Milosevic presents video defence

A TV set being repaired in Belgrade to take the live broadcast from the Hague

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CNN) -- Slobodan Milosevic has presented video evidence in his defence to the U.N. war crimes tribunal at The Hague.

He accused the western allies of telling "lies" about the deaths of thousands of civilians in Kosovo and the bombing of Belgrade.

On the third day of his trial, the former Yugoslav president, 60, began his response to an exhaustive two-day recital of alleged horrors by the prosecution.

The former Yugoslav leader began with a sharp attack against the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, arguing that mass deaths in Kosovo did not begin until the allies launched an offensive.

Milosevic showed a news video from 1999, building a case that Serbs were massacred in Kosovo and that the NATO campaign was "a violation of international law in which innocent civilians lost their lives."

VIDEO Milosevic on trial accused of "the worst crimes known to humankind." CNN's Christiane Amanpour reports (February 12) Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)   MORE STORIES • What they said: Quotes from the prosecution  • Charges: A summary of the indictment  • Timeline: The Milosevic years  • The view from Serbia  • Speaking out for Kosovo's dead    EXTRA INFORMATION • In pictures: Milosevic in court  In-Depth: The case against Milosevic  CNN Presents: The people against Milosevic    RESOURCES On the scene: CNN's Christiane Amanpour reports    CNN.com Europe More news  from our European edition    QUICKVOTE Slobodan Milosevic says the charges against him are a conspiracy by the West. Do you agree? Yes No View Results

The western intervention in Kosovo was built on lies, according to the video. "Facts were turned upside down," it said.

CNN's Alessio Vinci in Belgrade says that the video was very much tailored to a domestic Serb audience in Yugoslavia -- though he said that not much attention was being paid to the trial in Belgrade so far.

Vinci said that much of the evidence journalists had assembled at the time was that brutality was taking place before the NATO bombing campaign.

"However one of the survivors of an alleged massacre in one of the villages mentioned in the war crimes indictment against Milosevic was tending to suggest that brutality was going on but the scale of it began once the NATO bombing campaign started."

With time running out on Wednesday, Milosevic had declined to begin his well-prepared speech outlining his view of the history and politics behind the wars that wracked Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s.

Prosecutors say he was responsible for the deportation of millions of non-Serbs and the killing of hundreds of thousands more during the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, in a brutal campaign to entrench his own personal power.

Milosevic used the few minutes left on Wednesday to demand that the trial judges respond to his pre-trial motions that the court is illegal and that his extradition to The Hague last June was contrary to the Yugoslav constitution.

He told the court he wanted a response to his longstanding questions on "the very legality of this tribunal" and on the legality of his arrest last year in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.

But presiding judge Richard May interrupted the former Yugoslav leader and told him that the court had dealt with the legal questions Milosevic raised and Milosevic's challenges were now "irrelevant."

In his first words to the trial on Wednesday, Milosevic said: "This tribunal does not have the right to try me because it has not been established lawfully.

"We cannot speak of a fair or equitable trial here.The prosecutor is not only biased but has already publicised my judgment."

Milosevic's legal advisers have complained of prosecutors saying publicly that he deserves life imprisonment.

A prisoner at Trnopolje detention camp, Bosnia, in 1992

"From your prosecutors' office a media campaign has been orchestrated as a parallel lynching," Milosevic told the court.

Milosevic, 60, faces a total of 66 counts of genocide and other war crimes during a decade of strife in the republics that once made up Yugoslavia. Each count carries a maximum sentence of life in prison.

He is the first head of state to be called to justice before an international tribunal. His case is the most prominent war crimes trial nce military tribunals tried the leaders of Nazi Germany and Japan after World War II.

May said that if Milosevic had bothered to read the court's decisions he would know that all the legal points raised about the trial and his arrest have already been dealt with by the court.

"You had the right of appeal. You did not take it," May told Milosevic. "The matters therefore have all been dealt with, and your views about the tribunal are now completely irrelevant as far as these proceedings are concerned."

Prosecutor Dirk Ryneveld said the war crimes trial was "primarily a deportation case" that involved the persecution "of civilians in a widespread, systematic scale."

Milosevic accuses prosecutors of promoting a "parallel lynching" in the media

Ryneveld said Serb forces "executed a concerted plan to terrorise the ethnic Albanians, or Kosovars, into leaving." Killings, lootings, beatings and rapes by the Serb forces generated an exodus of Kosovars, he said.

Villagers would listen to the sound of artillery from neighbouring villages, see houses burning and hear horror stories from those who were fleeing, he said.

"They feared that the same fate awaited them," Ryneveld said, so they would get on their carts and tractors and join the convoy of displaced people avoiding rape and murder.

Ryneveld said that by June 1999, more than 800,000 Kosovo Albanian civilians had been ousted from their homes by Serb forces and had to flee to neighboring states.

"In the process," Ryneveld said, "thousands of civilians were murdered," many of them elderly, women and children.

Milosevic also is accused of responsibility in Bosnia for the Srebrenica massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys, the siege of Sarajevo, and the deportation or imprisonment of over a quarter of a million.

Prosecutors on Wednesday screened graphic film of gaunt prisoners in Bosnian camps, and claimed Milosevic masterminded "unrelenting violence" not seen since World War II.

They showed 1992 video footage of thin and frightened prisoners at the Trnopolje detention centre, and said that at that centre and others at Omarska and Keraterm in eastern Bosnia, thousands of detainees were starved, beaten, sexually assaulted and tortured. They said many were murdered and their bodies buried in mass graves.

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.

Milosevic, who has already spent seven months behind bars in The Hague, faces life imprisonment if convicted.