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Top Serb general pleads not guilty
THE HAGUE, The Netherlands -- A former Serb army commander has pleaded not guilty to war crimes in Kosovo after becoming the first senior Serbian figure to surrender voluntarily to the U.N. tribunal. Dragoljub Ojdanic is accused of leading Yugoslav and Serb forces in a campaign of "terror and violence" against Kosovo Albanians from 1998 to 1999. He pleaded not guilty to four counts of crimes against humanity including murder, deportation and persecution, and one violation of the laws or customs of war. The general had flown from Belgrade into the U.N. war crimes court's custody on Thursday saying he had a clear conscience and "felt like a hero."
Ojdanic was ex-President Slobodan Milosevic's army chief of staff during the Yugoslav crackdown on ethnic Albanians in Kosovo that killed thousands and forced 800,000 people from their homes in the Serbian province. The indictment against him reads: "Operations targeting the Kosovo Albanians were undertaken with the objective of removing a substantial portion of the Kosovo Albanian population from Kosovo in an effort to ensure continued Serbian control over the province." Before he left Belgrade for The Hague, Ojdanic told reporters: "As a chief of staff, I have nothing to feel ashamed of and my conscience is clean. The charges against me are groundless." He admitted to reporters in Belgrade that some soldiers had carried out actions that could be treated as crimes despite all the army's efforts to prevent such acts. However the army, he said, conducted itself in accordance with the law, the constitution and all international war conventions. Ojdanic is one of six suspected war criminals who have agreed to voluntarily surrender to The Hague tribunal from a list of 23. The others who are likely to follow him shortly are:
But the remaining 17 on the wanted list have made no effort to surrender, including Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military chief Ratko Mladic. The federal Yugoslav government has been placed under severe pressure to show it is cooperating with the war crimes tribunal and has been threatened with a freeze on millions of dollars of U.S. aid. Earlier this month, the Yugoslav parliament passed a bill allowing extraditions of Yugoslav nationals to the tribunal. But Ojdanic, a soldier for 41 years, said it was shameful that he faced trial in a foreign country on charges for which there was "no proof." |
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