Mr Slobodan Milosevic insisted today he had worked for peace in the Balkans as prosecutors opened their genocide case against him in Europe's biggest war crimes trial since World War II.
|
|
Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic takes his seat in a courtroom in The Hague.
|
Prosecutors at the UN court in The Hague said the former Yugoslav president was the leading figure behind the bloodshed as his trial moved on after seven months from Kosovo to deal with the wars in Bosnia and Croatia.
The 61-year-old Serb strongman, facing the most serious charge of genocide, again rejected the accusations and painted himself as a man who worked to stop the violence, which left at least 225,000 people dead.
"I personally invested all my powers in achieving peace," said Mr Milosevic.
In an uninterrupted two-hour monologue, he threw blame back at western powers, singling out Germany and the United States. Their quick recognition of independence for respectively Croatia and Bosnia after the old Yugoslav federation broke up in the early 1990s fanned nationalist sentiment, he said.
In Croatia, he said, this encouraged the extreme nationalism of what he called the inheritors of the World War II Nazi puppet regime, and in Bosnia, the "expansion of Islamic fundamentalism" under then Muslim president Alija Izetbegovic.
Prosecutors, who wrapped up their case on Kosovo two weeks ago, outlined a catalogue of deportations and killings as they argued Mr Milosevic was the mastermind behind a plan to forge an ethnically pure Greater Serbia.
The genocide charge for Bosnia specifically names the 1995 Srebrenica massacre -- the worst single atrocity on European soil since the Holocaust - and the killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in detention camps such as the infamous Omarska camp in northwestern Bosnia.
In Srebrenica more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were killed when Serb forces overran the enclave.
Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice tried to establish a chain of command back to the former Belgrade leader.
His responsibility for events in Bosnia and Croatia between 1991 and 1995 - when he was merely president of Serbia - is seen as harder to prove than over the Yugoslav province of Kosovo in 1998-1999, when he was Yugoslavia's president.
Mr Milosevic, whose trial began in February after Belgrade extradited him last year, is the first former head of state ever to be tried for genocide by an international tribunal.
The prosecution maintains he was part of a "joint criminal enterprise" in which he had great influence over Serb leaders and their forces in Croatia and Bosnia.
"The accused intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslim community in part in order to fulfil the aims of the objective of the joint-criminal enterprises where prosecutions would be insufficient to achieve the desired result," Mr Nice said.
But Mr Milosevic, who has carried out his defence in a boisterous and impressive performance, told the court he had "worked for peace not as a protagonist of war" in the Balkans.
AFP