Critics Blast Delay of Trial for Ethnic Albanian Activist

The judge trying Serbia’s most prominent Kosovo Albanian prisoner called in sick Thursday and postponed the case by more than a month, dashing hopes that Slobodan Milosevic’s ouster would bring quick freedom for the defendant.

Defense lawyers scoffed at the illness report. They said that the delay was a sign that Milosevic loyalists still run Serbia’s courts and that Yugoslavia’s new president, Vojislav Kostunica, was reluctant to intervene on behalf of ethnic Albanians who were punished for Kosovo’s uprising against Serbia, the main Yugoslav republic.

Flora Brovina, a poet, pediatrician and women’s rights activist, was arrested in Kosovo in March 1999 during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air war to drive Milosevic’s troops from the breakaway province. She was convicted of terrorism and sentenced in December to 12 years imprisonment.

The prosecution charged that she was ferrying supplies to the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, basing its case on a forced confession, a receipt for knitting wool and a photograph showing Brovina with an Albanian fighter.

Her trial drew worldwide attention because of the weak prosecution case, her pacifist credentials and her worsening angina. Serbia’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction in June but ordered the 50-year-old defendant to remain behind bars until a new trial, which was set to begin Thursday in this southern Serbian city.

The popular revolt against Milosevic has led to freedom for other high-profile prisoners as Kostunica, who defeated Milosevic in presidential elections Sept. 24, moves to curry favor with the West.

Miroslav Filipovic, who wrote for the independent Serbian daily Danas and the French news agency Agence France-Presse, was released Tuesday after three months of a seven-year sentence on charges of publicizing state secrets.

A Canadian working in Kosovo was freed on bail Monday weeks after the Yugoslav army arrested him in Montenegro and charged him with illegal possession of explosives. His three companions--two Britons and another Canadian--were freed last week after Belgrade’s military court dismissed their cases.

But the case against Brovina, one of hundreds of Kosovo Albanians imprisoned in Serbia, is more sensitive. Despite his democratic credentials, Kostunica is a nationalist who has promised to bring Kosovo, a province of Serbia now under United Nations control, back under Yugoslav sovereignty.

Western officials say Kostunica has quietly assured them that he will review these cases and pardon or dismiss charges against any ethnic Albanians who are unjustly held. But he has not begun to do so, the officials say, for fear of offending Serbian nationalists as he challenges Milosevic loyalists for control of the police and security forces.

Defense lawyers had hoped that Milosevic’s ouster would weaken the resolve of judges he appointed to keep Brovina locked up.

But her retrial was postponed Thursday after court officials reported that Judge Marina Milanovic was ill. They rescheduled it for Nov. 16.

Fellow judges said Milanovic felt faint Wednesday and was taken to a local hospital in an ambulance. A check with the ambulance service and both hospitals in Nis, however, turned up no record of her name.

The chief judge in Nis, Branislav Nesic, said Milanovic came to his office Wednesday to report her illness and phoned Thursday morning to say she felt worse.

Defense attorney Rajko Danilovic asked Nesic to assign a new judge to the case.

“She simply ran away,” Danilovic said. “This is obstruction of justice.”

“The case of Flora Brovina is a hot potato,” said Bogdan Ivanisevic, a Belgrade-based lawyer for Human Rights Watch. “Either this judge is getting instructions from Milosevic’s people, or she’s not getting instructions and is afraid to make a mistake.

“Either way, she is prolonging Dr. Brovina’s unfair treatment,” he added.

Three defense lawyers and Brovina’s husband visited the defendant Thursday in the women’s prison in Pozarevac in central Serbia. She told them that she is “aware of the complexity” of Serbia’s political turmoil and asked for some winter clothes, they said.

A coalition led by Milosevic’s Socialist Party still controls the Serbian parliament and government. Kostunica’s camp has threatened to renew massive street protests unless the Socialists agree today to yield to a joint transitional leadership that would control the police and organize elections in December.

Serbia’s state television network, led by Kostunica loyalists, has focused its evening newscasts this week on the struggle over Milosevic’s crumbling power structure in Serbia and on the new president’s meetings with visiting Western leaders. Thursday’s newscast did not mention the Brovina case.

“These political changes can be a step forward in one sense,” said Zoran Saveljic, a pro-Milosevic judge who has convicted 11 and acquitted 10 Kosovo Albanians in recent trials at the Nis courthouse. “We want to become a normal country so foreigners will stop telling us how to judge these criminals.”