Milosevic to answer genocide charges

Slobodan Milosevic is due to finally tell his story today at the United Nations war crimes tribunal, giving him a chance to rebut allegations that he masterminded a ruthless campaign of murder and expulsion in the Balkans in his quest to create a ‘‘Greater Serbia’’.

On the third day of his trial, the former Yugoslav president will begin his response to an exhaustive two-day recital of horrors by the prosecution.

With time running out yesterday, Milosevic declined to begin his well-prepared speech outlining his view of the history and politics behind the wars that wracked Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s.

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.

Milosevic used the few minutes left yesterday to demand that the trial judges respond to his pre-trial motions that the court was illegal and that his extradition to The Hague last June was contrary to the Yugoslav constitution.

‘‘I challenge the legality of this court because it is not established on the basis of law,’’ he said.

‘‘Your views about the tribunal are now completely irrelevant, as far as these proceedings are concerned,’’ snapped Judge Richard May. The court had already rejected his motions, ‘‘as you would know if you had taken the trouble to read our decisions’’.

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.

He is the first head of state to be called to justice before an international tribunal. 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.

Milosevic’s remarks followed chilling case-by-case accounts by the prosecution of horrors in the former Yugoslavia, a grisly taste of the sorrowful tales to be told by a parade of survivors in a trial that could last two years.

Senior trial lawyer Dirk Ryneveld focused on the deportation of about 800,000 Kosovo Albanians and the murder of hundreds of others by Serbian security forces during the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia.

Ryneveld said the prosecution would call a girl who was just 14 when she was raped by a Serbian soldier in front of her parents.

Another witness, he said, would be a massacre survivor - then 10 - who witnessed the execution of his entire family in Kosovo.

‘‘He could see that his mother’s body had shielded his toddler sister from the bullets. And he could hear that his sister was still alive under the pile of bodies, because he could hear her calling to him to save her. Because he was shot himself, he was unable to lift his mother’s body to save his sister,’’ Ryneveld said.

‘‘Imagine his horror when he saw the assailant set fire to the house,’’ he said. ‘‘Imagine his agony and sense of helplessness, images of which still haunt him today, knowing that his sister was burned alive.’’