The first day in the historic war crimes trial of former Yugoslav president Mr Slobodan Milosevic ended today with the prosecution still in the middle of its opening presentation.
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Mr Slobodan is led into the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague Photo: Reuters
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The trial will resume tomorrow at 8.30 Irish time with prosecutor Mr Geoffrey Nice continuing his description of atrocities and crimes in Kosovo that are being blamed on Milosevic.
Chief prosecutor Ms Carla Del Ponte said today as the trial began that Mr Milosevic was behind "the worst crimes known to humankind" and said the 1990s Balkans wars were filled with a "medieval cruelty."
Mr Milosevic is defending himself and may get to make the opening defence statement tomorrow if the prosecution has finished its first presentation by then.
The trial, which is expected to last more than a year, is the most significant war crimes trial in Europe since the Nuremberg prosecutions of leading Nazis after World War Two.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia opened the case involving hundreds of witnesses, scores of alleged atrocities and a tangle of legal arguments drawing fine distinctions among varieties of massacre and persecution during a decade of Balkan wars.
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"These crimes touch every one of us wherever we live because they offend against our deepest principle of human rights and human dignity," chief prosecutor Ms Carla del Ponte said in her opening remarks. She promised the victims would be heard.
Mr Milosevic is the first former head of state to be charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes over crimes committed by his forces in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo following the breakup of Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1999.
"An excellent tactician, a mediocre strategist, Milosevic did nothing but pursue his ambition at the cost of unspeakable suffering inflicted on those who opposed him or represented a threat for his personal strategy of power," Ms Del Ponte said.
Fellow prosecutor Mr Geoffrey Nice took the floor to briefly describe the burning alive of children and the throwing of women down wells by Serb troops, before asking the court to view such evidence as dispassionately as possible later in the trial.
Mr Nice took the court back to the collapsing Yugoslavia of the late 1980s to try to explain Milosevic's rise to power, showing archive film of the communist leader's landmark visit to Kosovo.
In the coming months, prosecutors plan to introduce evidence relating only to Kosovo. The Bosnia and Croatia cases are not expected to begin in earnest at The Hague until July.
Reuters and AFP