The UN war crimes tribunal handed a warrant demanding the handover of Mr Slobodan Milosevic to Yugoslavia's Justice Minister, Mr Momcilo Grubac, yesterday after sceptical Belgrade authorities demanded that Kosovo Albanians be indicted too.
"I handed over the indictment and the warrant of arrest and Mr Grubac promised to have it served on Mr Milosevic. . . It was a very promising visit," the tribunal registrar, Mr Hans Holthuis, said after the meeting.
Mr Milosevic, the former nationalist president, was arrested last Sunday for corruption after presiding over four wars that shredded and bankrupted the Yugoslav federation before his fall in a people's uprising six months ago.
The UN tribunal indicted him in May 1999 for alleged massacres and wholesale expulsions of ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo conflict and sent a delegation to Belgrade this week to deliver the warrant for his prompt transfer to The Hague.
A Yugoslav government statement confirmed Mr Grubac had accepted the warrant, but said he was "particularly interested" to hear from Mr Holthuis about tribunal inquiries into murders of minority Serbs in Kosovo by ethnic Albanian radicals.
The Justice Minister of Serbia, Yugoslavia's main republic, wrote to the tribunal's chief prosecutor this week to press for indictments of ex-Kosovo Albanian guerrillas he said were still killing Serbs almost two years after the end of the fighting.
Kosovo has been under interim UN administration since NATO air strikes forced Mr Milosevic in June 1999 to scrap a military onslaught against majority ethnic Albanians rebelling against police repression.
Belgrade's reformist coalition has ruled out turning over Mr Milosevic to the tribunal soon, saying he must be called to account in Yugoslavia first for plundering public coffers and reducing the nation to a poor, mafia-ridden backwater.
Coalition leaders hope that putting Mr Milosevic and an array of cronies on trial at home will help consolidate the fragile new democracy by building trust in government and the courts.
Analysts say it will also dissipate any lingering aura he has as a national titan who, if packed off to The Hague quickly, could turn into a martyr dangerous to democracy in a nation with a deep victim complex and facing unrest over economic woes. Mr Milosevic denies all accusations against him and has denounced the court in The Hague as an instrument of Western imperialism.