Serbs May Help Patrol Afghanistan, but Qualms Abound

PRESEVO VALLEY, Serbia and Montenegro — A convoy of jeeps sped though an Albanian village in southern Serbia one recent day. Inside, troops with their faces hidden by camouflage masks sat with their guns at the ready.

The men were part of Serbia's gendarmerie, an elite paramilitary police force that routinely patrols this region in search what they call Albanian terrorists.

In 1999 similar Serbian forces were bombed by NATO warplanes as they rooted out ethnic Albanian rebels — and killed ethnic Albanian civilians — in the neighboring province of Kosovo. American officials now see these special forces as potential allies.

Serbs May Help Patrol Afghanistan, but Qualms Abound
By NICHOLAS WOOD

PRESEVO VALLEY, Serbia and Montenegro — A convoy of jeeps sped though an Albanian village in southern Serbia one recent day. Inside, troops with their faces hidden by camouflage masks sat with their guns at the ready.

The men were part of Serbia's gendarmerie, an elite paramilitary police force that routinely patrols this region in search what they call Albanian terrorists.

In 1999 similar Serbian forces were bombed by NATO warplanes as they rooted out ethnic Albanian rebels — and killed ethnic Albanian civilians — in the neighboring province of Kosovo. American officials now see these special forces as potential allies.

The governments of Serbia and Montenegro, the two republics that until early this year made up what was left of Yugoslavia, have offered a contingent of 700 troops and policemen to work alongside NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

The offer, first made in July and explored in September at Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., is in abeyance pending the outcome of parliamentary elections in Serbia on Dec. 28.

But Serbia's very readiness to send troops — and Washington's apparent willingness to consider accepting them — show how much the world has changed since the ethnic conflicts of the 1990's and the atrocities attributed to Serbs and their leader at the time, Slobodan Milosevic, dominated world headlines.

Now Serbia, which was isolated and impoverished by a decade of war and violence, wants to join NATO. The United States wants to foster democracy, although the old nationalisms still make the task difficult.

For instance, the United States Congress insists that Serbia hand over war crimes suspects to the United Nations tribunal in The Hague if it expects to receive further aid.

But Milos Vasic, a defense analyst and writer with the Serbian weekly Vreme, said that United States had put the issue of human rights to one side in its desire to see a broad coalition of troops serving in Afghanistan or Iraq.

"The Americans want a token Serbian force," he said in an interview. "This is regarded as a completely separate issue from cooperation with The Hague."

Serbian nationalists and human rights groups alike have united in criticism, believing for different reasons that it is too soon for Serbian forces to serve with NATO soldiers.

Vojislav Kostunica, the former Yugoslav president whose Serbian Democratic Party is predicted to fare well in the coming elections, warned in a Montenegrin newspaper, Vijesti, "Our soldiers will come back in metal coffins, like the Americans."

Natasa Kandic, a lawyer and veteran human rights campaigner in Belgrade, is one of many liberals who say the security forces — blamed for thousands of civilian deaths during the Kosovo conflict — should not take part in any foreign mission until they have been properly reformed, and until senior commanders accused of war crimes have been tried.

"The Serbian police are not a formation who should go anywhere," Ms. Kandic said, adding that any checks were not sufficient. "How they are going to bring peace and human rights to another country, it is impossible to know," she said.

Serbia's current deputy interior minister and head of public security, Sreten Lukic, has been indicted by The Hague tribunal for his alleged role in the Kosovo conflict. He was the commander of the uniformed police in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999. The current prime minister, Zoran Zivkovic, has refused to hand him over to the tribunal.

Whatever the politicians decide, the commander of the gendarmerie, Gen. Goran Radosavljevic, is preparing to supply at least 250 of the 700-member contingent, all of whom would be volunteers.

In an interview, he said senior officers were learning English and receiving human rights training. He maintained that his troops were well suited to work in Afghanistan.

"Our people have a lot of experience in war situations," said the general, who was a deputy commander of police operations during the war in Kosovo.

His 2,800-member brigade was formed in September 2001 and is recruited from units that have been accused of direct involvement in war crimes. It specializes in antiterrorism operations and is also trained in coping with natural disasters, using explosives and finding and disarming mines.

Some of its most recent recruits include 80 former members of the Red Berets, a paramilitary police unit that was disbanded earlier this year after some of them were implicated in the killing of the Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, in March.

A NATO official said the possibility of Serbian forces working in Afghanistan was a "viable idea" if those taking part were checked. Implication in war crimes would exclude service, he said.

Ms. Kandic, for instance, says General Radosavljevic is guilty of complicity in genocide in Kosovo. She said operations by the Serbian police to remove hundreds of bodies from mass graves and transport them to Serbia at the end of the war could not have taken place without his help.

General Radosavljevic denied that there was "any evidence" that he or any of his senior officers were responsible for war crimes. But he openly opposes cooperation with The Hague tribunal. In October he attended a protest organized by the police in support of Mr. Lukic.

The brigade's commander asserts that his force is now multiethnic, including Muslims, ethnic Hungarians, and even seven or eight ethnic Albanians. But new recruits who trained near the town of Kula, some 70 miles northwest of the Serbian capital, Belgrade, marched to the tune of Serbian nationalist songs alongside murals depicting battle scenes from Serbian history.

The gendarmerie already has contact with American troops serving with the NATO contingent that helps keep the peace in Kosovo, which is still formally a Serbian province, though one with an overwhelmingly Albanian population and a United Nations administration.

The Serbian units and foreign peacekeepers meet each month to discuss monitoring of the province's boundary — in 2000 and 2001, Kosovar Albanian insurgents fought Yugoslav troops here in the Presevo Valley in an attempt to unite three Albanian-populated towns in southern Serbia with Kosovo.

The rebellion was quashed in May 2001, and NATO officials praised the Serbian military for its comparative restraint in dealing with the uprising. The gendarmerie is now responsible for patrolling the region.

"I'm very happy with the results our unit has had in southern Serbia," said General Radosavljevic.

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