Milosevic dismisses genocide charge as absurd

Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, derided as a "supreme absurdity" charges that he orchestrated genocide in Bosnia. He said he should be regarded as a peace-maker.

In a defiant performance yesterday before the United Nations international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Mr Milosevic, who has declined to appoint lawyers, refused to enter a plea to the charges related to the war in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. "I would like to say to you that what we have just heard, this tragic text, is a supreme absurdity. I should be given credit for peace in Bosnia not war," Mr Milosevic said after the indictment.

He said the "responsibility for the war in Bosnia is with the forces who broke up Yugoslavia and their agents in Yugoslavia – not the Serbs or the Serbs in Bosnia". The proceedings against Mr Milosevic are the biggest war crimes trial since the Second World War .

The 60-year-old former president, who was handed over to the tribunal last June, seemed to have lost none of his composure during his fourth court appearance. It took well over an hour for the list of accusations of genocide, murder and torture – including infamous episodes such as the massacre at Srebrenica – to be read. For the most part Mr Milosevic remained impassive as the prosecution listed details of ethnic cleansing, but on several occasions he pointedly examined his watch.

While he again refused to co-operate with proceedings, the exchange of words was shorter than on his previous appearances when confrontations with Judge Richard May have sometimes ended with his microphone being switched off. In the absence of a formal response to the Bosnia charges, Judge May entered a "not guilty" plea. Mr Milosevic faces 29 counts of genocide, complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes against Bosnian Muslims and Croats.If convicted, he faces life in prison.

However, yesterday's ruling was a setback for the prosecution which had hoped to amalgamate charges for crimes in Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia into one trial. Instead the court ruled that the Kosovo trial, scheduled to begin on 12 February, should proceed while the other two cases will heard later.

The Bosnia indictment is the last of three to be completed by prosecutors and the only one to accuse Mr Milosevic of genocide, the crime which is most serious and most difficult to prove.

The indictment alleges that Mr Milosevic "exercised effective control or substantial influence" over the political officials and military officers who committed "the widespread killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats".

During this time, thousands were held in detention "calculated to bring about the partial physical destruction of those groups, namely through starvation, contaminated water, forced labour, inadequate medical care and constant physical and psychological assault", the indictment says. The 38-page document links Mr Milosevic to dozens of execution sites.

¿ A French army officer appeared before a court martial yesterday, accused of handing lists of Nato bombing targets to the Serbs during the Kosovo crisis in 1998.

Commandant (Major) Pierre-Henri Bunel, 49, admits supplying the list to a Serb agent but denies the charges of "treason" and "communication with the enemy". He claims that he was ordered by French intelligence to leak the information to persuade Belgrade that Nato's threat to bomb targets in Serbia was not a bluff. "I am not a traitor. I had no intention to harm Nato or France and I did not harm Nato or France," Major Bunel said, as he arrived at a military barracks in southern Paris.

However, when arrested in October 1998, Major Bunel gave a different explanation. He said he had copied out the targets and given them to a Serbian official "for humanitarian reasons". He wanted to convince the Serbs that Nato would attack unless they withdrew from Kosovo. If convicted he faces up to 15 years in jail.