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[It's absolutely laughable that Stipe Mesic, who authored the book "How We Destroyed Yugoslavia" and bragged about his successes in sabotaging the Yugoslav Federal Presidency, and is now the pro-NATO, neoliberal leader of Croatia, is going to be the "star witness" against Milosevic. One wonders if Tudjman were still alive whether or not the International Criminal Farce for Yugoslavia would have carted him in front of the judges?]
Milosevic Up Against Genocide Case
By KATARINA KRATOVAC
.c The Associated Press
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - U.N. prosecutors opened their genocide case against Slobodan Milosevic Thursday, vowing to prove that he played a leading role in the worst crimes in Europe since World War II.
Prosecutors began the second stage of his trial with an 80-minute opening statement on the 61 counts of war crimes, including genocide, that Milosevic faces for the Croatian and Bosnian wars in 1991-1995.
The first stage of the trial that concluded earlier this month covered the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict.
Responding to the most serious allegations so far, Milosevic denied Serb war crimes and said he should be credited for peace efforts, not war mongering.
``It is not in doubt that Serbs helped Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia, but that was no crime,'' Milosevic said. ``I should be credited with helping achieve peace, not war.''
Lead trial prosecutor Geoffrey Nice said the coordinated destruction of villages and systematic murder of civilians in Bosnia will be traced back to the Bosnian Serb leadership, and ultimately, Milosevic.
Milosevic was an ``essential participant in a joint criminal enterprise'' Nice said, with the primary aim of creating a Serb state.
``Genocide was the consequence,'' he said.
``The accused intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslim population in part or in whole in order to achieve those aims,'' Nice said.
Milosevic operated like a careful criminal, he said, making sure there was no paper trail implicating him in atrocities. But the evidence, he added, will ``reveal a careful design and strategy, and all of that may be laid at the door of this accused,'' he said.
Milosevic, who has refused a lawyer and is conducting his own defense, showed famous video footage taken by a British television crew in 1992 of an alleged Serb prison camp in which men are shown apparently starving behind a barbed-wire fence.
The INT television material, Milosevic said, was misleading because the men were not being held prisoner, but were in an open refugee center.
Milosevic said the only war in the Balkans was a ``war against Yugoslavia ... instigated and directed by the biggest world powers.''
He again rejected the U.N. tribunal as illegal, calling it a ``tool of war against the Serb people'' and blamed the Western governments for Balkan bloodshed.
Prosecutors said that by expelling non-Serbs from large portions of Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic sought to rearrange the territories into a ``tidy map, a map that was brought about by thousands of killings and innumerable acts of inhumanity and thousands of counts of ethnic cleansing,'' Nice said.
Milosevic looked rested after a two-week break in court hearings and listened closely to the prosecution, sometimes smirking or frowning.
Outside the war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a dozen Bosnian protesters called for the arrest of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his wartime general, Mladic, also indicted for genocide in Bosnia.
The former Yugoslav president has been charged for the mass execution of Srebrenica's Muslims and the three-year siege of Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, when Serb snipers shot children, women and the elderly on the streets and in their homes.
In the 1991-1992 Croatian war, Milosevic's indictment says, forces under his command murdered thousands of civilians and forced 170,000 Croats and non-Serbs out of a third of Croatia.
Milosevic, 61, is the first head of state indicted for war crimes while in office. He could be sentenced to life imprisonment if convicted of any of the charges against him. He has been held for nearly 15 months at a U.N. detention unit near The Hague, Netherlands.
One of the first of the 177 prosecution witnesses expected to be called this week is Croatian President Stipe Mesic who headed the 1991 rotating Yugoslav presidency when the former federation broke up.
Mesic's testimony could provide key insight into Milosevic's role in setting off the Balkan bloodletting.
The trial has taken a toll on Milosevic's health and he is at serious risk of a heart attack, according to a court-ordered medical examination. The tribunal judges are seeking to slow the trial pace to provide Milosevic with time for rest.
Milosevic has spent several months with his legal aides reviewing more than 115,000 pages and several hundred videocassettes disclosed by prosecutors as evidence.
09/26/02 08:46 EDT
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