SKOPJE, March 14: Former Macedonian Interior Minister Ljube Boskovski has been indicted for war crimes by the UN tribunal in The Hague, the Justice Ministry said on Monday.
The indictment, which names Mr Boskovski and another person, is the first in Macedonia and is among the last the UN court will issue for the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Police sources said he was indicted with Johan Tarculovski, a former senior policeman in custody in Macedonia.
Mr Boskovski fled to Croatia last year after Macedonia charged him and six former members of the security forces with murdering six Pakistanis and an Indian to make it look like a blow against Muslim militants.
The court has levelled charges in all the conflicts except Slovenia, indicting individuals from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Kosovo — including Kosovo’s prime minister last week — and Macedonia.
“We have received an indictment for Ljube Boskovski and one other person charging them with crimes against the laws or customs of war,” spokeswoman Mira Ilievska told reporters in the capital, Skopje.
Official sources said the charge concerns Mr Boskovski’s role in a clash between security forces and Albanian rebels in the village of Ljubotno, near Skopje, in 2001, in which 10 Albanians were killed.
INDICTMENTS NEAR END: UN chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte said in December she was about to sign five or six indictments for about 11 people. An unofficial count suggests Mr Boskovski’s may be the last.
There was no immediate comment from The Hague.
Del Ponte is thought to be under pressure from major powers who initiated the tribunal to wrap up investigations and finish trials by 2008 and close by the end of 2010.
Macedonia broke away peacefully from Yugoslavia in 1990 but encountered ethnic conflict 11 years later.
Mr Boskovski was among the toughest members of the nationalist government of Orthodox Christian Macedonia during the six-month insurgency by guerrillas of its Muslim Albanian minority.
They seized control of villages in the north, igniting a conflict that took Macedonia to the brink of all-out civil war.
Mr Boskovski formed a paramilitary police unit known as the Lions, loyal to him alone, while Ukrainian helicopter gunships were brought in to help Macedonian forces fight the rebels.
In 1999, Macedonia had been swamped by ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo during NATO’s bombing of Serbia. The government of the day said the revolt was stirred by outsiders infiltrating from Kosovo and southern Serbia.
Mediation by NATO and the European Union eventually stopped the fighting, leading to the 2001 Ohrid peace accord which gave greater local autonomy to the 25 percent Albanian minority.
Mr Boskovski was questioned by war crimes tribunal investigators last November in Croatia.—Reuters
