Cheering relatives, friends and supporters greeted the arrival in Kosovo province Tuesday of 145 ethnic Albanians who had been held prisoner elsewhere in Serbia. Most were expected to be released Wednesday.
More than 2,000 ethnic Albanian prisoners–many of them suspected guerrilla fighters–were moved out of Kosovo in mid-1999, before peacekeepers entered the province after NATO’s air war to end the repression of the ethnic Albanian majority.
The great majority of the detainees were gradually released, and Tuesday’s transfer means that virtually none remain in Serbia, according to authorities in Belgrade, Yugoslavia’s capital.
Serbian authorities had charged most of the prisoners with terrorism or ordinary crimes. Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo viewed almost all of them as political detainees or hostages.
The release fulfills a key condition demanded by U.S. legislation for Belgrade to continue receiving American aid past the end of this month.
Michael Steiner, head of the UN administration in Kosovo, welcomed the transfer.
“Those who have not committed crimes will be released, most of them tomorrow, the rest within weeks, not months,” Steiner said.
Those guilty of crimes “will serve out their sentences not in Serbia [proper] but here in Kosovo,” Steiner said.
Many Kosovars had believed that until the prisoners’ arrival Tuesday, about 500 ethnic Albanians were still being held elsewhere in Serbia. But in a sign of increasing acceptance of the idea that the total might be much smaller, Radio Television 21, an Albanian-language station in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, referred to Tuesday’s transfer as covering “all” prisoners.
While the prisoner release should help the Serbian government’s standing with Washington and other foreign governments, the most important condition in the U.S. financial aid legislation is that Yugoslavia cooperate with the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague.
There has been widespread speculation in Belgrade that Serbian authorities might arrest several alleged war criminals and transfer them to the tribunal by early next week in an effort to satisfy this requirement. About $40 million of badly needed aid is at stake.
