Louise Arbour, chief prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal, revealed Wednesday that there is a long-standing indictment against the notorious Serb paramilitary leader Zeljko Raznatovic Arkan for Bosnia war-era atrocities. (AP)

By Charles Trueheart
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, April 1, 1999; Page A24

BELFAST, March 31 – The top U.N. war crimes prosecutor said today that her investigators are collecting new evidence that could lead to indictments of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his political lieutenants and military commanders.

Milosevic and his deputies could face criminal charges – including some stemming from the current military campaign in Kosovo – even if they did not personally take part in killing or torturing, chief prosecutor Louise Arbour and other Western officials said in The Hague, where the tribunal is based. Milosevic and other members of the Serb-led Yugoslav government and military could be charged, she said, because they had knowledge of atrocities or failed to stop them.

Arbour also revealed the existence of an 18-month-old indictment against one of Milosevic's longtime disciples, Zeljko Raznatovic, a Serbian nationalist better known by his nom de guerre of Arkan. Now the owner of a Belgrade soccer team, Arkan was commander of a notorious Serbian paramilitary force tied to massacres of Muslim civilians during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. He has been named repeatedly in testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia as an author of that war's monstrous pattern of killings and forced expulsions known as ethnic cleansing.

In an interview on CNN tonight, Arkan declared: "I have nine children, and I am not a war criminal. I am only a Serbian patriot." He said that his "volunteers" were not involved in any atrocities in Kosovo. "They're not engaged yet, but they will be engaged if the ground troops come," he said.

With U.N. Security Council backing, the tribunal asserts jurisdiction over allegations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity without respect to dates or territory. Arbour, a Canadian, noted that no one except Yugoslav authorities had questioned the mandate's application to the current conflict in Kosovo.

Arbour said she hopes the disclosure of the Sept. 30, 1997, indictment against Arkan would put on notice anyone who "might retain his services or obey his orders." The tribunal would not comment on whether Arkan was suspected of war crimes in the struggle over Kosovo.

Arbour delivered her warnings to the Yugoslav leaders publicly, she said, because the Yugoslav Embassy in The Hague had refused to accept letters she wrote Friday reminding each of them of their criminal liability under international law. Her comments followed a crescendo of official accusations that Milosevic and his senior leadership are criminally responsible for the killing of Kosovo Albanians and the displacement of the thousands of refugees who have poured across borders into Albania and Macedonia since Sunday.

In a careful and sweeping warning to Yugoslav commanders, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook declared: "Anyone who carried out atrocities against the civilian population, anyone who gives orders for them to carry it out, or is complicit in those orders being given, and anyone who fails to prevent such orders or to prevent those orders being carried out – anyone in those categories is liable to face indictment before the international war crimes tribunal."

Cook also named names, citing top Yugoslav and Serbian officials who might be indicted by the tribunal and providing photographs and capsule biographies.

The officials who were sent copies of Arbour's letter overlapped with the British list. They include, besides Milosevic, Milan Milutinovic, Serbia's president, and Mirko Marjanovic, its prime minister; Lt. Gen. Radomir Markovic, Serbia's head of state security; Col. Gen. Dragoljub Ojdanic, chief of staff of the Yugoslav army; Nikola Sainovic, deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia; and Gens. Nebojsa Pavkovic and Sreten Lukic, who have been in charge of the counterinsurgency against the Kosovo Liberation Army.