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Milosevic Blames NATO For War Atrocities
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| Milosevic accuses Western powers for the atrocities in the Balkans |
THE HAGUE, Feb. 14 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - In a defiant counterblast to a litany of war crimes charges, Slobodan Milosevic went on the offensive Thursday, attacking his trial and Western intervention in the Balkans during the 1990s, news agencies reported.
The former Yugoslav president showed the court photographs of severed heads and charred bodies he said were taken after NATO bombing in Yugoslavia in 1999.
He branded the Serb opponents who defeated him in 2000 elections as a "puppet regime" of the West, accused the media of inherent bias and lambasted NATO for its 11-week bombing of Yugoslavia in response to a Serb crackdown in Kosova.
"This is a crime against the truth. This is a competition between justice and injustice," he told the court's three scarlet and black-robed judges and solemn prosecutors facing him across the austere modern courtroom.
Prosecutors accused Milosevic Wednesday, February 12, of being the shadowy mastermind of "unrelenting violence" not seen in Europe since World War Two, during Serb ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosova in the 1990s.
Milosevic, charged with genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war and crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991-92 and in Kosova in 1999, inflicted unspeakable suffering during those conflicts, prosecutors said on the trial's first two days.
Contemptuous of a tribunal he refuses to recognize, the first serving head of state indicted for war crimes has appointed no defense counsel and is speaking for himself.
Judges have entered not guilty pleas on Milosevic's behalf and appointed three lawyers as "friends of the court" to give legal shape to his arguments and ensure he has a fair trial.
Milosevic, who faces 66 charges in all, wants to call Western leaders as witnesses to prove he acted in the 1990s Balkan wars with their blessing, his advisers say.
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| "After a decade of
violence and bloodshed and misery, Milosevic is where he deserves to be,
" said Robertson. |
The 60-year-old former Serb leader, who was handed over to the U.N. tribunal in June 2001, said his defiant stand at the international court was at one with the will of the Serb people.
Milosevic has dismissed the charges as a conspiracy by the West to tarnish the memory of his 13-year rule and to overshadow its meddling in the region at the end of the Cold War.
He opened his defense by showing an hour-long documentary which said NATO had violated international law by bombing Yugoslavia in 1999 in response to a Serb crackdown in Kosova.
The German television documentary featured interviews with people who said the killings of Muslim Kosova Albanians at Racak early in 1999 -- referred to by prosecutors in their opening remarks -- had been used as a pretext for NATO bombing. The program called "Monitor" was broadcast by German regional station WDR.
"NATO strikes were against international law. There was no mandate of this nature," Heinz Loquai, an official of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said in an interview with the German broadcaster. The United States, Britain, Germany and France were involved in what was the first offensive action against a sovereign nation in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's history when they launched air strikes against Milosevic in Belgrade.
More than one million people were imprisoned or forced from their homes and tens of thousands were killed or maimed during the Balkan conflicts, prosecutors say. Mosques, churches, towns and villages were reduced to rubble, countless lives ruined.
The Sarajevo siege "was an episode of such notoriety...that we must go back to World War Two to find a parallel in European history," prosecutor Geoffrey Nice told the second day of the biggest international war crimes trial since Hitler's henchmen were tried at Nuremberg.
At Srebrenica, Serbs are blamed for killing up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in Europe's worst atrocity since World War Two.
Video footage was played of emaciated prisoners behind barbed wire at a Serb-run camp in Bosnia. Prosecutors say more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims, Croats and other non-Serbs were held in grim conditions at such camps in May-August 1992.
Meanwhile, Milosevic said Thursday he will ask French President Jacques Chirac to testify at his war crimes trial on the 1999 NATO bombing campaign on Yugoslavia.
Speaking in his defense, Milosevic said Chirac had acknowledged in a television interview that France had vetoed NATO plans to bomb bridges in Belgrade during the air war. "When he comes here, and as you know I have the right to question witnesses, I will have to ask him why he did not veto the destruction of a small mining town" and other targets, he said.
Milosevic's legal advisers have said that he plans to call western leaders such as former U.S. president Bill Clinton and former NATO chief Javier Solana to testify during his trial. But Chirac was the only witness he cited in his hours-long defense.
The former president charged that NATO, and not Serbian forces under his authority, caused the deaths of civilians in Kosova during the 1999 war against Yugoslavia.
Milosevic is to continue his defense on Friday, February 15, and witness testimony on Kosovo is due to begin next week.
On his part, NATO Secretary General George Robertson lashed out Thursday at accusations by Milosevic that the alliance violated international law and killed innocent civilians in its 1999 bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.
Milosevic, on trial for war crimes in The Hague, is entitled to defend himself, "but telling lies about NATO is not going to help his case," Robertson told journalists during a one-day visit to Poland.
"NATO always acted within international law, and it did so to save lives, not to lose lives," he said.
"After a decade of violence and bloodshed and misery, Milosevic is where he deserves to be, and that is on trial in The Hague where he will get justice," said Robertson.
"No matter what Milosevic says we must not forget the ethnic purges, the crimes and the victims, and we must hope that justice will be served," Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller said in a joint press conference with Robertson.
The onetime Serb strongman is indicted for the crimes in the wars of Bosnia, Croatia and Kosova which left hundreds of thousands dead and more than a million homeless across the Balkans.
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