Chief UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, international law experts and human rights activists gathered in Belgrade yesterday to review Serbia's shortcomings in dealing with war crimes committed during the 1990s Balkan conflicts.
The conference on international justice and war crimes was the first of its kind in Serbia, where extremism is still rampant and where many consider the UN tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands, to be biased against Serbs.
The conference comes amid intense Western pressure on Belgrade to capture fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime military chief General Ratko Mladic and about 14 other war crimes suspects believed to be hiding in Serbia.
Many in Serbia still believe -- as they did under former President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial in The Hague for his role in fomenting the Balkan bloodletting -- that Serbs were the victims, not the perpetrators of war crimes.
"Without facing war crimes committed in our name, we shall forever remain trapped in the shadow of Milosevic's bloody heritage," said Natasa Kandic, whose Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Center, an independent group assisting victims of persecution, organized the conference with support from the Council of Europe.
The two-day gathering will cover topics ranging from international and domestic war crimes trials to reconciliation among the former Yugoslav republics.
Bosnia's 1992-95 war claimed about 250,000 lives, while 1.8 million were driven from their homes in fighting that pitted the country's Muslims, Croats and Serbs against each other. The 1998-99 war in Kosovo killed some 10,000 people, mostly ethnic Albanians.
"We owe it to the victims to raise our voice against forgetting or hushing up of war crimes," Kandic told The Associated Press.
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