U.N. War Crimes Tribunal Set to Indict Milosevic

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic will be indicted on war crimes charges today by an international tribunal, well-informed sources said Wednesday, a step that will increase his isolation but could also complicate diplomatic efforts to end the war in Kosovo.

The U.N. indictment will accuse Milosevic of involvement in killings, rapes and “ethnic cleansing” by Yugoslav forces that have driven most of Kosovo’s 1.8 million ethnic Albanians from their homes, two of the sources said.

North Atlantic Treaty Organization officials said a war crimes indictment will intensify Milosevic’s international isolation, long an alliance objective. And it could also shore up support for NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia in Germany and other member countries that have grown critical of the attacks.

On the other hand, officials said, the indictment will make diplomacy more difficult by putting NATO in the unsavory position of negotiating a settlement in Kosovo with someone who is charged with war crimes. Kosovo is a southern province of Serbia, which is the dominant republic in Yugoslavia.

For the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, this will be the first indictment of a sitting president. If Milosevic is indicted, arrested and found guilty of genocide--the most serious of the possible charges against him--he could be sentenced to life in prison.

In Washington, Clinton administration officials declined to confirm the reports of the indictment before the official announcement from the tribunal, which is based in The Hague. Nor would U.N. officials comment. But sources close to the war crimes panel in Europe, New York and Washington confirmed that the indictments will be handed down. All the sources requested anonymity.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the United States and its allies would continue their dual-track strategy of bombing and diplomacy regardless of Milosevic’s legal status.

“We all have to continue in every conceivable way to pursue the air campaign. . . . We need to pursue the humanitarian work that we are doing . . . and we need to pursue a diplomatic track,” Albright said. “And we need to talk to the people that have some role to play on the Serb side.”

Although Albright declined to elaborate, her response seemed to indicate that if Milosevic was pushed to the sidelines, the United States and its allies would try to negotiate with some other Yugoslav leader.

A senior administration official said Washington would deal with whoever is in charge in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital. This official said NATO had never planned to negotiate--in the normal sense of the word--with Milosevic anyway. NATO’s conditions for ending its bombing of Yugoslavia are not subject to change, the official said, and so the only choices for the Yugoslav government are to accept them or to continue to be hit by daily bombing raids.

The official said an indictment should “strengthen political and public support in the United States, in Europe and in the world for what we are doing.”

Another senior State Department official said: “There is no legal prohibition against dealing with someone who has been indicted. There is a judgmental question there as to whether you want to deal with him, but we haven’t made that decision yet.”

It is not likely that Milosevic will be arrested soon. Under international tribunal law, once an indictment is signed by a judge, it is sent to Interpol, which notifies countries that they are required to arrest the accused if he or she enters their jurisdiction.

Human Rights Watch applauded the prospective indictment. “We believe it is high time,” said Reed Brody, the New York-based group’s advocacy director. “There is no doubt that he bears command responsibility for the atrocities” in Kosovo and, before that, in nearby Bosnia-Herzegovina, where a war raged for 3 1/2 years earlier this decade.

The timing of the indictment may be a product of Canadian politics. Louise Arbour, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, has been trying to wrap up indictments against Milosevic and others before quitting in anticipation of being appointed to a seat on the Canadian Supreme Court that will open up Tuesday, according to U.N. and Canadian sources.

The tribunal is known to have considered war crimes charges against Milosevic stemming from the conflict in Bosnia, but it did not indict him during that war. That left Milosevic free to attend 1995 peace talks in Dayton, Ohio, and negotiate on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs at a time when their own leader, Radovan Karadzic, was under indictment.

During the Dayton conference, U.S. officials said Milosevic was both the problem and the solution to the bloodshed in the Balkans. Now the United States and its allies have decided that he is no longer a reliable partner in the search for a solution.

“We didn’t pick the timing,” the State Department official said. “Louise Arbour makes her own decisions. And she made this decision the way any prosecutor would.”

Nevertheless, the expected indictment clearly added new uncertainty to Russian efforts to broker a deal that would end the conflict. Russia’s Balkans peace envoy, Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, was expected to postpone a planned trip to Belgrade today so that he could assess the impact of the tribunal’s decision.

In Moscow on Wednesday, Chernomyrdin and Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott met late into the night, hours longer than planned, to discuss the faltering diplomatic effort.

“An energetic search for ways of settling the Kosovo issue is underway,” said Chernomyrdin’s spokesman, Valentin M. Sergeyev.

In Washington, Albright met with Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou, whose country is conducting a less-known but perhaps more promising attempt to mediate between NATO and Yugoslavia. Although Greece is a member of the alliance, the Greek public is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the Serbs.

“We are a member of NATO, we are a member of the European Union, but we also are a country in Southeast Europe, in the Balkans, right next to the conflict,” Papandreou said with Albright at his side. “We therefore feel that this double identity gives us a special place in helping overcome the crisis, find a solution and creating a multicultural Balkans where everyone can live in peace and democracy.”

Papandreou called for a pause of at least 48 hours in the 9-week-old bombing campaign against Yugosavia, a step that he said would make it easier to reach a peaceful solution. Albright rejected the plan, arguing that continued military force was the only way to persuade the Yugoslav government to agree to withdraw its army and special police from Kosovo and to allow hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees to return.

In the skies over Yugoslavia, NATO conducted some of the heaviest bombing attacks since the war began.

In the 24 hours ending early Wednesday, NATO aircraft flying 650 sorties made 284 strike flights. That brought the number of sorties since March 24 to 27,110.

In other developments:

* President Clinton taped a radio message to the Kosovo Albanians in which he urged them to be patient, and he renewed the U.S. commitment to ensure that they return safely to their homes. “It will take time,” he said. “But with your strength and our determination, there is no doubt what the outcome will be. The campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo will end. You will return. . . . No matter what has happened to you, you are not alone. The United States and NATO are with you, and we will stay with you.”

* Blasts reverberated throughout dozens of Yugoslav cities Wednesday during a record number of NATO attack flights. In a round of bombing over Belgrade shortly before midnight, heavy antiaircraft fire resounded in the capital. Local media reported that two children and one other person were killed and several people injured in the region of Ralja, 18 miles south of Belgrade, when a missile struck residential buildings. The report couldn’t be independently confirmed.

* The Defense Department announced a ban on retirements from the Air Force to ensure that enough pilots and ground crews are available for the air campaign against Yugoslavia. Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon said the ban applied to about 120,000 Air Force personnel and will remain in effect as long as reservists are being called up for duty in the conflict. Bacon said about 6,000 Air Force personnel had already requested retirement between now and the end of the year. Those requests will be frozen.

* Enthusiastic ethnic Albanian refugees from Kosovo greeted Ibrahim Rugova, the moderate Kosovo Albanian leader, when he made a cameo appearance at one of Macedonia’s refugee camps. Shouting “NATO,” “Rugova,” and “UCK,” the initials in Albanian for the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, the crowd swarmed around Rugova as he entered the camp. Although Rugova was elected Kosovo president in an unofficial prewar election that was not recognized by Yugoslavia, he appears to have lost his preeminent position to the guerrilla KLA.

* Officials of the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said the agency was preparing for 1 million refugees expected to be expelled from Kosovo. Already, more than 800,000 have fled Yugoslavia. UNHCR special envoy Dennis McNamara said that governments of neighboring countries as well as the international community needed to work closely and that more aid money was needed to handle the flood.

* Gen. Dennis Reimer, the U.S. Army chief of staff, told reporters that he warned his civilian superiors in the weeks leading up to the start of the bombing that air action alone was unlikely to achieve NATO’s objectives. “I had adequate opportunity to make my views known and to raise all the issues I wanted to raise,” Reimer said, in reference to the Pentagon’s pre-conflict consultations. Reimer joined a growing list of military officials, mostly from the Army, who have said that air power alone may not be enough.

Kempster reported from Washington and Wilson from the United Nations. Times staff writers John-Thor Dahlburg in Brussels; Maura Reynolds in Moscow; Alissa J. Rubin in Skopje, Macedonia; Carol J. Williams in Tirana, Albania; Edwin Chen in Jacksonville, Fla.; and Doyle McManus and Paul Richter in Washington contributed to this report.