The former Yugoslav president, Mr Slobodan Milosevic, who yesterday called allegations of genocide "stupid", will go on trial for war crimes in February.
UN tribunal judges in The Hague rejected a request by the prosecution to hold a single trial for the three separate indictments filed against Mr Milosevic for crimes in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia, and said the first trial on Kosovo will open on February 12th. The Bosnia and Croatia trial will be conducted together, the tribunal ruled, although no date was set.
The decision came after the former Balkans hard man refused to plead to charges of genocide against Muslims and Croats in Bosnia. Mr Milosevic called the allegations of genocide absurd and portrayed himself as a peacemaker in Bosnia.
As in previous indictments, the UN war crimes tribunal entered a plea of innocent on his behalf.
For more than an hour, Mr Milosevic sat impassively, often looking around the courtroom, as the Bosnia indictment was read in his native Serbian language.
"This miserable text is the ultimate absurdity. I should be given credit for peace in Bosnia, not war," Mr Milosevic said when asked if he were guilty or innocent.
The indictment charges that Mr Milosevic "exercised effective control or substantial influence" over the political officials and military officers who committed "the widespread killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats".
Thousands were held in detention "calculated to bring about the partial physical destruction of those groups, namely through starvation, contaminated water, forced labour, inadequate medical care and constant physical and psychological assault", the indictment said.
Taken together, the lengthy list of criminal acts during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war constitutes genocide - a planned and carefully-executed scheme to liquidate or deport the entire non-Serb population of parts of Bosnia, the prosecutors say.
It is the third and final indictment against him for his 13 years in power in the former Yugoslavia, during which he is accused of instigating and conducting a decade of ethnic war.
Mr Milosevic has persistently rejected the legitimacy of the UN court and has refused to co-operate with it, alleging that the tribunal is a political tool of NATO. "The responsibility for the war in Bosnia lies with the (Western) powers and their agents, not in Bosnia and not with Serbs, Serb people or Serb policy," Mr Milosevic said before the presiding judge, Judge Richard May of Britain, cut him short.
The Bosnia indictment is the first to charge him with genocide, and is the most serious challenge since Serbian authorities transferred him to The Hague for trial in June.
The 38-page document links Mr Milosevic to dozens of execution sites, scores of detention facilities where inmates were beaten and sexually assaulted, and the murder of more than 8,600 Bosnians.
Mr Milosevic has been charged with 29 counts of genocide, complicity to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and violations of the laws or customs of war - every crime in the tribunal's statute.
Mr Wolfgang Petritsch, the senior international official in Bosnia, welcomed the indictment as part of Bosnia's healing process.