THE HAGUE WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL: Former Yugoslav president, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, has received a stern judicial reprimand for using his war crimes trial as a political platform to lampoon prosecutors and undermine witnesses.
Mr Milosevic, accused of crimes against humanity and genocide in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, was yesterday rapped across the knuckles by presiding Judge Richard May at The Hague war crimes tribunal for dismissing the prosecution's case as false.
"We are not impressed by your political points. You have made them a great many times. They do not improve with repetition," Judge May said after Mr Milosevic accused prosecutors of manipulating witnesses in a bid to secure a conviction.
Mr Milosevic, who has branded the United Nations-mandated court "illegal" and shown his contempt by refusing to appoint a defence counsel, has tried to ridicule the prosecution by accusing it of denying material facts.
Mr Milosevic, who is cross-examining prosecution witnesses on Kosovo, is accused of spearheading a Serb campaign to expel 800,000 ethnic Albanians from the province in 1999 as part of a grand plan to create a "Greater Serbia".
"Osama bin Laden could bring you as many witnesses also from Kosovo and Metohija who could swear that they saw with their own eyes George Bush throwing grenades and bombs on the Pentagon and the White House," Mr Milosevic said.
He has accused the US and bin Laden's al-Qaeda network of backing the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in Kosovo in 1999.
The 60-year-old went on to impatiently dismiss a Kosovo Albanian witness after cross-examining him about tensions between Serb forces and the majority-ethnic Albanian population in the province.
"The witness knows nothing. I don't think there's any point in my examining this witness any longer," Mr Milosevic told the court after questioning Mr Besnik Sokoli, a translator who said he was deported from the town of Pec by Serb forces in March 1999.
Mr Sokoli said he had been beaten by Serb police in a hotel in Pec for up to six hours before he was bundled into a packed truck and taken close to the Albanian frontier. "We walked on foot to the border. The policemen were there and they asked the people to give them ID's and passports they had with them," he said.