Milosevic begins defence today

Slobodan Milosevic is expected to accuse Western governments of hypocrisy as he opens his defence against war crimes charges, including genocide, at the UN tribunal in the Hague today.

The 62-year-old former Yugoslav president’s defence marks the halfway point in a trial legal experts consider the most important since Nazi leaders faced justice after World War II.

Milosevic’s courtroom performance may also foreshadow what to expect from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

Milosevic has been given four hours to make his opening response to 66 charges of war crimes filed by prosecutors, including genocide, during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

Prosecutors finished presenting their case against him in February after introducing evidence from nearly 300 witnesses, reams of documents, and videos in an attempt to link him to crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and the Serbian province of Kosovo.

Milosevic has so far used his trial as an opportunity to grandstand for supporters at home, a situation US and Iraqi authorities will be eager to avoid at Saddam’s trial.

He has pleaded not guilty to any wrongdoing, and is expected today to challenge the authority of the court.

His strategy will probably include an attempt to turn the tables and blame the UN member states which created the court, especially the United States and its Nato allies, for alleged war crimes of their own.

Despite his poor health, Milosevic has insisted on defending himself, greatly slowing the pace of his trial, which began in February 2002.

In his opening statement, Milosevic is expected to criticise former US President Bill Clinton, Mr Blair and leaders of other Nato countries.

He has demanded that Clinton and 1,600 others, many of them prominent politicians, appear to testify at his trial. But he will have just 150 days to present his case, and the court has said he must give good reasons why any witness should appear.

Milosevic has argued in the past that a crackdown he ordered in 1999 on ethnic Albanian Muslims in Kosovo was undertaken to protect the Serb minority there. He claims Nato’s 78-day bombing campaign, which drove his troops from the region, caused civilian deaths.

He also claims that as president of a crumbling Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, he did not have control over ethnic Serb troops in neighbouring Croatia and Bosnia. He says he cannot be held responsible for any crimes committed after those countries declared independence from federal Yugoslavia and Serb minorities rebelled.

An estimated 200,000 people on all sides died in fighting during the disintegration of Yugoslavia. More than 7,000 Muslim men and boys were massacred by Serb troops at Srebrenica, Bosnia, in a single week in July 1995 – the event that is at the heart of Milosevic’s genocide charge.

Today’s hearing will be presided over by a three-judge panel led by Jamaican judge Patrick Robinson. The former lead judge, Briton Richard May, quit the court in February due to illness. He died last week.

Milosevic has a weak heart and high blood pressure, and has repeatedly complained of fatigue and stress. His trial has been delayed for months because of his illnesses, and hearings are only held three days a week at the request of his doctors.