The UN war crimes court today set the trial of Slobodan Milosevic for February 12, as the former Yugoslav president ridiculed the charges against him as the work of a "retarded seven-year-old."
On the second day of a preparatory hearing marked by defiant tongue-lashing by the former Yugoslav strongman, Judge Richard May said he wanted to speed up Mr Milosevic's trial for alleged atrocities during the 1998-99 conflict in the Serbian province of Kosovo.
"To expedite matters the trial chamber think it right to set the date for the Kosovo indictment in any event for February 12, 2002," Mr May said.
Mr Milosevic, who also faces charges of war crimes in Croatia during the 1991-95 war, described the proceedings as "a farce."
"Don't bother me and make me listen for hours on end to the reading of texts written at the intellectual level of a seven-year-old child," he told the court.
"Let me correct myself: a retarded seven-year-old child."
Mr Milosevic, asked by Mr May about the conditions of his detention, said there was no need to maintain a suicide watch on him, as he had absolutely no intention of killing himself.
"I would never commit suicide, I do not wish to do it for my family. I will struggle here to topple this farce of a tribunal," Mr Milosevic said.
During his angry monologue, uninterrupted by the court, the 60-year old also accused the "biased tribunal" of covering up NATO aggression in Kosovo by blaming Yugoslavia for the 1998-99 Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanians in the province.
He even tried to cast his role in Kosovo in the light of the recent global antiterrorism campaign, saying the case against him was "giving wings to Albanian terrorists in southern Serbia" and linking Albanian separatists to Osama bin Laden, chief suspect for the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch praised the court for letting the defendant speak freely. "It is very important that he was able to say all that, however objectionable," he told AFP.
AFP