to return to their village of Gorni Petric in western Kosovo.

But their road home quickly hit a dead end. "I went to visit our home, and our neighbors threatened me with knives and said we will be killed if we try to return," says Yeton's aunt, Vera Isaku. "Our houses have been burned and destroyed."

It's a common tale among the 240,000 refugees and internally displaced persons from Kosovo, mostly Serb and Roma (Gypsy) minorities, who found refuge in Serbia, Montenegro or Macedonia. Another 60,000 minority refugees from Kosovo are scattered across the rest of Europe. In the past four years only about 7,000 non-Albanian refugees have returned to Kosovo.

Kosovo was historically the poorest Serbian province, and Serbs have been drifting away for decades in search of better economic opportunities. However, it was once a haven for other minorities, such as the Roma, who often face discrimination elsewhere in Europe. The Kosovar town of Mitrovica once boasted the largest and most prosperous Romany settlement in the former Yugoslavia - 7,000 people, many of them skilled craftspeople and educated professionals. Today, not one of them is left, and their homes are rubble.
Sadima Toska once had a cozy home in that Romany neighborhood but now she and her seven children live in a refugee camp in the Serb-controlled town of Svechin. After four years of UN rations, these camps, which still hold tens of thousands of refugees, are being cut off from food and water aid as international attention turns toward the Middle East. "Of course, I would go back home at the first opportunity," Ms. Toska says. "But I am afraid we would be killed. KFOR [the NATO-led peacekeeping force here] says they can't guarantee our safety."
Attacks against minorities continue on a regular basis in Kosovo - everything from stone throwing to grenade attacks, arson and shootings - and most of the 100,000 Serbs and other minorities remaining in Kosovo are confined to isolated enclaves. Peggy Hicks, director of the Office of Returns under the UN administration of Kosovo, rates lack of security as the greatest obstacle to returning refugees, but the 70 percent unemployment rate in Kosovo does not help to bring émigrés back either.

Serb leaders call the invitation by ethnic-Albanian politicians propaganda, but Ms. Hicks and other international officials say it is a sign of progress. "Until recently, no politician here would say anything positive about returns,"she says. "Now, Kosovar politicians have realized that minority returns are key to their own future."

Kosovo's future remains in doubt. It is administered as a UN protectorate, though it is technically still a Serbian province, and Kosovar Albanians desperately want independence. Serbian and Kosovar Albanian officials have spoken recently of a date sometime in 2005 for final status talks, and a senior US official said Tuesday that such talks could begin in mid-2005 if Kosovo meets rule-of-law, democracy and other standards by then.

The return of minority refugees tops the list of conditions for independence set by international officials. As a result, Kosovo's Albanian political elite issued the open letter welcoming the refugees back, although most of the population opposes the returns. "Kosovo is for Albanians," says Palaj village resident Azem Dedinca, voicing a typical view. "Serbs and Roma have no place here. They killed Albanians or they collaborated with those who did."

In August, gunmen fired on Serb children swimming in a river near the Serb enclave of Gorazdevac in western Kosovo. The attack, which killed two youths, was timed just before 200 Serb refugees were expected to return to the area. The return was quickly aborted.

Only 24 men managed to return to the nearby village of Belo Polje before the attack, and they have set up camp amid charred ruins of their former homes, guarded constantly by Italian KFOR soldiers. "It is like living in a prison," says Radomir Kostic, a returnee who left his family in Serbia to help rebuild his village. "How can I consider bringing my daughters and grandchildren back to a place like this? On the other hand, what choice do I have? We have no chance living as refugees. We are not welcome in Serbia. They call us Albanians and refuse to give us jobs. Faced with two kinds of nothing, I choose my nothing, and this is the only home I have ever known."

Tribunal moves to merge Kosovo indictments (B92)

THE HAGUE -- Wednesday – Prosecutors at the Hague tribunal have asked that the case against four top Serbian generals indicted last month be merged with the case against the four Serbian leaders indicted alongside Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo, B92 learns tonight.

The four generals – incumbent police Public Security chief Sreten Lukic, his predecessor Vlastimir Djordjevic, and former army generals Vladimir Lazarevic and Nebojsa Pavkovic – have been charged with war crimes committed during the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo. The charges are almost identical to those against former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic, former Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, and Pavkovic’s predecessor as armed forces chief of staff, Dragoljub Ojdanic. All three are in tribunal custody in The Hague.

The authorities in Belgrade have said they want to try the four generals in Serbia.

Political backstabbing in aftermath of assassination? (B92)

BELGRADE -- Wednesday – In an extraordinary attack on Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic, presidential pretender Velimir Ilic has claimed Mihajlovic demanded he incriminate Deputy Serbian Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic in the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic.

“I don’t know why they pursued Nebojsa Covic and why they wanted to attack him in that context”, Ilic, the leader of New Serbia, said today. He claimed he had refused to sign anything that would incriminate anyone and said everything was eventually “hushed up”.

Ilic, who is running for Serbian president in elections on November 16, said he would soon make public the information concerning Covic and the assassination.

Asked why he had not come clean before now, Ilic replied:

“I didn’t want to get involved. It was an in-house fight within the government. They wanted me to be arbiter in the story and to sign something”.

Mihajlovic declined to comment on the claims. A senior member of his party, the Serbian Liberals, said Ilic was confused.

“Ilic called me on April 12, clearly scared during Operation Sabre, saying he had information about Legija’s connections with politicians”, said Ljubodrag Grbic, adding that he met Ilic three times. Legija, or Milorad Lukovic, is the man accused of masterminding the shooting of Djindjic on March 12, following which the Serbian police launched an operation codenamed Sabre.

Grbic claimed that Ilic had told him what he knew, which he then relayed to Mihajlovic. The interior minister, he said, asked that Ilic put it all down in writing. “Since Ilic refused we terminated contact. Among other things, during those meetings Velimir Ilic mentioned many politicians, among them Nebojsa Covic, in connection with the assassination of Prime Minister Djindjic”, said Grbic.

He claimed that Ilic had received a letter from Legija in February calling on him to overthrow the authorities “using any means”.

Covic said today that he was pleased that “all affairs are coming to the surface”. He said that Ilic had behaved fairly at the time and that he expected more revelations in the near future.

Croatia rejects link between EU membership and war crimes suspect

ZAGREB, Nov 5 (AFP) - Croatia said Wednesday it was unhappy at suggestions by the UN chief war crimes prosecutor that its future membership of the European Union should be tied to the handing over of a suspected war criminal.

On Tuesday Carla Del Ponte said in Vienna that German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had been wrong to suggest that Croatia could enter the EU without handing over fugitive retired general Ante Gotovina.

A statement from the Croatian foreign ministry said "it expresses its displeasure over the way the prosecutor linked Croatia's entry to the EU with the extradition of General Gotovina".

"The Croatian authorities have taken and will take all step to cooperate with the (UN war crimes) court at the Hague... but in spite of the measures taken so far the Croatian authorities have not been in a position to arrest General Gotovina."

The war crimes court, the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, wants to put Gotovina on trial for the alleged massacre of Serbs during the 1991-1995 Serbo-Croat war. He has been on the run since his indictment in 2001.

In Vienna Del Ponte repeated her belief that Croatia could extradite Gotovina if it wanted to and that blocking the country's entry to the EU "was the only way to get him."

U.N. names 58 countries that failed to meet Oct. 31 deadline for reports on measures to combat terrorism

By EDITH M. LEDERER

UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A U.N. Security Council committee named 58 countries on Wednesday that failed to meet an Oct. 31 deadline to submit reports on measures they are taking to stop supporting, financing and providing sanctuary to terrorists.

Almost all are developing nations in Africa, Asia and the Pacific islands.

The committee is monitoring what all 191 U.N. member states are doing to implement a Security Council resolution adopted less than three weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. The resolution required U.N. members to adopt legislation and take administrative measures and other steps to halt all support for terrorists.

The Counter-Terrorism Committee, initially chaired by Britain and now chaired by Spain, received initial reports from all member states. These were analyzed with the assistance of outside experts who could use terrorism-related intelligence from governments in their assessment of compliance.

Countries then received follow-up letters identifying gaps, making recommendations and seeking responses by specific deadlines. All those that responded received a third letter, seeking additional information.

In a letter to the council circulated Wednesday, Spain's U.N. Ambassador Inocencio Arias said that ``a total of 58 states ... have failed to meet the Oct. 31 deadline for the submission of outstanding second and third reports.''

The committee and its experts ``will continue to be in contact with the states concerned'' to discuss any aspect of the required reports, he said, stressing that the best way for states to get the help they need to implement the resolution is to submit reports ``in a timely manner.''

The committee identified 26 countries that haven't submitted their second reports, including half a dozen whose reports are more than a year overdue. It noted that Lesotho _ which is on the list _ had submitted ``a partial second report.''

The 25 other countries are: Benin, Bhutan, Botswana, Burundi, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Comoros, Dominica, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Gambia, Ghana, Honduras, Kiribati, Liberia, Malawi, Maldives, Micronesia, Palau, St. Lucia, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Tanzania, Togo and Zambia.

The Pacific island of Niue, with about 2,000 people, which isn't a U.N. member, also hasn't submitted a second report, it said.

The committee named 31 countries that missed the Oct. 31 deadline to submit their third report, noting that one nation _ Namibia _ had sent a letter asking for an extension.

The 30 other countries are: Afghanistan, Albania, Andorra, Angola, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Fiji, Georgia, Grenada, Jordan, Kenya, Latvia, Malta, Mongolia, Morocco, Myanmar, Nauru, Nepal, Nigeria, Qatar, Senegal, Slovenia, Sweden, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Ukraine, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

Bill Clinton: Defining the mission of the 21st century

Bill Clinton IHT Thursday, November 6, 2003

A global community

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut Many people today refer to the time in which we live as the age of globalization, and for most Americans, it has brought enormous benefits.

In the eight years when I served as president, roughly one-third of U.S. growth came from trade. Our country's enormous increase in productivity was in no small part fueled by the application of information technology across all sectors of the economy, the continued outreach to people throughout the world and the openness of our borders to immigrants who continued to replenish the energy of our entrepreneurial system. It worked for us. But interdependence is not, by definition, good or bad. It can be either, and it can be both.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists used the forces of interdependence - open borders, easy travel, easy immigration, easy access to information and technology - to turn jet airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, killing 3,100 people including hundreds from 70 foreign countries who were in America looking for positive interdependence. More than 200 of those killed were Muslims, indicating the racial and religious diversity of the positive side of this equation.

My basic premise is this: The interdependent world, for all of its promise, is inevitably unsustainable, because it is unstable. We cannot continue to live in a world where we grow more and more interdependent and have no over-arching system to make the positive elements of interdependence outweigh the negative ones.

So I believe all thinking people, particularly Americans, must ask and answer three questions: What is my vision of the 21st-century world? What do we have to do to achieve it? And what does America have to do?

I think the great mission of the 21st century is to create a genuine global community, to move from mere interdependence to integration, to a community that has shared responsibilities, shared benefits and shared values. How would we go about building that kind of world?

One of the most important shared responsibilities is to fight for security: against terror, weapons of mass destruction, organized crime and narcotics traffickers. This means sharing responsibility for breaking up Al Qaeda and terrorist networks, for restarting the Middle East peace process, for resolving the nuclear issues of North Korea, for encouraging the new dialogue between India and Pakistan, for a successful transition to a democratic self-government in Iraq, for helping countries like Colombia and the Philippines fight terror. It means making a global effort to reduce the stocks of available chemical, biological and nuclear materials.

The second main shared responsibility is to build institutions of global cooperation, so that people get into a habit of resolving their differences in a peaceful way, according to rules and procedures generally perceived to be fair. Unless you have institution building, it will be hard to sustain the mentality necessary to have shared responsibilities.

We also have to share the benefits of the interdependent world. Why? For one thing, if you come from a wealthy country with open borders, unless you seriously believe you can kill, imprison or occupy all of your enemies, you have to make a world with more friends and fewer enemies, with more partners and fewer terrorists.

As we see every day in Iraq, the United States has the only super-military in the world. We can win any military conflict all by ourselves, but we can't build the peace all by ourselves. So what does that mean? Among other things, it means that we have to bring economic opportunity to the 50 percent of the globe's population that lives on $2 a day or less. It means more trade with developing nations. It means more aid that works properly. It means another round of debt relief tied to economic development, education, health care. It means financing projects that will build functioning, sustainable economies in poor countries. It means educating those who presently can't be part of positive interdependence.

I was at the United Nations talking to the secretary general about the work I'm doing to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. We are now going to be able to buy medicine for under $140 per person per year, but we need to finance the development of health-care networks to make the medicine work. This is not rocket science, but as we do it we build a world with more friends and fewer terrorists. I'm all for a strong security position, but we cannot possibly kill, imprison or occupy all of our actual or potential adversaries, and we are drastically underinvesting in building a world with more partners.

What, then, is America's responsibility? My philosophy is that the United States should cooperate with others whenever we can, across the broadest range of areas, and act alone only if we have to. In the current U.S. government, the conservatives believe they should act alone whenever they can and cooperate only when they have to.

For example, take those of us in the cooperation camp who were fairly hawkish on Iraq. I was for the UN resolution last November that said to Saddam Hussein: "You will let the inspectors back in, or we will depose you." I diverged when we moved from "cooperation whenever we can and act alone when we're forced to," to "now we've got the UN, and we will decide when Hans Blix is through with his inspections." The UN inspector was pleading for four, five or six more weeks to finish, but the people who wanted the conflict didn't want him to finish and didn't want to let him finish.

I still believe that we ought to see if the United Nations can take over security in Iraq, ask NATO to handle it, and involve countries that opposed the military conflict but who are part of NATO. If they came in, it would prove that we were all trying to build a multiparty, multiethnic, and multitribal democracy in Iraq. Most of the problems we have today are ill suited to unilateral action.

Finally, let me say just one other thing. I believe that fundamentalism - the sense that you have the certain truth and the entitlement to impose it on others - is not well suited to solving the problems of the modern world in either religion or politics. It is far better to deal with these problems using evidence and argument, with a willingness to experiment. If you're driven by ideology, you're going to make mistakes. The world is full of hard questions without easy answers. Not everyone who disagrees with you is your enemy.

The opposition to globalization in the world is rooted in the feeling of some people that they are left out, left behind and stepped on by other countries.

If you, like me, believe in expanded trade and believe America has greater obligations to open our borders and to invest more in the development of poor countries, we have got to maintain the political support here in America for doing that. And the only way we can do that is to keep making our economy function better, make our society more united. We have to build an integrated community in America, too. Otherwise we won't have the political support here to do what we need to do around the world.

The writer was the 42nd U.S. president. This article is adapted from a speech he gave at Yale University on Oct. 31 and printed with permission of Yale Global Online