Scant mention of NATO in Milosevic indictment

By Douglas Hamilton

THE HAGUE (Reuters): The fact that NATO was bombing Yugoslavia while Slobodan Milosevic was allegedly orchestrating the mass killing and deportation of Kosovo Albanians is not mentioned until the last-but-one page of his 32-page indictment.

It comes at the end of a section called "Additional Facts".

The existence of a state of conflict at the time is first mentioned on page 22 and the Kosovo Liberation Army, which was fighting the Yugoslav Army and police all the while, is first referred to on page 28, also as an "additional fact".

Milosevic's prosecutors aim to prove he had a master plan to drive Albanians from Kosovo, and ruthlessly executed it. His defense may argue that NATO bombing triggered the mayhem.

"There's nothing to be read into this," said Graham Blewitt, the deputy prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague.

"The way these things are drafted often is just a question of the individual style of the people doing it," he told Reuters when asked about the lack of these elements of context in 12 pages of otherwise detailed charges in the indictment.

But a Rip Van Winkle reader unaware of the two-year guerrilla war between Kosovo Albanian separatists and Yugoslav forces, that climaxed in the Western alliance's first armed "humanitarian intervention", would get an odd impression of events and the circumstances in which killings were committed.

Attached to the indictment which Milosevic is due to answer on Tuesday is a 22-page appendix with the names of some 600 murdered Kosovo Albanians, aged from 10 months to 90 years.

With the sole exception of 46 victims at Racak on Jan. 15, 1999, all were killed during the March 24 to June 10 period of NATO bombing. Most listed lost their lives in late March or early April, within days of the first allied air raids.

Until the bombing started, KLA guerrillas claimed to control up to 40 percent of Kosovo.

Milosevic, and four others accused, allegedly "planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted in a campaign of terror and violence" against Kosovo Albanians.

"By using the word 'committed' in this indictment, the Prosecutor does not intend to suggest that any of the accused physically perpetrated any of the crimes charged, personally," the tribunal's indictment states.

The indictment, reissued after Serbia handed Milosevic over to the tribunal last week, asserts at several points that the killings, woundings and forced deportations were "systematic".

In the section titled General Allegations, it asserts that in addition to his de jure powers as president of Yugoslavia and supreme commander of the army, Milosevic "exercised extensive de facto control over numerous institutions essential to, or involved in, the conduct of the offenses alleged".

But in the probable absence of any convincing paper trail, the prosecution will be required to produce convincing witnesses to prove Milosevic ordered crimes against humanity in Kosovo and urged his security forces to disregard the rules of war.

Milosevic says the tribunal is a tool of NATO and the West to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia -- a viewpoint for which Russia has also expressed some sympathy.

Supporters say that whether he gets a technically fair trial at The Hague is not the issue; the politics of "victor's justice" lies in who indicts whom in the first place.

"He said he wanted his defense to be political as he considers all the accusations against him to be political," one legal source privy to discussions told Reuters in Belgrade.

"He said the real war criminals were the leaders of NATO and that they should be tried and not him," the source said. As the indictment notes, Milosevic was the "primary interlocutor" of the international community on the crisis provoked by the breakup of Yugoslavia. It even lists the big conferences.

Chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte ruled months ago, after reviewing the facts, that NATO has no case to answer. But Milosevic's defense team can be expected to challenge that.

"I think we cannot underestimate the case," Nancy Paterson, an American lawyer who has just left the tribunal's prosecutor's office, told the New York Times on Monday.

"There is no classic paper trail that ideally you would like to have," said Paterson, who helped draw up the indictment in 1999 that made Milosevic the first head of state ever to be charged with war crimes while in office.

"There are pieces missing ... You need to establish what the real chain of command was."

Whatever it was, the results are not in any doubt.

Thousands of Kosovo Albanians were killed by Serbian troops, police and paramilitary gangs, then burned or buried in mass graves or, as recently disclosed, trucked north to faraway sites for concealment.

Three quarters of a million were driven out of Yugoslavia and hundreds of villages and farms put to the torch.

As the indictment states, those who were spared death had their identity documents systematically removed as they were pushed out, so they could never reclaim their homeland.

Was this the orchestrated execution of a long-standing, drastic plan to "save" Kosovo for Serbia by reversing the 9-to-1 ethnic population balance? Or was it a storm of revenge by Serb forces against Albanians who knowingly brought NATO bombs down on Yugoslavia?

Proof that it was the former may exist in a secret Serbian plan, called "Operation Horseshoe", said to have been uncovered by German military intelligence. Its three-pronged intent was to rid Kosovo of Albanians, leave the KLA no place to hide, and cause a refugee crisis in the Balkans.

But details of the alleged plot appeared at a convenient time for NATO -- in early April as it became apparent that more than a few days of bombing was going to be needed to make Milosevic give in -- and its existence is questioned by some. It is not mentioned in the Tribunal's indictment.

Two international studies, by the UN refugee agency and the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), concluded that the air strikes did trigger greater violence on a grander scale, as Kosovo Albanians will readily testify. It was open season.

Whether the crimes alleged in the Milosevic indictment were planned before or after the start of NATO military action may have no bearing on his ultimate guilt, or innocence, for them.

But a finding that the start of war with NATO triggered the pogrom could stoke debate over the timing and wisdom of Western "humanitarian intervention", and its cost in lives.