SERBIAN BODY "STARTLED" AT HAGUE'S REFUSAL TO GIVE DOCUMENTS ON KOSOVO MISSING
BBC Monitoring International Reports - December 8, 2005

Text of report by Serbian independent news agency FoNet

Pristina, 8 December: A handover of the remains of nine Serbs discovered in mass graves in Kosovo-Metohija will be carried out at Merdare administrative crossing tomorrow, the Coordination Centre for Kosovo-Metohija has said, adding that the working group for missing persons today in Pristina expressed its dissatisfaction over achieved results in finding the truth about the missing.

The working group for the missing appealed to all those who could offer help for any kind of information to report to the Serbian or the Albanian side, the working group or the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

The chairman of [Serbia-Montenegro] Council of Ministers' commission for missing persons, Gvozden Gagic, told journalists that it had been assessed at the meeting that some progress had been made, but that there still existed huge obstacles in the process of finding truth about missing persons.

The president of the meeting, the head of the ICRC section for South East Europe, Francois Stamm, filed a report which demanded that the Hague tribunal submit to the working group all documentation which could possibly shed light on the fate of the missing. He said that that tribunal had refused to submit any kind of material.

"We were all startled by tribunal's response that it could not submit court documentation to us, because we are not competent. This is why we agreed that ICRC should carry out additional talks with chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte and once again seek documentation from Kfor [NATO-led Kosovo Force] which, too, is in possession of documents about the missing," Gagic said.

The Belgrade part of the working group for the missing was headed by the chairman of the Serbia-Montenegro parliamentary committee for Kosovo-Metohija, Veljko Odalovic, while Ragip Zekolli headed the Albanian part.

On behalf of UNMIK [UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo], the director of the judiciary sector, [Legal Director] Thomas Monahan, attended the meeting.

It was agreed at the meeting that the next meeting be held in Belgrade at the end of January 2006.


Source: FoNet news agency, Belgrade, in Serbian 1242 gmt 8 Dec 05

Copyright 2005 Financial Times Information
All rights reserved
Global News Wire - Asia Africa Intelligence Wire
Copyright 2005 BBC Monitoring/BBC

Posted for Fair Use only.