YUGOSLAVIA: Military Court sets Perisic free

(16/3/2002)BELGRADE (March 16) - A Yugoslav military court will soon release Momcilo Perisic, the Serbian deputy prime minister and Milosevic-era army boss arrested on spying charges, his chief of staff said on Saturday. ''I expect he will be freed soon,'' Nebojsa Mandic, told Reuters. A military court had been questioning him since early Saturday morning, private Beta news agency reported. It was not clear if charges were being dropped. Perisic was seized, along with a U.S. diplomat, in a Belgrade restaurant on Thursday night, sparking a furious response from Washington and plunging the Serbian political scene into crisis. Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic accused the Yugoslav military of fabricating a scandal to embarrass the country and said army intelligence, which informed neither its superiors nor top Yugoslav politicians of the arrests, was out of control. The arrests have exacerbated tension between Djindjic's reformist government and moderate nationalist Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica, to whom the army owes at least nominal allegiance. The incident will also complicate relations with Washington in the run-up to a March 31 deadline set by the U.S. Congress for Yugoslavia to demonstrate it is cooperating with the Hague War Crimes Tribunal or lose aid payments. Plain-clothes officers roughed up the U.S. envoy and interrogated him over spying allegations during a 17-hour incarceration, the U.S. embassy said. Danas newspaper said investigators found audio recordings of meetings of the Yugoslav army chiefs of staff in the diplomat's briefcase. It gave no source for the claim. Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said the diplomat, first secretary John David Neighbor, alleged the objects were planted in his briefcase. WAR CRIMES Media speculated the material was intended as evidence against former President Slobodan Milosevic, who is on trial in The Hague on U.N. war crimes charges. Prosecutors hope to tie him to atrocities blamed on the Yugoslav army in Kosovo. Sections of the Yugoslav army are believed to be thwarting Hague prosecutors in many ways, including shielding several prominent war crimes suspects, such as former Bosnian Serb army chief Ratko Mladic, indicted on genocide charges. Djindjic described the arrest, during which a bag was put over Neighbor's head, as ''a first-rate scandal with international consequences.'' Mihajlovic said it looked ''more like a badly directed spy movie than anything else.'' After a crisis meeting with Djindjic, Kostunica did not condemn the arrests, saying only that the charges levelled against Perisic were serious. ''According to everything I have learned so far, and I repeat so far, the legality of the procedure itself, from the standpoint of domestic procedure, is not disputable,'' Kostunica said. Yugoslavia is made up of Serbia and tiny Montenegro, with the military being one of the few bodies that still functions at the federal level. Just this week the European Union brokered a deal that would see the Yugoslav Federation dissolved soon. Perisic, a former general, was army chief of staff until November, 1998, when Slobodan Milosevic fired him after he criticised the then president's policies in Kosovo. In 1999, he said he had warned Milosevic he should avoid a war with NATO that the army could not win. Milosevic disagreed and fired him shortly before NATO launched its air war. Perisic later founded his own party, the Movement for Democratic Serbia, joined the coalition that toppled Milosevic in 2000 and in January 2001 became a deputy prime minister in the Serbian government.

//Shqiptarja.com

TAG:
• Ratko Mladiç