Most people who have met Milan Milutinovic say the Serbian president is a nice guy, not at all the war criminal type.
“Smooth, affable, beautifully dressed, at ease in the language and style of international diplomacy,” is how Richard Holbrooke, the veteran U.S. envoy, describes him in his memoir of the Dayton accords.
But when former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic was indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague in May 1999, Milutinovic and three other senior officials were named as co-defendants. All are charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity in the campaign of violence against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
Milosevic was delivered to The Hague by Serbian authorities at the end of June. The four others remain at large. Unlike Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic, two other prominent names on The Hague’s most-wanted list, Milutinovic and his colleagues have not gone into hiding. They live openly in Serbia.
Milutinovic serves in what is theoretically the most powerful political post in Yugoslavia.
The presidency of the Serbian Republic was Milosevic’s power base from 1989 until 1997. When the Serbian Constitution precluded him from seeking a third term, Milosevic adjusted the Yugoslav Constitution so he could slide into the Yugoslav federal presidency–a largely symbolic post, but sufficient for the needs of the dictator.
Milutinovic, who had served as Milosevic’s foreign minister, moved into the Serbian presidency, the post he holds today.
A recent telephone call to his office resulted in a chat with a staffer who said that Milutinovic was not giving interviews but that the president “still has a job, he still gets correspondence and he still gets calls–just not as many as before.”
These days, the main rivals for political power in Yugoslavia are Vojislav Kostunica, the federal president who defeated Milosevic in elections a year ago, and Zoran Djindjic, the Serbian prime minister. Both have an eye on Milutinovic’s job.
Kostunica is interested in the Serbian presidency because if Montenegro, the junior partner to Serbia in what remains of Yugoslavia, makes good on its threat to leave the federation, there will not be a Federal Yugoslavia for Kostunica to govern. Opinion polls show Kostunica as heavy favorite in any race for the Serbian presidency.
Djindjic has effectively consolidated political power in Serbia but remains unpopular with voters. Because he could not defeat Kostunica in a head-to-head election, he would like to find a way to give the job to an ally.
No vote is planned until Montenegro decides its fate, and for now both men find it politically convenient to let the compliant Milutinovic occupy the office.
“They’ve made a deal with him. They left him in office and he agreed to become invisible. He signs whatever they tell him to sign,” said Stojan Cerovic, a political commentator in the weekly magazine Vreme.
`Immunity’ seen
As Serbian president, Milutinovic could have blocked Milosevic’s extradition to The Hague. He didn’t. In return, Djindjic has taken the position that Milutinovic, as Serbia’s lawfully elected president, enjoys “immunity” from the Hague indictment.
Carla Del Ponte, The Hague’s chief prosecutor, disagrees. She was in Belgrade on Tuesday, insisting there is no immunity for war crimes and that Milutinovic and several other prominent figures must be extradited.
“It does not mean we are presently banging on the table demanding that Milutinovic and the others be delivered to The Hague immediately. But as with any other indictee, they will have to be arrested and transferred here,” said Jean-Jacques Joris, the prosecutor’s adviser.
“In all fairness, the arrest and transfer of Slobodan Milosevic was a good sign of cooperation, and we are actively pressing the Yugoslav authorities to resume that cooperation,” Joris said.
But with Milosevic behind bars, it seems that international pressure to bring the others to justice has slackened.
“When you’ve got No. 1, who cares about Nos. 2 and 3?” said Cerovic. “It’s true, Milutinovic was president of Serbia [during the Kosovo war], but everyone here knows he wasn’t anywhere close to the decision-making process. The Hague would be smart to forget about him.”
Even some senior Western officials concede that Milutinovic probably was out of the loop, but the same cannot be said for Nikola Sainovic, Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic and Vlajko Stojiljkovic, the three other men named in the Milosevic indictment.
Sainovic, a political ally of Milosevic, was deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo war. Communications intercepts leaked to the media indicate he was in direct contact with Serbian police as they slaughtered 45 ethnic Albanians in the village of Racak on Jan. 15, 1999, an event that stirred the West to intervene in Kosovo.
After Milosevic was pushed from power, Sainovic retained a senior position in the Socialist Party and his seat in the federal parliament, which in theory gives him a claim of immunity from The Hague.
Serb authorities suspect that Sainovic was responsible for smuggling large quantities of gold out of the country on behalf of the Milosevic family. According to police sources, he recently was detained at the Romanian border and may be cooperating with Serbian authorities trying to recover the gold.
Ojdanic, a Milosevic loyalist, was appointed army chief of staff in November 1998, replacing Gen. Momcilo Perisic, who was increasingly reluctant to carry out Milosevic’s orders in Kosovo. Earlier, Ojdanic was involved in questionable military actions in eastern Bosnia during the war there.
Now retired and living on his pension in Zlatibor, a mountainous area near Montenegro, Ojdanic was undoubtedly at the top of the chain of command of the army, which coordinated the violence against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians.
`Operation Horseshoe’
So, too, was Stojiljkovic, who during this period served as interior minister with responsibility for the secret police and regular police. The police, even more than the army, were responsible for executing Operation Horseshoe, Milosevic’s plan to “cleanse” Kosovo of ethnic Albanians. Stojiljkovic, in poor health these days, is retired and living in Milosevic’s old neighborhood in Belgrade.
Because all four are named with Milosevic on the indictment, Del Ponte would prefer to try all of them together rather than wasting time and money repeating the same trial for each, said Joris.
