Word: kosovo
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...almost any day now--his detention will not be the watershed that international prosecutors hoped for. Despite his indictment by the international war-crimes tribunal in the Hague, he will be tried in Belgrade, most probably for abuse of office and other misdeeds rather than for ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and elsewhere. This is not a minor distinction. Local trials do not address responsibility for the worst crimes committed in Europe since World War II, and hence they undermine the landmark U.N.-led effort to hold war criminals accountable under international law regardless of nationality...
...only of those linked directly to Milosevic. In fact, the new government has shown few pangs of conscience about Serbia's wartime past. Prime Minister Djindjic recently appointed to the critical post of chief of public security Sreten Lukic, the man who presided over Serbian police during massacres in Kosovo prior to the NATO bombing. Now Lukic, among his new responsibilities, is obliged to arrest and extradite two relatives, Milan and Sredoje Lukic, wanted by the Hague for "willfully killing a significant number of Bosnian Muslim civilians" in the eastern town of Visegrad between May 1992 and October...
Simatovic is not a hero in Belgrade, nor is he the villain that he is in the eyes of many Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians. The appointments of Lukic and others were greeted with a yawn. Even figures who have become synonymous with evil in the West have yet to fall from grace in long-isolated Serbia. Not long ago, 500 Belgraders turned out on a midwinter morning to honor the memory of Zeljko (Arkan) Raznjatovic, the notorious paramilitary gangster who was gunned down in a hotel lobby a year ago. Dressed in rich furs and long black overcoats, the mourners...
...Berets? They were in action again last week, this time against Albanian guerrillas along the Kosovo border, though these days they are under a different command. The new government defends its reluctance to send even indicted war criminals to the Hague, citing the risk of political instability if it acts too fast. But the reverse is also true. "If we want to build a normal society, we need to face the truth about these crimes and punish the perpetrators," says Natasa Kandic, head of a local human-rights group, the Humanitarian Law Fund. Anything less would be getting away with...
...guerrillas? No Western forces are eager to be drawn into a fight with the guerrillas on their own turf. Instead, last week NATO enlisted the aid of its former archenemy, the Yugoslav army, to tamp down guerrilla activity. Two years ago, it was this army that stormed into Kosovo. "NATO is beginning to trust us," mused a Serbian official...