Four Serbian generals, among them the country's present deputy interior minister, were publicly indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia on war crimes charges relating to the 1998-1999 Kosovo conflict, a foreign news agency reported on Tuesday.
The men, among them Sreten Lukic, the deputy minister who is head of public safety, and Nebojsa Pavkovic, former chief of staff of the army of ex-Yugoslavia, are accused of having taken part in a campaign of terror and violence against Kosovo Albanians in 1999.
At the time Pavkovic was in command of the Third Army Corps which was active in Kosovo. Lukic was chief of police in Kosovo. The other men accused are Generals Vladimir Lazarevic and Vlastimir Djordevic, at the time respectively corps commander in the Kosovo capital Pristina and head of public security at the Serbian interior ministry.
The war crimes court, based in The Hague, accuses the generals of having participated in "a joint criminal enterprise" which sought among other things "the expulsion of a substantial portion of the Kosovo Albanian population from the territory of the province of Kosovo in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control over the province. Between January 1 and June 20, 1999, an estimated 800,000 Kosovo Albanians were forced from their homes. |
