Yugoslavia Looks to Cabinet for Decree

Approval of a legal framework for handing over former President Slobodan Milosevic and other suspects to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague is expected today, Yugoslav Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic said Friday.

After failing to win enough parliamentary support to pass a law resolving the issue, top reformist leaders decided at a Thursday night meeting that they will seek passage of a decree or regulation at the Yugoslav Cabinet level, Zivkovic said.

Such action by the Cabinet--where the reformers have a voting majority--could set the stage for Milosevic and others to be transferred to The Hague within the next few months, and perhaps within the next few days.

Milosevic supporters immediately questioned whether such action would be legal, but it appeared that they would be powerless to stop it. Indicted in 1999 by the tribunal for crimes against humanity in connection with his troops’ brutal treatment of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo province, Milosevic is being held in a Belgrade prison on domestic charges of corruption and abuse of power.

The reform-oriented coalition that took power after Milosevic was ousted last year in elections is racing to meet a U.S. demand that Yugoslavia show cooperation with the tribunal as a condition of American participation in a donors conference set to open Friday in Brussels.

Officials in Yugoslavia and its main republic, Serbia, hope that the conference will approve about $1.2 billion in aid--roughly half from the United States--and initiate steps toward restructuring $12 billion in debt. A successful conference is seen as critical to heading off a collapse of government finances and a sharp worsening of economic difficulties here.

“When this decree or regulation is passed, then the conditions are created for full cooperation with the Hague tribunal,” Zivkovic told reporters. “The decree will be applicable to everyone. There is no one who will be exempt from it.”

However, Zoran Andjelkovic, general secretary of Milosevic’s Socialist Party of Serbia, told reporters that a Cabinet decree would mark “a constitutional coup d’etat.”

Responding to questions about the legitimacy of a decree instead of a law, Zivkovic declared that “there is a constitutional and legal basis for this.”

Western governments and prosecutors at The Hague have argued for months that Yugoslavia does not need a new law to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

But Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, an expert on constitutional law, has insisted on a firm legal basis governing cooperation with the tribunal. He appears to have backed down from seeking passage of a law and joined the reformist consensus in favor of action at the Cabinet level.

It remained unclear Friday evening whether a Cabinet decree, if approved today, would be immediately valid or would need to be published in a government gazette before taking effect, as is usually the case.

If publication is required, that could delay implementation for more than a week. In that case, U.S. participation could remain in doubt.

Reformers may be planning to pass a decree and quietly give the tribunal and Washington a time schedule for when Milosevic and other suspects will be handed over, said a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Asked whether that would be likely to satisfy the Americans, he replied: “My guess is no. It would have to be a pretty concrete, pretty solid promise.”

The diplomat also said he believed there is a chance “we’ll see some pretty dramatic events over the weekend” involving transfer of one or more suspects to The Hague.

“It could be Milosevic, it could be somebody in the military or police, or it could be the Vukovar 3,” he said, referring to three senior Yugoslav army officers indicted in 1995 for the mass execution of 261 non-Serbian men removed in 1991 from a hospital in Vukovar, Croatia.

Such a hand-over, combined with approval of “a mechanism by which [the tribunal] can request all the others who have been indicted,” would be enough to win U.S. participation in the donors conference, the diplomat predicted.

Indicted along with Milosevic in 1999 were Serbian President Milan Milutinovic; Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, chief of staff of the Yugoslav army; Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic; and Serbian Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic. The Vukovar 3 are Mile Mrksic, Miroslav Radic and Velelin Sljivancanin.

Dmitar Segrt, a Socialist member of parliament, said his party still hopes that “sanity will prevail and keep Milosevic away from The Hague.”

“We must not cooperate with the institutions--such as the Hague court--that destroy our dignity as a nation,” Segrt said. “The Socialists stand firm that all criminals and all those who committed war crimes can only be tried by our courts.”

The Socialist Party--an ex-Communist party--issued a statement declaring the decree unconstitutional and arguing that authorities were “behaving in true Communist dictatorship style by resorting to governing through decrees instead of laws and trampling on all principles of democracy.”