THE HAGUE: Mr Slobodan Milosevic ended his opening statement to The Hague tribunal yesterday yesterday, insisting that the "jury" of world public opinion would judge him innocent of genocide and crimes against humanity in three Balkan wars.
After hours of speaking to the UN court, the former Yugoslav president blamed NATO for dismembering his country and committing atrocities in Kosovo. "The truth is on my side. That is why I feel superior here, the moral victor," he declared. "The public will speak up. They are the jury. This tribunal doesn't have one."
Portraying himself as a peacemaker who had tried to help "Serb brothers" in Bosnia and Croatia - "even though our brethren had gone a little mad" - he said that the West effectively broke up Tito's multi-ethnic federal republic.
"War on the territory of Yugoslavia was incited by big western powers," Mr Milosevic said.
"The goal of western envoys was not to bring peace, but their interest was destroying the country and ensuring a new colonialism."
Mr Milosevic (60), is accused of genocide in Bosnia's 1992-1995 war, and of crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991 and in Kosovo in 1998-1999. He has refused to recognise the court, which has entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
Addressing a central issue of the trial, he argued that as Serbia's president he had no "command responsibility" over the Yugoslav army during its involvement in the Croatian and Bosnian conflicts.
By contrast in Kosovo, as federal Yugoslav president at the time, it will be harder for him to claim that he was not in command.
He appeared to incriminate himself on this point, saying: "If I had commanded the Yugoslav army [in Croatia and Bosnia], Yugoslavia would have been preserved. When I commanded the army in Kosovo, I defended the country."
Mr Milosevic denied knowing about the July 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, where some 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys died. He said he learned about it from the Swedish UN envoy, Mr Carl Bildt.
"I called [Bosnian Serb leader Radovan] Karadzic and he swore he knew nothing about it," he told the court. "Now, whether he did or didn't know I don't want to get into."
Later, the court heard from the first of 90 witnesses expected to appear for the prosecution in the Kosovo part of the trial, among them Mr Mahmut Bakalli, an ethnic Albanian politician, who took part in a failed mission to Belgrade in May 1998 to defuse tension over what he called a kind of apartheid being imposed on Kosovo before the war.
Earlier, Mr Milosevic departed from a diatribe about Balkan politics to protest that he and his family had become the object of "personal hatred".
But there was some good news yesterday for Mr Milosevic when a lawyer representing a fellow accused - ex-Bosnian Serb leader Biljana Plavsic - said she would not testify against him.
Prosecution witnesses are expected to range from survivors of massacres to former Milosevic allies who exhumed human remains from mass graves in the Balkans.