Slobodan Milosevic entered the dock at the the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia yesterday, eager to reject prosecution charges he was a power-drunk opportunist who wreaked "medieval savagery and a calculated cruelty" on the Balkans.
UN prosecutors screened graphic film of gaunt prisoners in Bosnian camps at the start of the second day of the trial of Milosevic, accused of orchestrating a decade of murder and oppression in the Balkans in an unbridled drive for personal power.
The former Yugoslav president is the first head of state to be called to justice before an international tribunal. His case is the most prominent in international law since a military tribunal tried the Nazi leaders after World War II.
With the prosecution's opening statement lasting longer than expected, it was unclear whether Milosevic would have a chance to begin his response before the end of the day. His legal advisers said he will speak for at least a full day.
"He's going to provoke or to challenge very certain, strictly legal questions and after that he is going to speak also about the historical background, and the political background," said Belgrade lawyer Dragoslav Ognjanovic.
Milosevic doesn't recognize the authority of the court and plans to defend himself before the three-member panel of judges. His lawyers say he will seek to call high- ranking Western officials to testify, including former US president Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Describing crimes in Bosnia, for which Milosevic had been charged with the genocide of thousands of Muslims at Srebrenica, prosecutors showed video footage of rail-thin and frightened internees at the Trnopolje prison camp in 1992.
Milosevic, led into the courtroom by two guards, brought in a large leather briefcase, glanced toward a gallery seating reporters and visitors and then set emotionlessly listening to Deputy Prosecutor Geoffrey Nice outline the worst carnage in Europe since World War II.
At the Trnopolje, Omarska and Keraterm detention centers of eastern Bosnia, thousands of detainees were starved, beaten, sexually assaulted and tortured. Many were murdered and their bodies hauled off to mass graves, prosecutors say.
The pictures of the camps were what aroused international attention to the Balkan horrors that led to the establishment of the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal in 1993.
The prosecutors say the prison camps were part of a campaign to rid large portions of Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo of non-Serb populations and create a "greater" Serb state.
Nice recounted the weeklong rampage in July 1995 at Srebrenica, when as many as 7,500 men and boys were systematically gunned down in mass executions. Their remains were trucked to common graves so large they had been dug with excavating equipment.
Nice showed the court the haunting image of a dead man, his eyes blindfolded and fear frozen on his face. Jutting teeth and gaping mouth were cast in a scream of death.
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