Vlastimir Djordjevic: Serbian Official Involved in Kosovo Crimes Cover-Up

Djordjevic, a law graduate, joined the police and rose to the position of assistant minister at the Serbian Interior Ministry in September 1996. The following year, he was made a colonel-general, which was the highest rank at the time.

After the chief of the Interior Ministry's powerful Public Security Department, Radovan 'Badza' Stojicic, was gunned down in a Belgrade restaurant, Djordjevic was appointed as his successor, a role that was made permanent in January 1998. The Public Security Department had a wide-ranging remit, controlling everything from criminal police operations to border crossings.

Not long afterwards, the situation in Kosovo became more problematic for Belgrade as the Kosovo Liberation Army gathered strength in its armed campaign to overthrow Serbian rule.

According to the Hague Tribunal's appeal judgment in 1997,  Djordjevic set up a Headquarters for Kosovo and then, a year later, his superior, Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic, established a new Headquarters for Suppression of Terrorism, which was intended to target the KLA's guerrilla forces.

Djordjevic claimed in court that when the second headquarters was set up, the command chains of the ministry's Public Security Department and the State Security Department were merged and placed under the direct supervision of the minister, Stojiljkovic. (Stojiljkovic shot himself in 2002, on the day the Serbian parliament adopted a law on cooperating with the Hague Tribunal.)

But the appeal judgment said that Djordjevic's role in Kosovo was not diminished by the merger of the two departments' command chains, and that he had a direct role in the engagement of Serbian police forces in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, and was often in the field himself.

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