Belgrade fears martyring Milosevic

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic could become a national hero if efforts to get him tried in The Hague continue, a senior figure in the new Belgrade administration has warned.

Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic also outlined possible steps to have Milosevic tried at home.

He said any moves to prosecute the former president on war crime charges should be preventative as well as punitive, stressing that the goal should be to stop such events from ever recurring in the ethnically divided region.

"We don't want to see in our country what has already happened elsewhere -- those sentenced to war crimes being treated locally as martyrs or heroes in 10 or 50 years' time," Svilanovic said.

But he said Belgrade would cooperate with The Hague Tribunal, which has indicted Milosevic for suspected crimes by his forces during the conflict in Kosovo province in 1999.

Speaking during the first visit to Japan by a high-ranking Yugoslav official for more than 10 years, he said the new reformist government was looking at prosecuting former Serb political and military leaders in domestic courts.

President Vojislav Kostunica has already floated the idea of setting up a truth commission.

Svilanovic said: "The primary task should be to create awareness among the ordinary population of the crimes that have been committed on behalf of our country and also the crimes that have been committed against our people."

Last week, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said he was making progress in gathering evidence for a trial of Milosevic and an indictment could be ready soon. He said the former president had been placed under round-the-clock surveillance. Svilanovic said the next step was to organise a legal framework for cooperating with the U.N. tribunal, which has set up an office in Belgrade.

Meanwhile, ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Yugoslav troops clashed on Monday night in Serbia's Presevo Valley.

A government-run press centre in the area, which borders Kosovo, said the guerrillas attacked Yugoslav army and Serb police positions around the town of Bujanovac.

Fighting in the Presevo Valley has prompted fears among Serbs, Albanians and international officials that the area could become a major flashpoint and trigger fresh violence in other parts of the Balkans including Kosovo itself.

Over the past year, the guerrillas have taken control of more and more of a five-kilometre(three mile) wide buffer zone on the Serbian side of the boundary, which is off limits to the Yugoslav army and Serb special police.

The Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac, named after three municipalities in the area with a substantial ethnic Albanian population, says it is fighting against Serb police persecution of local Albanians.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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