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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SirRealist who wrote (15906)	1/9/2002 3:46:40 AM
From: SirRealist	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Wednesday January 9 12:16 AM ET Milosevic to Face Last Hague Pre-Trial Hearing By Paul Gallagher AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites) will enter the dock of the Hague tribunal on Wednesday for his final hearing before trial for alleged crimes against humanity in Kosovo in 1999. But evidence of Kosovo's mass graves is unlikely to figure in Wednesday's session as lawyers and judges set the procedural course for the start of the ousted Serb leader's trial on February 12. Milosevic, accused of responsibility for a Serb campaign of mass killings and expulsions of ethnic Kosovo Albanians, is to face a separate trial on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide in Croatia in 1991 and in Bosnia in 1992-95. The 60-year-old ousted Yugoslav and Serb president, who lost power to reformists in Belgrade after 2000 elections, has branded the court ``illegal,'' the charges against him ''monstrous,'' and has chosen not to appoint defense counsel. The court has entered ``not guilty'' pleas on his behalf to all three indictments and appointed three prominent international lawyers as ``amici curiae'' or ``friends of the court'' to ensure he has a fair trial. The Kosovo indictment -- the first of three against Milosevic -- accuses him of responsibility alongside four other senior Serbs for the murder of 900 Kosovo Albanians and expulsion of around 800,000 civilians from their homes. United Nations (news - web sites) war crimes prosecutors say Kosovo marked the beginning and the end of Milosevic's plan to create a ``Greater Serbia'' during his 13 years at the helm in Belgrade as both Serb and Yugoslav president. The conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and Milosevic's role in them were clearly linked, they said. MASS GRAVES Prosecutors have examined hundreds of mass graves and exhumed thousands of bodies in Kosovo to build up their case. Hundreds of witnesses are to be called in the Kosovo trial during the nine months prosecutors expect to present their case. ``We exhumed around 4,000 bodies in Kosovo. Around half were identified,'' U.N. prosecution spokeswoman Florence Hartmann said. Kosovo made and broke Milosevic's political career. As Serbian Communist Party leader in the late 1980s, he lit a nationalist fire in the hearts of Serbs by issuing a rallying cry on a Kosovo battlefield where 600 years earlier Serbs were crushed by Turkish forces. A decade later, with Milosevic now president of what was left of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav forces reacted ferociously to an armed uprising by the ethnic Albanian guerrilla Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1999 NATO (news - web sites) intervened against the Serbs and after an eleven-week bombing campaign occupied Kosovo. Human Rights Watch said in a recent report on Kosovo it also had evidence of human rights violations by the KLA and NATO. The European Court of Human Rights ruled last month that NATO's bombing of Serbian state television in Belgrade, which killed 16 civilians during the Kosovo conflict, did not breach a convention on European human rights. dailynews.yahoo.com