MILOSEVIC INDICTED FOR WAR CRIMES; TRIAL UNLIKELY, BUT CHARGES BAR SERBIAN LEADER FROM U.N. TALKS.

Byline: Fawn Vrazo Knight Ridder Newspapers

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was indicted Thursday by the International Criminal Tribunal, which accused him and four aides of personal responsibility for the persecution, deportation and murders of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians forced from their Kosovo homeland by Serb forces.

The war crimes indictment, the first ever of a sitting head of state, accused the 57-year-old Serbian leader of both direct and military-command responsibility for an anti-Kosovar campaign that he and the four aides ``planned, instigated, ordered, committed or otherwise aided and abetted.''

Along with the deportation and persecution of more than 740,000 ethnic Albanians, Milosevic and the others were accused of causing the murders of 348 individually named Kosovars in a death list that tribunal Chief Prosecutor Louise Arbour said is expected to grow as more evidence is collected.

The indictment was applauded by President Clinton and international human rights groups. Milosevic has long been seen as the chief architect behind the hatred-fueled upheaval that has ruptured the former Yugoslavia for seven years, creating Europe's greatest crisis since World War II.

In practical terms, the indictment means that Milosevic, who was a chief player in the Dayton, Ohio, negotiations leading to the 1995 settlement of the Bosnian conflict, cannot travel to any United Nations country for peace negotiations because of the threat of arrest. All members of the United Nations, Arbour said, are ordered to arrest him and the indicted aides if they enter their territories.

Only a special order by the U.N. Security Council, which created the tribunal in 1993, could grant Milosevic legal immunity to attend peace talks, according to Arbour, and she said that would be extraordinary.

Although she is ``mindful of the impact that this indictment may have on the peace process in the federal republic of Yugoslavia,'' Arbour said, ``no credible, lasting peace can be built upon impunity and injustice.''

In her statement outside a tribunal courtroom, she added: ``The refusal to bring war criminals to account would be an affront to those who obey the law and a betrayal of those who rely on it for their life and security.''

The evidence against Milosevic and his aides ``raises serious questions about their suitability to be the guarantors of any deal, let alone a peace agreement,'' said Arbour, a French-Canadian jurist. ``They have not been rendered less suitable by the indictment. The indictment has simply exposed their unsuitability.''

There will be no trial until they either surrender or are delivered to the court, she said.

Surrender or arrests were widely viewed as unlikely in the wake of the tribunal's failure to arrest those indicted as top war criminals of the Bosnian conflict.

Indicted along with Milosevic, president of the Serbian-dominated Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, were Milan Milutinovic, president of Serbia; Nikola Sainovic, deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia; Dragoljub Ojdanic, chief of the general staff of the armed forces of Yugoslavia; and Vlajko Strojilkovic, minister of internal affairs of Serbia.

Yugoslav officials dismissed the indictment Thursday as a ploy to justify NATO airstrikes against targets in Serbia, now entering their 66th day.

``This court for us does not exist,'' Branko Brankovic, Yugoslavia's chief envoy to the United Nations' seat in Geneva, said Thursday.

The air campaign began March 24 after Milosevic's forces started attacking ethnic Albanians, who made up 90 percent of the population of the southern Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Yugoslav officials maintained the crackdown was justified to end anti-Serb attacks by Kosovo Liberation Army fighters.

The 42-page indictment, which Arbour said was held back from public release for three days to assure safe passage Thursday of U.N. human rights inspectors leaving Kosovo, opens with a long outline of Milosevic's rise to political power in Serbia in the late 1980s. Starting in 1987, it says, he ``exploited a growing wave of Serbian nationalism in order to strengthen centralized rule'' in the former Yugoslavia republic headed by Josip Tito.

The indictment outlines the roles of Milosevic and the others during the growing Kosovo crisis. Even as the Serbian delegation negotiated toward a Kosovo peace at an international meeting in Rambouillet, France, in February, ``the violence in Kosovo continued. . . . Forces of (Yugoslavia and Serbia) launched a series of offensives against dozens of predominantly Kosovo Albanian villages and towns,'' the indictment says.

Forces under the command of Milosevic and the others ``engaged in a well-planned and coordinated campaign of destruction of property owned by Kosovo Albanian civilians,'' it continues. ``Towns and villages have been shelled, homes, farms and businesses burned and personal property destroyed. . . . The unlawful deportation and forcible transfer of thousands of Kosovo Albanians from their homes involved well-planned and coordinated efforts by the leaders of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia.''

The indictment describes the ``ethnic cleansing'' of specific Kosovo villages and summarizes multiple murders and assassinations in seven Kosovo communities, including the village of Racak, where 45 Kosovo Albanians - most of them civilians - were shot by Yugoslav and Serb forces in January.

During the press briefing, Arbour said that evidence against Milosevic and the others is largely circumstantial, based mainly on interviews with Kosovo refugees in camps in Albania and Yugoslavia. But the amount of evidence is also voluminous, she said, and tribunal officials expect the indictment to grow when investigators are allowed into Kosovo under any international peace agreement.

Tribunal deputy prosecutor Graham Blewitt said Thursday that more indictments are expected in coming weeks.

Milosevic, he said, still could face indictment for actions during the 1992-1995 Bosnian conflict. But such an indictment, he said, would require more evidence linking Milosevic to war crimes because in the Bosnian conflict he was president of a nation not directly involved in the fighting. In the Kosovo conflict, said Blewitt, Yugoslavia has declared a state of war and Milosevic ``is commander in chief; he is leader of the army (which is) evidently acting in concert with paramilitaries and police.''

In its six years, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, charged with investigating all war crimes occurring in the former Yugoslavia, has publicly indicted 89 individuals, including Milosevic and his aides. Eight have been convicted, and just 25 are in custody.

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Photo: Milosevic