Rugova to face Milosevic at trial

Rugova was criticised for his previous meeting with Milosevic

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Kosovo's President Ibrahim Rugova will appear before The Hague war crimes tribunal on Friday to give evidence in the trial of his former nemesis Slobodan Milosevic.

The court face-off comes a day after a senior aide to Yugoslav ex-President Milosevic, Nikola Sainovic, surrendered to the U.N. international war crimes tribunal for the region.

Rugova, the long-serving leader of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority, has not met Milosevic since a stage-managed meeting by the Serb strongman during NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

At the time Serb forces were driving masses of Kosovo Albanians from their homes amid mass killings.

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Rugova, an academic, was criticised at the time by radical ethnic Albanians for the meeting as well as a general policy of passive resistance that they said encouraged violence.

He fled abroad soon after the meeting and did not immediately return to Kosovo despite NATO's bombing having driven Serb forces out in June 1999 and the province becoming an international protectorate.

Nevertheless, he returned to be voted in as president of Kosovo in March this year.

Milosevic is charged for war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia but his trial is currently focusing on accusations of crimes against humanity relating to Kosovo.

In a separate move on Thursday the key figure Sainovic, 53, a former Serb deputy prime minister gave himself up to The Hague where he is wanted for alleged war crimes in Kosovo. (Full story)

He is the second most important political figure to face war crimes charges after Milosevic.

He was among five indicted war crimes suspects still in Yugoslavia who had said they would turn themselves in rather than subject themselves to arrest and extradition for alleged Balkans war atrocities.

Sainovic was the former president's security adviser in charge of Kosovo during NATO's 1999 bombardment of Yugoslavia.

A second indicted suspect, former Bosnian Serb prison official Momcilo Gruban, also surrendered to the tribunal on Thursday after flying with Sainovic to the Netherlands.

Gruban is charged with presiding over the killing, rape, sexual assault, beating and humiliation of non-Serbs at the notorious Omarska prison camp in Bosnia in 1992.