| Milosevic's
Defense: Serbia Fought against 'Terrorists'
Roger Wilkison Brussels 14 Feb 2002 14:36 UTC  
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Mr. Milosevic accuses NATO and the West of fabricating what he calls an "ocean of lies" to justify its bombing of Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. He showed photographs of carbonized victims of an April 1999 NATO bombing raid on a convoy of ethnic-Albanian refugees fleeing the province to make the point that NATO targeted civilians during its bombing campaign. NATO said at the time that it believed Serb forces were hiding within the convoy, but later acknowledged that it had made a mistake. Mr. Milosevic refutes prosecution arguments that he masterminded murders and deportations during a decade of conflict in the Balkans. Speaking through an interpreter, he told the court the prosecution simply does not have a case against him. "These things we have been listening to for two-days show that you basically have nothing, and that is why you have to concoct things," he said. Mr. Milosevic, who maintains that the court has no legitimacy to try him, says his trial is actually part of a campaign to demonize him and the Serbian people. He says it was not Serb persecution that drove hundreds-of-thousands of ethnic Albanians to flee Kosovo, but NATO's bombing and coercion by ethnic Albanian guerrillas. He said he was simply defending his country against the guerrillas, whom he described as terrorists. "The Americans go right to the other side of the globe to fight against terrorism, in Afghanistan, a case in point, right to the other side of the world. And that is considered to be logical and normal. Whereas here, the struggle against terrorism in the heart of one's own country, one's own home, is considered to be a crime," he said. Mr. Milosevic contested the prosecution's argument that Kosovo was somehow distinct from Serbia. He says Kosovo is Serbia.
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