Army chief surrenders to UN war crimes court
A former Yugoslav army chief wanted by the UN war crimes tribunal today agreed to surrender to the Netherlands-based court after spending several weeks in hiding, the Serbian government said.
Retired Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, wanted for atrocities committed during the 1998-99 Serb crackdown on ethnic-Albanian separatists in Kosovo, decided to give himself up voluntarily, a Cabinet statement said.
It quoted Pavkovic as saying he would go to The Hague tribunal as an “honourable soldier who has devoted his life and honour to his country.”
The government said Pavkovic stressed that he had “fulfilled (his) professional duties to the end” and had no “desire to become an obstacle to our country’s struggles for a better future.”
The Serbian government has faced mounting pressure to extradite all war crimes fugitives to the UN court in order to build closer ties to the European Union and NATO.
The government gave no details of Pavkovic’s current whereabouts or where he ad been since going into hiding last month, when he failed to answer a summons to appear before a Belgrade court as a witness in the trial for the attempted assassination of a leading Serbian opposition figure in 2000.
Pavkovic’s decision was a “highly moral and patriotic act, in the best interest of the state and the nation,” the government said.
He is due to travel to the Netherlands on Monday, accompanied by a government minister and a physician from the Belgrade military hospital which treated him on several occasions over the past years.
Pavkovic’s lawyer, Ljubisa Zivadinovic, said his client had given an affidavit announcing his surrender.
It was not immediately clear how Pavkovic got in touch with the authorities today, but apparently no force was used.
Pavkovic, who commanded Yugoslav army units in Kosovo and was a close ally of ex-President Slobodan Milosevic, was one in a group of four Serb generals indicted for alleged atrocities committed in Kosovo.
Two others have already surrendered and are awaiting trial, while the fourth, police Gen. Vlastimir Djordjevic, is still at large and believed to be hiding in Russia.
Pavkovic’s indictment alleges that troops under his command “murdered hundreds of Kosovo Albanian civilians … that resulted in the forced deportation of approximately 800,000 Kosovo Albanian civilians from October 1998 until June 1999.”
Since October, 13 Serbian and Bosnian Serb suspects have given themselves up to the UN tribunal through government-brokered surrenders. Pavkovic would be the fourteenth.
However, top suspects such as Bosnian Serb wartime commander Gen. Ratko Mladic and wartime leader Radovan Karadzic remain at large.
