Milosevic, Kosovo President Face Off

Slobodan Milosevic argued in court Monday with the president of Kosovo over the root cause of the Kosovo war: Was it an attempt to create a Greater Albania, or a struggle for freedom by the province’s ethnic Albanian majority.

The former Yugoslav president also argued that he once saved the life of the newly elected Kosovo leader, Ibrahim Rugova, whom he said was threatened by ethnic Albanian rivals--a claim that Rugova disputed.

Milosevic, cross-examining Rugova, who was appearing as a prosecution witness in the former Yugoslav leader’s war crimes trial, displayed a copy of a map that he said proved the intention to unite Kosovo, Serbia’s southern province, with neighboring Albania.

“This is a map of Greater Albania drawn up by Albanian nationalists,” Milosevic said, waving the map in front of the three United Nations judges.

“As you can see, it includes the southeast of Montenegro, southern Serbia, western Macedonia and parts of northern Greece,” in addition to Albania and Kosovo, he added.

Rugova, who led the campaign for Kosovo’s independence from Yugoslavia’s larger republic, Serbia, dismissed it as “one of many alleged maps” and said “there have also been Serbs who wanted to create a Greater Serbia.”

Appearing for the second day at the U.N. war crimes tribunal, Rugova described years of conflict between Serbs and ethnic Albanians that escalated into war in 1998-99.

“It was a popular movement, a result of desire by Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority to be free,” Rugova said.

“Nobody has ruled out a future integration,” Rugova said, but he added that “we stride for an independent Kosovo. We cannot change borders.”

Milosevic is accused of five counts of war crimes related to Kosovo, among the 66 counts he faces, including alleged atrocities in Croatia and Bosnia during the decade of Yugoslavia’s breakup.

Some 800,000 ethnic Albanians were expelled from Kosovo as Serb troops rampaged from village to village in what Milosevic described as an attempt to crush a terrorist uprising by Albanian separatists.

In 1999, NATO launched an air war to force out Milosevic’s troops. Kosovo is now an international protectorate, with self-rule under the newly elected Rugova.