Slobodan Milosevic lashed out afresh at the Hague war crimes tribunal today, slamming its tolerance of hearsay evidence and prosecutors' plans to use "illegal" intercepted phone conversations against him.
As the first prosecution witness testified on Croatia, where prosecutors say Serb ethnic cleansing cost hundreds of lives and drove out at least 170,000 non-Serbs, the former Serbian and Yugoslav leader criticised his evidence as lame and second hand.
Prosecutors last week began their case on Croatia and Bosnia, where charges include genocide and crimes against humanity, after earlier this month closing their case on Kosovo.
The witness, whose identity was concealed for his own protection, was a former moderate politician of the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in Croatia referred to as C-037.
C-037, of the Western Slavonia region of Croatia seized by rebel ethnic Serbs, told of killings of Croats, torchings of Catholic churches and Belgrade funding for rebel Croatian Serbs who established the breakaway Serb state of Krajina.
But his testimony, which began on Friday at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, was peppered with admissions that he did not know things or had heard of them through media or from local inhabitants.
"The answers of this witness are that he has heard something, he doesn't know, he assumes...how can anything be admitted on that basis?" said Mr Milosevic, criticising the introduction of numerous prosecution documents through C-037.
Mr Milosevic also attacked the use of intercepted phone calls as evidence. Pre-trial documents show the prosecution plans to make much use of intercepts, such as calls between Mr Milosevic and fugitive Bosnian Serb wartime leader Mr Radovan Karadzic.
Prosecutors played what they spoke of as an intercepted call between C-037 and Mr Karadzic, though the conversation itself remained a mystery because it was heard in closed session. Mr Milosevic objected. "It was intercepted illegally, without the authority of the state agency in charge," he said.