U.N. War Crimes Court Investigates Serb Leaders

20/05/2001| IslamWeb

THE HAGUE (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Prosecutors preparing for the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic said on Thursday they were investigating the chief of staff of the Yugoslav army and Serbia's police chief over alleged atrocities in Kosovo in 1999.
Army chief Nebojsa Pavkovic and police head Sreten Lukic, promoted to their current posts only after the conflict, played a key role in Milosevic's campaign of ``ethnic cleansing'' against Albanian civilians in Kosovo in 1999, U.N. prosecutors said.
Pavkovic was then head of the Yugoslav Third Army, which covered Kosovo, while Lukic was head of uniformed police in the province during a Serb terror campaign in which up to 800,000 ethnic Albanians were driven from their homes, prosecutors said.
Belgrade's systematic repression of civilians in Kosovo, and its effort to snuff out a guerrilla rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), was ended by an 11-week NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
Serbia's leaders, who appointed Lukic to his new job last January, have said his record is clean. Lukic told Reuters in May he did not believe war crimes were committed in Kosovo.