The international war crimes court
trying Slobodan Milosevic has adjourned for the day in the middle of the former Yugoslav president's opening defence statement.
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Mr Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague courtroom today
Photo: Reuters |
His trial for genocide and crimes against humanity over the 1990s wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo will resume tomorrow morning at 8.30.
Launching his defence against war crimes charges earlier today, Mr Milosevic justified his actions in the Balkans as a "struggle against terrorism," and said he was a victim of twisted facts and "terrible fabrication."
Mr Milosevic, the first head of state called to justice before an international tribunal, began with a sharp attack against the Nato bombing of Kosovo that forced Yugoslav forces to abandon the drive against ethnic Albanians rebelling against his regime.
On the third day of his trial in The Hague, the former Yugoslav leader finally had a chance to respond to an exhaustive two day recital of horrors by the prosecution in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. He was accused of masterminding a ruthless campaign of murder and expulsion in the Balkans in his quest to create a "Greater Serbia."
Mr Milosevic, 60, faces a total of 66 counts of genocide and other war crimes during a decade of strife in the republics that once made up Yugoslavia. Each count carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. His case is the most prominent war crimes trial since military tribunals tried the leaders of Nazi Germany and Japan after the Second World War.
He spoke in Serbian and with animation, pointing his finger and thumping his desk, in an address that appeared directed as much toward the television audience in Serbia as toward the three international judges trying him.
Mr Milosevic, who has refused to appoint a lawyer to represent him, asked the court to release him from detention so he could better prepare his case, calling the trial against him unfair.
"I only have one phone, while you have a huge apparatus behind you," he said, nodding toward the prosecution table. "You want me to swim a 100 metre race with my hands and legs tied."
He again denounced the trial as illegal. "You basically have nothing," he told the prosecutors. "You just want to invent things. This is a political trial, and this has nothing to do with the law itself."
Mr Milosevic went on the offensive against his accusers, whom he identified as the western countries which deliberately undermined the Yugoslav federation by encouraging Bosnia to secede in 1992.
"Your bosses broke up Yugoslavia," he said, mocking the court, which he scorns as an instrument of his enemies. "They pushed Bosnia into a civil war. The Serbs did not start the war. It is nonsensical to accuse the wrong side," he said.
Despite the prosecution denials, he said the case was not against him alone but against the whole Serbian people. "Our citizens stand accused, citizens who lent their massive support to me," he said. "My conduct was an expression of the will of the people," he said.
Mr Milosevic began with the war in Kosovo, the first of three indictments against him. He rejected as "a terrible fabrication" accusations that Serb military forces expelled hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians, and said they in fact fled from the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Nato bombing.
"When people were fleeing from these places of conflict, this is called deportation," he said. "They want to make me accountable for the crimes they perpetrated themselves," he said.
He displayed a series of gruesome photographs of the victims, part of a refugee convoy who were killed by Nato bombs on April 14 1999. Photo after photo showed burned corpses, severed body parts, lifeless girls and old women lying beside destroyed tractors and trailers.
"They were all peasants, farmers, mothers and daughters," Mr Milosevic said. "They were intentionally targeted, because they were returning to their village," Mr Milosevic claimed, dismissing what he called NATO "lies" that they were fleeing Serb forces.
He said he had given strict orders that civilians should not be harmed, but indirectly admitted some individuals may have committed crimes.
"I'm not trying to say that some individuals did not do this, but the police and army defended the country courageously and honourably," he said.
"America crosses the globe to fight terrorism in Afghanistan, but to fight terrorism in the heart of your own country is considered to be a crime," he said. "Our defence was a heroic defence against the aggression of the Nato pact."
His presentation, expected to take at least a day, opened with the screening of a video asserting that the western intervention was contrived and "concocted," and that there had been no human disaster in Kosovo, as claimed by the west, until the bombing began.
The video, a documentary prepared by the German ARD television was based on interviews with western officials who dissented from the policy toward Yugoslavia. It asserted that Serbs were massacred in Kosovo, and that the Nato campaign was "a violation of international law in which innocent civilians lost their lives."
Prosecutors say he was responsible for the deportation of millions of non-Serbs and the killing of hundreds of thousands more during the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, in a crass and brutal campaign to entrench his own personal power.
AP/AFP