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Milosevic ally shoots himself in protest of extradition law
( 2002-04-12 10:07 ) (7 )

Former Serbian Interior Minister and accused war criminal Vlajko Stojiljkovic shot himself outside the Yugoslav parliament on Thursday, hours after it passed a law to send him and other suspects to a UN court.

He put a bullet through his temple, police said, and was fighting for his life in hospital after emergency surgery.

The burly white-haired former police minister had been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal along with Yugoslavia former leader Slobodan Milosevic for "atrocities" committed by Serb forces in Kosovo province in 1999.

He left a suicide note accusing reformist leaders, who ousted Milosevic as Yugoslav president in 2000, of selling him and other indictees to the Hague tribunal in return for Western cash.

"Patriotic citizens of this country will know how to avenge me," he said in a note read out by a fellow nationalist politician outside the parliament building, where scores of angry protesters gathered to denounce the reformers.

"Killers!" they shouted.

Stojiljkovic's dramatic act underscored how emotive the subject of the war crimes tribunal is for many Serbs, who see the court as biased against them.

Parliament passed the law on cooperation with the tribunal only under pressure from the United States, which froze financial aid this month because of Belgrade's failure to hand over a significant number of suspects after Milosevic in June 2001.

Despite Milosevic's ouster, many Serbs still rail at the view widespread in the West and the country's neighbors that their nation and its leaders bear most of the blame for the Balkan wars of the 1990s as the old Yugoslavia fell apart.

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica said Stojiljkovic's attempted suicide was tragic. He said it should be a warning to politicians about the consequences of their actions and to the West not to push Belgrade too hard on the war crimes issue.

"The tribunal is a reality," Kostunica lamented. "Prejudice against the Serbs is also a reality and accusations against Serbs for almost all the evils that happened in this region in the past years is a reality, no matter how unjust."

POLICE Chief

Stojiljkovic, born in 1937, was interior minister from April 1997 until October 2000. His ministry was in charge of the police units widely accused of atrocities in Kosovo.

The ex-minister was one of three Milosevic-era officials seen as prime candidates for transfer to The Hague after the law was passed. Reporters at the parliament saw him in the building after the vote to adopt the law and then heard a shot ring out.

"I ran out and saw the man lying just next to my feet. I ran away, his body was still shaking. There was lot of blood around his head," a reporter for Belgrade's TV Politika said.

Stojiljkovic was rushed to hospital in a critical condition and placed on life support.

"We decided to carry out surgery to try to stop the bleeding," hospital director Mihajlo Mitrovic said late on Thursday evening. "The surgery is finished. He's alive and in serious condition."

UN deputy war crimes prosecutor Graham Blewitt said he was shocked by the news.

"There had been reports that Stojiljkovic would surrender himself if the law was passed," he said. "We would of course have expected as a consequence of the law that he would have been surrendered if he had not surrendered himself voluntarily."

Government ministers have said handovers could take place within about two weeks after the legislation was approved.

The UN-run International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia is seeking a total of 33 fugitives, the vast majority of them believed to be in Yugoslavia or Bosnia's Serb Republic. The most wanted are Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, both charged with "genocide".

But Stojiljkovic, former Yugoslav deputy Premier Nikola Sainovic and ex-army chief of staff Dragoljub Ojdanic were widely seen as the most likely candidates for early handovers.

They were indicted along with Milosevic and current Serbian President Milan Milutinovic during NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

They are charged with "crimes against humanity and violations of the law and customs of war". The indictment accuses them of responsibility for the "mass killing" of hundreds and the expulsions of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians.