Slobodan Milosevic goes on trial for genocide and ethnic cleansing in the 1990s Balkans wars on Tuesday at the start of Europe`s biggest war crimes trial since Hitler`s Nazis took the stand at Nuremberg.
The former Yugoslav president will defend himself at the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague on charges of crimes against humanity over nearly a decade of bloodshed and savagery in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
The trial, hailed by its supporters as a landmark in international justice and denounced by detractors as a political charade, will have repercussions for leaders around the world and could forever change how war is conducted.
Milosevic has angrily rejected the legality of the court and has vowed to summon for testimony some of the Western leaders who once looked to him as a peacemaker in the Balkans killing fields.
"This is not a battle that I will miss," the defiant 60-year-old vowed last month in his final introductory hearing before the trial, which is expected to last at least a year.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed or maimed, and more than one million thrown in jail or forced from their homes, in what the prosecution says was Milosevic`s master plan to create an ethnically pure "Greater Serbia."
The wars in Bosnia (1992-95), Croatia (1991-95) and Kosovo (1998-99) gave rise to the grim euphemism "ethnic cleansing" and engraved atrocities like the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre at Srebrenica on the blood-drenched pages of history.
The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 put an end to the conflict in Kosovo, and Milosevic was finally ousted in October 2000 when a popular revolt on the streets of Belgrade forced him out of the presidential office.
Facing both pressure of extended sanctions and pledges of international aid from the West, Serbian authorities finally extradited Milosevic to The Hague on June 28, 2001, and he has been held in prison here ever since.
The former Yugoslav strongman has denounced the charges as "monstrous," called chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte a "retarded child," and refused to appoint a lawyer in a show of his contempt.
The court has entered pleas of "not guilty" on his behalf, and named three lawyers as amici curiae, friends of the court, to help see he gets a fair trial.
Del Ponte has revealed little about the evidence she plans to present but in her opening statement Tuesday will begin a painstaking bid to hold Milosevic directly responsible for a grisly catalogue of atrocities committed by his armed forces.
She will outline the mass slaughter, brutal ethnic purges, detention camps and gang rapes which disfigured his final years in power as she tries to put Milosevic behind bars for the rest of his life.
The Kosovo indictment, which made him the first sitting head of state to be charged with war crimes when it was handed down in 1999, accuses him of the murder of 900 ethnic Albanians and the ejection of around 800,000 civilians from their homes.
In Croatia he is blamed for the death of hundreds of Croats and non-Serbs in 1991 and 1992 as well as the forced deportation of some 170,000 people.
The Bosnia indictment, which includes charges of genocide for the massacre of around 7,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995, is at once the most damning and the most difficult for the prosecution to prove.
The trial could embarrass the West if supposed links between its intelligence services and the Belgrade regime during the war years are revealed.
But it is unclear if Milosevic will be permitted to call to the stand officials such as former NATO secretary general Javier Solana and then US president Bill Clinton.
"The rights Mr Milosevic will have in this courtroom are much better than the Nazi leaders had in Nuremberg," said Richard Dicker from Human Rights Watch.
"If there is not sufficient evidence to convict him in the courtroom, then he should walk. The outcome of this should not be conviction no matter what -- that would be a travesty of justice," he said. Bureau Report