BELGRADE, Yugoslavia, Oct. 11 -- A military court on Friday found Yugoslav army officers guilty of war crimes against civilians in Kosovo -- for the first time in the almost three and one-half years since the end of the 11-week conflict with NATO over the province in 1999.
At the same time, another war crimes trial is being held in the civilian district court in Prokuplje, Serbia proper, against two members of a special anti-terrorist police unit known called the Scorpions.
The most famous of those on trial for crimes against humanity in Kosovo, the former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, has already had his case heard before the United Nations tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands. Milosevic's trial continues, however, regarding his alleged command responsibility for similar crimes in Croatia and Bosnia, two other parts of what was once Yugoslavia.
And the court is still waiting for Belgrade to hand over two of the three senior army officers -- Veselin Sljivancanin and Miroslav Radic, accused of the destruction of the Croatian town of Vukovar in November 1991 and the arbitrary killing of over 250 Croat civilians taken away from the town's hospital.
The third accused, Gen. Mile Mrksic, turned himself in to the tribunal and just had his request for provisional release refused.
Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his army commander, Gen. Ratko Mladic, are still on the run despite years of efforts by international forces in Bosnia and the tribunal's pressure on Belgrade to catch them and bring them to justice.
But Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik, two of the men's former close associates and co-defendants with Milosevic for alleged genocide and other crimes in Bosnia, are facing a trial that is scheduled in The Hague for next month. Krajisnik was arrested in Bosnia by international peacekeeping troops and turned over to the tribunal in April 2000.
Plavsic, another former president of Republika Srpska -- the Serb half of Bosnia-Herzegovina -- surrendered voluntarily in January 2001 and has been on provisional release for the past year. She recently changed her plea from innocent to guilty to charges of war crimes against Muslims and Croats in Bosnia in the early 1990s.
Friday's military court finding in the central Serbian town of Nis jailed Lt. Col. Zlatan Mancic for seven years and Capt. Rade Radivojevic for five years on charges of ordering two soldiers to kill two Albanians during the conflict in April 1999. Mancic was also found guilty of extorting money from Albanian civilians in a refugee convoy.
The law specifies jail terms of five to 40 years for those convicted of war crimes.
Radenko Miladinovic, presiding over the trial chamber, said Mancic and Radivojevic as security officers had been obliged to ensure civilians were given protection but had instead ordered murders.
Both officers denied the charges.
Two former soldiers who actually carried out the murders, Danilo Tesic and Misel Seregij, both 24 years of age, were sentenced to four and three years imprisonment, respectively. They admitted murdering the two Albanians and burning their bodies.
The court gave those soldiers less than the minimum sentences in view of extenuating circumstances: Miladinovic explained that they had committed the murders in the belief that they themselves would be killed if they refused to carry out the order.
Nevertheless, he was firm in adding, all four men had violated the Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians. They were released pending appeals within the next 15 days.
At Prokuplje, meanwhile, none of the five witnesses testifying Friday confirmed that Scorpion members Sasa Cvjetan and Dejan Demirovic, both 27, committed a war crime of killing several Albanian civilians in the Kosovo town of Podujevo on March 28, 1999.
Scorpions commander Boco Medic, one of the witnesses, told the court he was confident that none of his troops had committed the murders. His men were distinguished by "Serbian military honor and uprightness," he declared.
"If I had learnt that any of my fighters had committed such dishonorable deeds, I would personally have punished them (with death) on the spot," said Medic.
Earlier this week, some 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) away in The Hague, a Belgrade journalist told the Milosevic trial panel about his wartime tours of the regions. Dejan Anastasijevic said he had heard of the operations of Scorpion members in eastern Croatia and Bosnia where they struck terror into the local population, but had never seen them.
"People there told me, 'Where SAJ (Scorpion) men treaded, the grass did not grow'," he said.
Milosevic denied that any police units commanded by the Serbian government had ever crossed into the neighboring territories of the former Yugoslavia. |end| Content: 02008000 02011000 11007000 16010000
