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Milosevic's gruesome show and tell
15/02/2002 13:13 - (SA)
The Hague - Slobodan Milosevic went on the offensive against Nato again on Friday, showing his war crimes trial horrific pictures of dead
babies and adults blown to bits by the alliance's 1999 bombing of
Yugoslavia.
Milosevic, who has relentlessly attacked Nato and the West since
beginning his defence on genocide and war crimes charges on Thursday,
showed image after image of death to press his case that Nato is
guilty of war crimes.
He presented the court with pictures of a little baby covered
with blood and dust lying dead in a field, one young man
with half his face sheared off, and the twisted remains of another
with his limbs bent at impossible angles.
Milosevic said they were all ethnic Albanians who were killed
when a Nato bomb blew apart their convoy as they were returning to
their home in Kosovo.
The alliance acknowledged that civilians died when a pilot
mistakenly hit a refugee convoy in April 1999, but Milosevic
claimed that it had been targeted intentionally.
Intercepted communication
"We intercepted communication between the the pilot and his
command centre," the 60-year-old former Yugoslav president told the
court.
"The pilot says that it's not a military column, and that he can
see peasants and tractors. And the response was 'Carry out your
orders'," he said.
"This is a highly eloquent though drastic example of the
suffering of people," Milosevic said.
Legal experts say Milosevic will be allowed to continue to
attack Nato and the West in his opening defence statement, but once
the heart of the trial begins will be limited to cross-examining
prosecution witnesses.
But with the world attention focussed on him in these early days
of the trial, the Serb strongman kept pressing the case that Serb
forces were not guilty of ethnic cleansing but in fact tried to
save ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
"In that fury of failure and fiasco that was the attack on
Yugoslavia, and the persistence with which its policy was being
implemented, a special characteristic of the bombing was that it
targeted inhabited areas," he said.
"All the laws of international law and the statutes of Nato were
infringed upon," he told the court. - Sapa-AFP
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