Ex-Yugoslav general denies crimes

Mrksic enters his pleas at The Hague after surrendering to the court

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- A former Yugoslav army general accused of ordering the killing of 200 Croats has pleaded not guilty to war crimes charges at the U.N. tribunal.

Mile Mrksic is charged with six counts, two of them crimes against humanity, for beating and then killing the non-Serb victims, including patients and staff, taken from a hospital in the Croatian city of Vukovar after the town fell to Serb forces in 1991.

Mrksic, 55, pleaded "not guilty" to each charge, shaking his head at one point during the hearing at the International War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Thursday.

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He had been indicted along with two others -- jointly known as the 'Vukovar Three' -- Miroslav Radic and Veselin Sljivancanin.

At the time of the alleged incident Mrksic was a colonel, before being promoted to general and then commanding officer of the self-proclaimed "Republic of Serb Krajina" (RSK).

Mrksic arrived in The Hague on Wednesday having flown out from Belgrade with another indicted Croatian Serb Milan Martic, who faces charges for his alleged part in the shelling of the Croatian capital Zagreb in May 1995 in which seven civilians died.

Martic, who led rebel Serbs opposed to Croatia's declaration of independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, vowed he would soon return to Belgrade.

He has been indicted on four counts of violating the rules of war and is due to make his initial appearance before the court next Tuesday.

It is alleged that Martic, the "president" of the RSK, ordered its military forces to attack the central part of Zagreb on 2 and 3 May 1995.

The chief war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, recently said that the indictment against Martic would be expanded soon to include specific wartime actions by his troops in Croatia, where thousands were killed and tens of thousands chased from their homes between 1991 and 1995.

In the first years of the Croatian Serb rebellion, Martic was close to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial at The Hague, but the two fell out over Yugoslavia's perceived abandonment of Croatian Serbs to Croatian forces.

Mrksic later commanded Croatian Serb troops under Martic during the war.

Martic, who had been hiding in Bosnia and Serbia since 1995, is one of six Serb suspects offering to surrender voluntarily to the tribunal rather than face possible arrest and extradition.

Martic has accused Mrksic of betrayal for fleeing Croatia along with his troops, and the two remain bitter enemies.

Twenty-four Serbs are on the U.N. court's list of suspects wanted for alleged war crimes committed during the Balkan wars in the 1990s.

Yugoslavia's current leadership, which extradited Milosevic to The Hague last year, has been under strong Western pressure to hand them over or risk losing millions of dollars in badly needed U.S. aid.