Kosovo Justice System Tries Patience of Serbs, Albanians

The United Nations, one of the world’s most vocal champions of human rights, is facing mounting complaints that it has violated the most basic rules of justice in Kosovo.

Fourteen months after the U.N. took charge of the Serbian province, both Serbs and ethnic Albanians are accusing its criminal courts of excessive delays, bias among judges, widespread witness tampering and other serious violations of the right to a fair trial.

Defending the world body, spokeswoman Susan Manuel said that the U.N. is trying to make the local justice system work but that a boycott by Serbian prosecutors and judges--compounded by a chronic shortage of foreign aid money and experts--is making a difficult job worse.

In addition, the foreign-led U.N. police force has complained that frequent intimidation of witnesses and court officials makes it extremely difficult to investigate and prosecute crimes.

Vladimir Vucetic is one of several prisoners whom Serbs point to as evidence that the U.N. is failing to ensure impartial justice in Kosovo. The mentally disabled Serbian teenager has spent 11 months in a U.N. prison awaiting trial. He was charged with genocide on Sept. 27, 1999, after an ethnic Albanian woman accused him of being in a group of Serbs who set fire to three houses in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica.

Vucetic, who was 16 at the time, isn’t guilty of anything more than being simple-minded and easily manipulated, said his mother, Stevka.

“Give my son a chocolate bar, he’ll jump from the roof,” she said through an interpreter in a tiny room that serves as bedroom, kitchen and living room. “You can do everything with him when he doesn’t understand.

“I can’t understand why they don’t find that one year is enough time for anybody to realize he made a mistake, let alone a retarded kid whose guilt has not been proved yet.”

Vucetic used to attend a special school for the mentally disabled, said Father Svetislav Nojic, 63, a Serbian Orthodox priest whose daughter was one of the boy’s teachers.

But for nearly a year now, Vucetic has shared a prison cell with three men, and although the teenager is able to understand where he is, he is nonetheless frightened.

“He responds to questions, but he generally keeps quiet,” Nojic said. “He refuses most things and keeps saying he has a headache.”

Vucetic’s mother said she had sent him out with 10 Yugoslav dinars, about 20 cents, to buy candy. He was arrested by French troops, who brought him back to the family’s home in mainly Serbian northern Kosovska Mitrovica, surrounded the house and searched it, she added.

“When I saw him, he peed in his pants. We both cried,” she said.

U.N. police questioned her about a Serbian man with whom Vucetic was alleged to have burned the houses, she said, and she insisted that she didn’t know him.

A U.S. prosecutor took control of the case Aug. 15, and the following day he reduced the charge of genocide to causing public danger. The teen’s trial is set to begin Thursday.

The teen’s lawyer, Zivojin Jokanovic, has defended Serbs charged with genocide and ethnic Albanians accused of terrorism. Right now, 43 of his non-Albanian clients are in Kosovo prisons. Half of them have been waiting more than a year for their trials, and that number will reach 80% by next month, he said in an interview.

The long delays not only violate the Serbian defendants’ right to speedy trials but also give their ethnic Albanian accusers more time to coach and harass witnesses and prosecutors, Jokanovic charged.

“I think most witnesses are being trained by experts,” the Serbian lawyer said. “The public prosecutor is often blatantly lying. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to work normally under such conditions.”

Jokanovic won the release of Miroljub Momcilovic, 60, and his sons Jugoslav, 32, and Boban, 26, from a U.S. military prison Aug. 8--more than a year after the three Serbs were arrested for the slaying of an ethnic Albanian man.

The Serbs insisted all along that they were innocent. They finally were vindicated when U.S. Army Sgt. Robert Black, a sniper with the U.N. peacekeeping force, admitted that he had shot Afrim Gagica, a former guerrilla commander in the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army, in the southeastern town of Gnjilane.

Bekim Shabani, who was injured in the shootout in front of the Momcilovics’ auto shop about 5 p.m. on July 10, 1999, testified that he had come with Gagica to buy car parts when the Serbs opened fire on them.

Momcilovic has admitted that he and his sons fired handguns and a Kalashnikov assault rifle, but he said that they emptied them in 15 seconds and that they were firing into the air, trying to make enough noise to attract attention.

The ethnic Albanian judge refused to admit evidence such as a videotape from the Momcilovics’ security camera that showed someone trying to kick the garage door in before the gun battle raged for about three or four minutes, the father said in an interview.

“They accused us of editing the tape and wouldn’t accept it as evidence,” he said. “On top of that, the Albanian witnesses radically changed their testimonies on two occasions.”

As part of efforts to reform the system, the U.N. administration removed the head judge hearing the case and appointed French jurist Patrice de Charette. On July 20, two days before a new trial opened, the U.S. military revealed evidence that U.S. Army snipers stationed on the roof of an apartment building killed Gagica and wounded Shabani.

In explaining the delay in providing the crucial evidence, the U.S. military said that new details had come to light after a U.S. reporter made inquiries about the case.

When Momcilovic and his sons were in jail, looters hauled off several tons of equipment from his garage, and vandals set fire to his home and the garage several times. The Momcilovic family now lives in Nis, in southern Serbia proper, and has no plans to go back to Kosovo any time soon.

U.N. spokeswoman Manuel acknowledged that the system isn’t perfect but said: “We’ve been trying to give some credit to the local judiciary. When the judiciary was set up, it wasn’t clear that [ethnic] Albanians would only act reasonably in terms of Albanian cases.

“There are Albanian judiciary officials who are very objective, but there have been enough cases where it wasn’t happening that we had to introduce the idea of international judges.”

The U.N. has been able to recruit only half of the 12 foreign judges it needs in Kosovo and just two of five foreign prosecutors. They work with 405 local court officials, almost all of whom are ethnic Albanian.

In a serious criminal case, such as murder, a foreign judge sits on a tribunal with two local judges and three lay jurors. The foreign judge can be overruled, and one already has been in a Kosovska Mitrovica court, Jokanovic said.

A plan by Bernard Kouchner, the top U.N. administrator in Kosovo, to set up a special court to handle crimes of war or ethnic hatred is stalled because the U.N. General Assembly has yet to approve the $5-million start-up budget plus $10 million a year to keep the court running, Manuel said.

Having more foreign judges won’t “solve the problem but only soften it,” lawyer Jokanovic argued, because they can be overruled by ethnic Albanians sitting on a tribunal. Serbs won’t end their boycott because of the danger they face in Kosovo, he said.

Ethnic Albanians too are angry at the United Nations’ justice system and have accused Kouchner of a pro-Serbian bias for blocking the release of an ethnic Albanian man accused of killing three Serbs on May 28.

Serbian witnesses identified Afrim Zeqiri as the killer, and the license-plate number of the car that they said fled the scene matched his. He later turned himself in to police.

Seven ethnic Albanian witnesses testified that Zeqiri wasn’t in the village of Cernica, in southeastern Kosovo, when the slayings took place. Finnish Judge Ante Ruotslainen ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence against Zeqiri to bring him to trial and ordered his release.

But Kouchner, who governs with the power of decree under a U.N. Security Council resolution, overruled the judge and said Zeqiri had to be locked up for up to 30 days because he was a security risk.

It was the sixth time that Zeqiri had been jailed in a year for alleged weapons offenses and threats against Serbs, Manuel said, adding that Kouchner hasn’t decided what to do next with the defendant when his case comes up for review Thursday.

“Kouchner basically used his executive authority to detain him for this month, so there’s no regulation or script for this,” Manuel said. “Whether he’ll be detained further--or whether there will be a new case against him--is not clear at this time.”

Although Ruotslainen accepted Zeqiri’s alibi and dismissed the case for lack of evidence, Jokanovic failed to persuade a panel of ethnic Albanian jurists to do the same with Dr. Dragan Nikolic, 40.

The dentist was convicted of murdering ethnic Albanian Xhemail Ademi, 19, and sentenced to 12 1/2 years in prison, despite testimony that Nikolic was in church at the time.

Several of Ademi’s relatives said they recognized Nikolic in a group of eight Serbs in uniform who came to their home in the eastern Kosovo village of Lubiste on April 5, 1999, during the NATO air war.

After beating family members and demanding their guns and money, the Serbs ordered the Ademis out of their house, according to testimony. Xhemail was later shot dead, the court heard.

Nikolic admitted to serving as a medic in the Yugoslav army--Serbia is the main Yugoslav republic--during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 78-day bombing campaign to end “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo. But a Roman Catholic priest and a nun, two army officers and five reservists all testified that Nikolic was in church April 5.

The tribunal also accepted evidence from three ethnic Albanian witnesses who contradicted one another, said Jokanovic, who is working on an appeal.