23 October 2003 Morning Edition

Kosovo News

· UN court denies it issued arrest warrant for Kosovo ex-rebel leader (AFP)
· Kosovo general wanted in Serbia, freed in Slovenia (Reuters)
· Former Kosovo rebel commander detained in Slovenia (AP)
· Slovenia arrests Kosovo ex-rebel leader on Serbian request (AFP)
· Head of UN-created Kosovo Protection Corps arrested (B92)
· Agim Ceku detained in Slovenia (Beta)
· UN body urges Serb action on Belgrade mass graves (Reuters)
· Serbian police back their head indicted for war crimes in Kosovo (dpa)
· Thaqi calls for constitution (Beta)

Regional News

· UPDATE 3-Serb police launch Mladic search-PM (Reuters)
· Police launch hunt for Mladic (B92)

UN court denies it issued arrest warrant for Kosovo ex-rebel leader

THE HAGUE, Oct 22 (AFP) - The UN war crimes court in The Hague on Wednesday denied it had issued an arrest warrant for former Kosovo rebel leader Agim Ceku, who has been detained in Slovenia.

The Slovenian authorities said they detained Ceku at Ljubljana's airport Wednesday at the request of the UN court.

"There is no arrest warrant and no request at all from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY)," prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann told AFP.

Ceku is currently the head of Kosovo's civil emergency force. During the 1998-99 conflict in Kosovo he was named the military head of the rebel ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).

Kosovo general wanted in Serbia, freed in Slovenia

By Shaban Buza

PRISTINA, Serbia and Montenegro, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Agim Ceku, wartime chief of staff of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, was released early on Thursday, a day after Slovenian police arrested him on a Serbian warrant accusing him of genocide.
Muharrem Mahmutaj, spokesman of the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) which succeeded the KLA, told Reuters ``General Ceku was released in Ljubljana at about 1:15 a.m. (2315 GMT).''

Ceku told Kosovo television in the Slovenian capital shortly afterwards ``Slovenian authorities released me, now I'm free and tomorrow I'll continue my trip to Kosovo.''

There was no immediate comment from Slovenian authorities. A source at UNMIK (U.N. mission in Kosovo), which has been running Kosovo for the past four years, said on Wednesday that Ceku had apparently been arrested on the basis of an ``old'' warrant, and that UNMIK was working with Slovenia to resolve the problem.

Serbian officials say Ceku and other KLA leaders were guilty of atrocities against Serb civilians during the 1998-99 fighting between Kosovo's rebel Albanian majority and the province's Serbian rulers.

``The investigative judge told me I was arrested on the basis of a Serbian warrant, accused of genocide,'' Ceku said. ``But Serbian courts don't have any competence in Kosovo, only UNMIK and Kosovo institutions are responsible for Kosovo citizens.''
``Former KLA soldiers in particular need to be protected by law by UNMIK and our institutions and not become the target of Serbian courts,'' he added.

The arrest of the popular wartime commander sparked angry demonstrations in Pristina, the Kosovan capital, where hundreds of Kosovo Albanians gathered in the main square late on Wednesday demanding his release.

``Ceku's arrest is an attack on the core of our new country and democratic institutions,'' Dardan Islami, one of the organisers of the protest, told Reuters.
The protests turned into noisy celebrations when news of the general's release spread through the crowd.
CEKU SEEN AS HERO
Many Kosovo Albanians regarded Ceku as a hero in the province's war of liberation against harsh Serb rule in 1998-99.

He was one of the top figures in the rebel movement that battled Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian forces, and now heads the KPC, the civilian emergency force formed by ex-KLA guerrillas after the United Nations took control of Kosovo four years ago.

He was arrested at Ljubljana airport on Wednesday on a warrant issued by Interpol on the initiative of Serbia and Montenegro which ``accuses him of the criminal offence of genocide,'' a Slovenian police spokesman said.

Serbian officials, who have long urged the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague to indict ex-guerrillas like Ceku, say he and other KLA commanders were guilty of atrocities against Serb civilians during and after the conflict.

Serbia and Montenegro Justice Minister Vladan Batic said the warrant had been issued by a court in the southern city of Nis last year. ``He is wanted for genocide on Serb civilians from Kosovo.''

But a source at UNMIK, which started running the province after NATO's 1999 bombing campaign to halt Serb repression of majority Albanians, said it seemed that Ceku was arrested on the basis of an ``old'' warrant. ``UNMIK is working to resolve this problem with the Slovenian authorities,'' the U.N. source said.

Former Kosovo rebel commander detained in Slovenia

By ALI ZERDIN

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia (AP) _ Slovene authorities detained a former Kosovo rebel leader Wednesday on an international warrant issued by Serbia and Montenegro, which accuses him of war crimes.

Lt. Gen. Agim Ceku, the head of the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian emergency organization created after the disbanding of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, was ``detained on an Interpol arrest warrant,'' said police spokesman Zdenko Guzzi.
Ceku was arrested by the border police at Ljubljana's airport as he was about to fly back to Kosovo, Guzzi said.

Harri Holkeri, Kosovo's U.N. administrator, asked that Ceku be released immediately in a letter sent late Wednesday to Slovenia's foreign minister, Dimitrij Rupel.
``Since this is a matter within my jurisdiction, the arrest warrant issued by the Serbian authorities is invalid,'' Holkeri said alluding to the United Nation's authority over judicial affairs in the province.

In a letter, of which a copy was made available to The Associated Press, Holkeri requested ``that the arrested warrant be quashed and that Ceku be immediately released.''

The United Nations has run Kosovo since mid-1999, when NATO bombing forced out Serb-led troops of Yugoslavia _ Serbia-Montenegro's predecessor _ and ended their crackdown on Kosovo's independence-minded ethnic Albanian majority.
Ceku himself told the AP by telephone: ``I was told I am wanted by the Serb government, which has issued an arrest warrant.''
``They told me they can't release me without consulting the (Slovene) authorities,'' Ceku said.

Guzzi said Ceku would be brought before an investigative judge in Kranj, the closest city to the airport, who would check his identity and keep him in detention until the country's judicial authorities complete procedures for his extradition. That could take days or even weeks.

Ceku was detained shortly before 1 p.m. (1100 GMT) while en route to Pristina, Kosovo's capital. He said his passport and other personal belongings were seized and he was being kept in airport facilities.

In 1999, Ceku headed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a rebel group that battled Serb forces in the province's war. The corps he heads now numbers 3,000 and mainly consists of former rebel fighters.

Last year, Serbia's authorities requested that U.N. authorities arrest three senior ethnic Albanian rebel leaders, including Ceku, to face trial for atrocities allegedly committed during Kosovo's 1998-99 war.

Last December, Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic accused chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte of failing to indict Ceku and two other rebel leaders with war crimes.

Earlier this year, another former Kosovo rebel commander, Fatmir Limaj, was arrested in Slovenia and extradited to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, which indicted him for atrocities committed in Kosovo.

Slovenia arrests Kosovo ex-rebel leader on Serbian request

By Bojan Kavcic

LJUBLJANA, Oct 22 (AFP) - Slovenian police said Wednesday they had detained former Kosovo rebel leader Agim Ceku at the request of Serbia, where he is wanted for murders and kidnappings allegedly committed in the province's 1998-1999 war.

Slovenian police spokesman Zdenko Guzzi told AFP that police arrested Ceku at Ljubljana's airport acting on an Interpol arrest warrant issued by the Belgrade Interpol office at the request of a Serbian court.

Guzzi also corrected a previous statement from Slovenian authorities that the warrant for Ceku, currently head of Kosovo's emergency force, was requested by the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

In The Hague, prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann confirmed there was no arrest warrant issued for Ceku from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Serbian authorities also said that Ceku had been detained at Belgrade's request.
"As far as I know, Ceku has been detained in Slovenia following our (Serbian) arrest warrant from 1998," Nebojsa Covic, Serbian Deputy Prime Minister in charge of Kosovo, told AFP.

A local court in southern Serbian town Nis launched an investigation on Ceku in 1999 for crimes and genocide allegedly committed against the Serbs living in Kosovo after the province came under UN and NATO control in June 1999.

"Based upon commanding responsibility, Ceku is investigated for murders of 669 Serbs and 18 people of other national origin and 584 cases of kidnapping," investigating judge Danica Marinkovic told the Beta news agency.

Covic said last month that 1,021 Serbs had been killed during and after the war in Kosovo.

Ceku, the head of Kosovo's civil emergency force, had earlier told AFP from telephone to Pristina that he was being held by Slovenian authorities.

"I am being kept in a small room and guarded by two police officers," Ceku said.
Ceku said he had been detained at Ljubljana airport in the early afternoon but that he had not been told why he was being held.

The Slovenian police spokesman said Ceku would be handed over to Slovenian judicial officials.

Ceku heads the Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC), an emergency reaction force formed after the dismantling of the rebel ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) that fought a separatist war against Yugoslavia in 1998-99.

The 3,000 strong KPC is closely supervised by the UN mission that administers Kosovo as well as the NATO-led force, KFOR.

Its mission is to react to humanitarian catastrophes, although the organisation is allowed a limited number of weapons and Kosovo Albanians see it as the future army of the independence-seeking province.

Ceku, a former senior officer in the Croatian army, was named military head of the KLA during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia that ended the war in Kosovo in 1999.

Earlier this year, Slovenia detained another ethnic Albanian politician and former guerrilla leader from Kosovo, who had been indicted for war crimes by the Hague court. He was then extradited to the Hague.

The man, Fatmir Limaj, has been indicted by the tribunal, along with three other former members of the now dismantled Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), for killing and torturing prisoners in a prison camp during the 1998-99 conflict in the Serbian province, the court said last March.

They were the first ethnic Albanians to be indicted by the UN court for crimes committed during the conflict that pitted the Serb forces of former strongman Slobodan Milosevic against the ethnic majority Albanians and the KLA.
Milosevic has himself been given till mid-December by the court to prepare his defence on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Head of UN-created Kosovo Protection Corps arrested (B92)

LJUBLJANA -- Wednesday - The commander of the UN-created Kosovo Protection Corps was arrested today in Slovenia on an arrest warrant issued by the current authorities in Belgrade.

A spokesman for the Slovene police said Agim Ceku, a former member of the guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army, was detained whilst waiting for a flight to Pristina.

Miran Koren said that police were responding to an Interpol warrant issued this year at the request of the Serbian authorities.

A source close to the Slovene police said that Ceku was wanted on suspicion of genocide. Belgrade confirmed tonight that it would seek his handover.

Serbian government minister Rasim Ljajic told B92 that he would sign an extradition request tomorrow morning.

Ceku heads the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civil protection unit set up by the province's United Nations mission from the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army. He previously fought with the Croatian army.

His extradition depends on whether the Slovene justice minister signs the extradition order. Slovenia does not have a bilateral extradition agreement with Serbia-Montenegro.

A spokeswoman for the UN in Kosovo said that mission was looking into the arrest, while media in Pristina report Ceku as saying he expects to be released soon.

The arrest comes as the chief prosecutor at the UN war crimes tribunal, Carla del Ponte, is due in Pristina.

Agim Ceku detained in Slovenia (Beta)

PRISTINA, LJUBLJANA -- Thursday - The commander of the Kosovo Protection Corps, Agim Ceku, has been arrested in Slovenia, UN officials said today.

The former leader of the outlawed Kosovo Liberation Army was in transit on his way to Kosovo when detained at Ljubljana airport on the basis of an arrest warrant issued in Serbia.

A representative of the UN mission in Kosovo told Beta that UNMIK had been informed of the arrest.

The Kosovo Protection Corps has also confirmed that Ceku has been arrested.

UN body urges Serb action on Belgrade mass graves

By Fredrik Dahl

BELGRADE, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Serbia must take action to find those guilty of killing 900 Kosovo Albanians and trucking their bodies to mass graves on police land near Belgrade and other sites, a U.N. human rights body said on Wednesday.

The graves' existence was made public two years ago as the reformers who ousted Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 prepared to hand him over to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, but no one has so far been charged for the crime in Serbia.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said the killing of hundreds of people in Kosovo during the 1999 conflict and then taking them outside the province could only have been done with police and army involvement.

It published a report calling for an independent commission of inquiry -- two days after The Hague court said it had indicted four Serb generals, including the current head of uniformed police, Sreten Lukic, for war crimes against Kosovo Albanians.

Mission head Laurie Wiseberg said the timing was a coincidence. But rapid progress in investigating the ``gross human rights violations'' represented by mass graves could help Serbia win approval to try such suspects at home, she said.

Serbia wants such cases to be tried before domestic courts, rather than sent to The Hague.

OHCHR human rights officer Paul Miller said the office had met Lukic several times and urged redoubled police efforts.

``More than two and a half years on we have not seen evidence that there is a criminal investigation in process,'' Miller told a news conference. ``We consider it is vital that this issue is addressed.''

The new U.N. indictment, alleging executions and mass deportations during NATO's 1999 bombing campaign to halt Serb repression, mentioned the mass graves found at a special police training ground in the Belgrade suburb of Batajnica.

The Serbian government has reacted with alarm to the latest charges from the U.N. court based in The Hague, with Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic suggesting he expects them to be withdrawn and reviewed.

Wiseberg declined to say whether she believed people still holding senior positions were involved in the crimes related to the mass graves, of which those in Batajnica were by far the largest, holding up to 800 bodies.

Two other sites contained more than 100 bodies.

``There were people clearly at very senior levels involved in this operation but we can't give you names, we can't tell you whether they are still in a position of authority today,'' she said.
The OHCHR report said the mass graves provided overwhelming evidence of systematic human rights violations, including torture and murder of civilians.

Serbian police back their head indicted for war crimes in Kosovo

Belgrade (dpa) - Serbian police on Wednesday fully backed their chief, General Sreten Lukic, warning that a recently-announced international war crime indictment against him was a threat to fragile stability in the country.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia on Monday announced that Lukic, along with another police and two army generals, was indicted over his alleged role in a campaign of terror targeting ethnic Albanian population in the 1999 Kosovo war.

Officials of The Hague-based tribunal insisted that the indicted men, whose charges were kept secret until this week, should swiftly be extradited to face trial. Lukic, assistant interior minister and chief of Serbian police, is the only one among the indicted who remained active service.

But Serbian police warned in a statement that it wants Lukic to remain on his post ``in this delicate moment and continue working ... because his withdrawal would jeopardize the security of the country''.

Lukic's departure would also pose a risk to stability due to ``dissatisfaction of all interior ministry personnel over sudden and unfounded indictments,'' police said.
Serbian police said that indictments were ``unacceptable'', based only on the chain of command.

``It relates to General Lukic and all policemen who served in Kosovo, where a large number of police were killed or wounded fighting Albanian terrorists, who served legally and in accordance with the rules,'' the statement said.

The police said they would organize a rally of support for Lukic in central Belgrade on Friday.

The indictments against Lukic and other generals enraged Belgrade officials, who said that they would insist to hold their trial in front of a domestic court.

Thaqi calls for constitution (Beta)

PRISTINA -- Democratic Party of Kosovo leader Hashim Thaqi said today that the transfer of international authority to Kosovo institutions called for changes to the Kosovo Constitutional Framework.

Thaqi told Radio Free Europe that the changes would meant that Kosovo would "finally have its own constitution".

He added that the international community must accept the reality that there would be no progress in Kosovo legislation until a Constitution is adopted which would be fully in line with international standards.

Serb police launch Mladic search-PM

(Adds police source in paragraph 6, details)

By Julijana Mojsilovic

BELGRADE, Oct 22 (Reuters) - Serbian police received an anonymous tip on the whereabouts of top war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic on Wednesday which they are following up, Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic said.

Serbia is under heavy international pressure to arrest Bosnian Serb army commander Mladic, commander of a separatist Serb army during Bosnia's brutal 1992-95 war, but several hours after police acted on the tip-off there was no sign of him.

U.N. war crimes prosecutors backed by the West have repeatedly demanded Serbia arrest Mladic. Along with Radovan Karadzic, who led a breakaway Bosnian Serb republic, he is wanted for the slaughter of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.

``Action was launched to check the whereabouts of Mladic following an anonymous tipoff,'' Zivkovic was quoted as saying by the Beta news agency. He later confirmed the report to Reuters.

``Our bodies respond to any tip-off that sounds serious,'' he said on Serbian television, while also describing the police action as ``routine.''

A police source declined to comment further. ``More details will, most probably, be available tomorrow,'' the source said.

Chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte said in Belgrade this month he was still in Serbia. But Serbian authorities have insisted they have no evidence he is in the country, while vowing to check any information to the contrary.

The U.N. tribunal stepped up the pressure on Monday by making public indictments against four top Serbian police and army generals during the 1999 Kosovo conflict -- a move seen by the Serbian press as ``blackmail'' to hand over Mladic.

Complying with The Hague under pain of a U.S. economic aid cutoff, impoverished Serbia has handed over former strongman Slobodan Milosevic, ex-president Milan Milutinovic and other leading wartime figures, including seven this year alone.

Mladic, a hero to some in Serbia who went underground in 2000, is mentioned by name for the first time in one draft of a U.S. Senate bill that could set Belgrade a March 31, 2004 ultimatum for his handover.

Serbian television quoted Zivkovic as saying the current checks were of the sort carried out ``almost every week'' on the basis of such tips. However, it is rare for such action to be made public while in progress.

In an indication of an increased sense of urgency, Serbia and Montenegro Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic told daily Danas the authorities should now focus on finding Mladic, making clear this could help resolve relations with The Hague.
A spokesman for the U.N. tribunal in The Hague said he was not aware of any action to apprehend Mladic.

Police launch hunt for Mladic (B92)

BELGRADE -- Wednesday - Serbian police have launched an operation to track down war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic after receiving an anonymous tip-off, Prime Minister Zoran Zivkovic has told reporters.

Zivkovic said that at 5.00pm police began "checking the whereabouts" of the former Bosnian Serb army chief. He added that such tip-offs had been received before.

Mladic is among the three most wanted war crimes fugitives, alongside Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and former Croatian general Ante Gotovina.

The move comes just two days after the United Nations war crimes tribunal disclosed indictments against four top generals, including the head of Serbian public security, Sreten Lukic.

Serbia-Montenegro Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic suggested yesterday that the handover of Mladic might convince the tribunal to allow the four indictees to stand trial in Belgrade.

He appeared to be backed by Pierre Richard Prosper, America's ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, who was quoted by Beta news agency as saying the extradition of Mladic would change everything.