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BELGRADE, April 1: The Yugoslav government has decided to “cooperate fully” with the UN war crimes court, including handing over wanted war crimes suspects, Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic said on Monday.
“The federal government decided unanimously during an extraordinary meeting to cooperate fully with the tribunal and to demand all state organs to also cooperate fully,” Svilanovic told journalists.
“...This means allowing access to archives in a way that does not harm national dignity and the arrest and transfer to The Hague of those charged with war crimes,” he added.
The announcement followed the freezing of 40 million dollars (45 million euros) in US aid after a March 31 US congressional deadline for surrendering war crimes suspects for trial to The Hague passed without action.
Svilanovic said the Yugoslav Federation — made up of Serbia and Montenegro — “is a member of the United Nations and is obliged to cooperate.”
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica had come under intense pressure from political rivals Monday after his refusal to authorise the surrender of more war crimes suspects prompted the US aid freeze.
The decision follows a move by the Serbian government last Wednesday to adopt a new decree on arresting war crimes suspsects.
Although four more war crimes suspects have been transferred to The Hague since former president Slobodan Milosevic was surrendered in June 2000, there has been no attempt arrest high-profile indictees believed to be on Yugoslav territory.
war crimes suspect arrested: NATO-led peacekeepers arrested on Monday a former Bosnian Serb military officer who could be linked to war crimes committed in Srebrenica, a police source said.
The police source in Zvornik said Momir Nikolic was arrested by the NATO-led Stabilisation Force (SFOR) in the nearby town of Bratunac, in eastern Bosnia.
Nikolic served during the 1992-95 Bosnian war as deputy intelligence chief with the Bratunac brigade which allegedly took part in the 1995 attack on former Muslim enclave of Srebrenica.
Some 7,000 Muslim men and boys were executed by Serb forces at Srebrenica in the worst known war crime of the Balkans conflict.
The SFOR press office here could not immediately confirm the arrest.
US AID: US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday he had not yet certified Yugoslavia as eligible to continue to receive US aid and officials said he is likely to defer his decision.
“Not yet,” Powell told reporters when asked if he had made his decision.
Powell, who was leaving the State Department building for an outside appointment, declined to comment further but officials said he was likely to delay a decision until at least later this week.
As a result, tens of millions of dollars in US assistance to Belgrade was frozen overnight as a March 31 deadline passed for Powell to decide whether the country is cooperating fully with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The officials, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said they believed Powell did not want to act until he was convinced Belgrade was serious or not about handing over war crimes indictees to The Hague-based tribunal.
“The memo on the secretary’s desk but he has not made a decision yet and it looks like it may be delayed,” one State Department official said.
Powell had said he would make his decision over the weekend, but late last week the State Department said a certification announcement would not come until Monday or Tuesday at the earliest, if at all.
“The feeling is: we should wait,” the official said. “We don’t want to take any action one way or the other right now.”
Under the congressional requirements, without Powell’s certification, US assistance to Yugoslavia was frozen as of midnight on Sunday.
The freeze affects about 40 million dollars in direct aid as well as US support for multilateral loans for Yugoslavia from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
It does not, however, affect assistance for humanitarian or democratization projects, officials said.
Powell has praised some steps Belgrade has taken in meeting the US requirements — such as releasing dozens of ethnic Albanian Kosovars held in Serbian jails — but has pointedly decried the fact the war crimes prosecutors are still being denied access to important military archives.—AFP
