Milosevic clashes with court

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic clashed with his war crime trial judge during his lengthy cross-examination of witnesses.

Milosevic has been charged with five counts of murder, deportation and persecution in the Serbian province in 1999. He faces another 61 counts of war crimes, including genocide, stemming from the Croatian and Bosnian wars between 1991 and 1995.

He has refused to enter a plea, forcing the court to enter a not guilty plea on his behalf.

Conducting his own defence, Milosevic has challenged many details of the evidence given by prosecution witnesses.

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Judge Richard May repeatedly told Milosevic on Tuesday to "move on please, this topic has been exhausted" as the former president flipped through page after page of questions.

"You have a right to put your case to the witness, you have a duty to, but there is a fair amount of repetition and a fair amount of comment," May said.

"We differ here on what is considered essential and what is not," Milosevic replied.

"The side that is prosecuting me, based on false charges, is trying to project that Albanians lived in hardship until NATO saved them," Milosevic said.

Prosecutors say that for several months Serbs looted and torched Kosovo Albanian villages as part of a wider plan to rid the area of its non-Serb inhabitants.

Milosevic's indictment accuses him of responsibility for the death of thousands and the deportation of 800,000.

During Tuesday's sitting at the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Milosevic accused NATO and anti-Serb rebels of destroying Kosovo.

He challenged the testimony of ethnic Albanian doctor Agron Berisha, 38, who said he had watched Serb troops massacre six of his relatives, leaving their bodies to be incinerated in their own burning home.

Milosevic asked Berisha if his family had links to rebel forces in Kosovo or if he had witnessed crimes against Serbs.

Berisha said a distant cousin had been a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army but had been killed. He told Milosevic he did not have direct links to the group and could not give evidence about it.

Berisha's testimony on Monday described a rampage by Serb forces that killed dozens of people in the town of Suva Reka in Kosovo on March 26, two days after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began.