Judges shown the horrors of Milosevic's rule

By STEPHEN CASTLE

Slobodan Milosevic engaged in a dramatic verbal spat with the judge at his war crimes trial yesterday after being blamed for a decade of murder and oppression and being shown harrowing imag-es of atrocities committed in the Balkans.

In his first words to the historic hearing in The Hague, Mr Milosevic rejected the legality of the court and accused the prosecution team of orchestrating a media campaign against him.

He was interrupted once by Judge Richard May. Mr Milosevic's microphone was later cut off after he was told the tribunal had already considered and rejected his arguments about the court's legality.

"Your views on this court are entirely irrelevant," said the British judge bluntly.

The confrontation came at the end of a day when the prosecution, in a four-hour presentation, said Mr Milosevic bore responsibility for savagery unknown in Europe since the Second World War, using video and gruesome photographs of corpses during a four-hour presentation.

The litany of horrors ranged across Bosnia and Kosovo and included the infamous massacre at Srebrenica, rapes and forced evacuations, and brutality at the Trnopolje prison camp in 1992. But it also included less well-known episodes including one murderous rampage in Kosovo less than three years ago.

Dirk Ryneveld, one of two prosecutors, told the court that, in March 1999, Serbian forces cornered seven women and 13 children in the upstairs of a house before opening fire.

"One 10-year-old boy survived," said Mr Ryneveld. "He could see his mother's body had shielded his toddler sister, he could hear his sister but, because he was wounded, was unable to lift his mother's body to save his sister. Imagine his horror, imagine his agony and sense of helplessness when he saw later that the place was set on fire."

For the second day, the prosecution outlined its case against Mr Milosevic, who faces 66 war crimes charges for atrocities in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, including a genocide accusation relating to Bosnia. He is the first former head of state to face such charges and the war crimes trial is the biggest since Nuremberg.

The two prosecution lawyers sketched out the links between Mr Milosevic in Belgrade and Serbian forces who terrorised the Balkans for a decade.

They allege he took part in an orchestrated campaign to build a greater Serbiaand consolidate his power, and had command responsibility for what was done in the name of those objectives.

Wearing his favoured tie in the colours of the Serbian flag, Mr Milosevic carried a large leather briefcase into court where he sat impassively as the second prosecution lawyer, Geoffrey Nice, described a catalogue of carnagewhich, he said, was unknown in Europe since the Second World War. Among the scenes shown to the judges on video was ITN footage of detainees at Trnopolje, one of the now-notorious Balkan camps, where non-Serbs had clearly been starved.

Mr Nice also referred to the detention centres at Omarska and Keraterm where he claimed victims were beaten, sexually assaulted and tortured. Then he detailed the horror inflicted on civilians when Bosnian Serb forces laid siege to Sarajevo, "an episode of such notoriety that one must go back to the World War Two to find a parallel", he said.

Then on to the event that became seared on the conscience of the west, the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, which had been declared a UN safe haven but was abandoned by Dutch peace-keepers.

At least 7,000 men and boys were shot dead in the massacrein open-air killing fields, schools and a cultural centre.

The horror of Srebrenica has been chronicled in the trial of the Bosnian Serb general, Radislav Krstic, who was convicted of genocide last year. But the court was shown the one image that above all others captured the terror there; a photograph showing the face of a dead man, his eyes blindfolded, his mouth contorted in an apparent cry of agony.

The former Yugoslav president showed no emotion.

Finally Mr Ryneveld accused the former Yugoslav president of instigating and commanding "mass executions" in Kosovo in 1999, which were, he said, "a systematic process, in which Serb forces went from hamlet to hamlet, village to village, town to town, killing, raping and destroying everything in their path".

Mr Ryneveld gave more detail of the organisation behind the massacres and forced expulsions, pinpointing four "deportation sites" and 12 "killing sites", from which the Albanian population was terrorised. Such atrocities, Mr Nice argued, were the product of human forces and "the personality at the centre of these events is unmistakably that of Slobodan Milosevic".

The former president will have his say when the trial continues today.

- INDEPENDENT