Mr Slobodan Milosevic yesterday aggressively challenged the first of many war crimes trial witnesses, an ageing communist who accused him of destroying Yugoslavia and killing children.
The former Yugoslav leader locked horns with Kosovo Albanian Mr Mahmut Bakalli on the sixth day of Europe's biggest war crimes trial since the second World War.
Presiding Judge Richard May intervened repeatedly during their acrimonious digressions to insist they stuck to the evidence.
Mr Milosevic challenged Mr Bakalli's account of a Serbian campaign to impose "apartheid" on Kosovo's Albanian majority in the 1990s. Prosecutors say this was a prelude to "ethnic cleansing" by Mr Milosevic's forces in the Serbian province in 1999.
Mr Bakalli, a former top Kosovo communist party official who took part in talks to defuse tension after clashes between Serb security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas in 1998, accused Mr Milosevic of destroying Yugoslavia "with pleasure by war."
Mr Milosevic accused NATO, the West and the Kosovo Liberation Army of driving out 360,000 Serbs, Roma and other minorities from the mainly ethnic Albanian province since 1999. Mr Bakalli said that estimate was an exaggeration but acknowledged many Serbs had fled Kosovo fearing revenge attacks.- (Reuters)