AP
Slobodan Milosevic

Accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic will make a formal opening statement in his own defense Thursday at The Hague tribunal.

On Wednesday, the former president of Yugoslavia again denounced his trial for genocide and crimes against humanity as nothing more than politically-inspired lynching with the outcome already decided.

Mr. Milosevic's renewed his claim that the Hague tribunal has no competency to try him and his arrest last year in Yugoslavia was illegal, but that view was again rejected by the court's presiding Judge Richard May.

The Milosevic trial is expected to last about two years. He is accused of responsibility for the deaths of tens of thousands of people during three wars in the 1990s aimed at expanding territory held by ethnic Serbs.

On Wednesday, prosecutors described horrible atrocities allegedly committed on Mr. Milosevic's orders in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. They produced photographs of mass graves and described the three-year Serb shelling of civilians in Sarajevo.

The prosecutors insisted that Mr. Milosevic exercised command responsibility in the conflicts and was ultimately accountable for the actions of Serb forces in the Balkans. They also pledged to outline the Yugoslav leader's role in the Serb campaign against the ethnic Albanian community in Kosovo.

The prosecutors did not mention any possible witnesses. But in Pristina, moderate Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova told reporters he will testify in the case.

Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb authorities have given fugitive wartime leader Radovan Karadzic 30 days to surrender to The Hague or lose his chance for bail if arrested. The warning was given to several other fugitives accused of war crimes. Bosnian Serb officials also urged authorities in Yugoslavia to arrest and extradite any of the Bosnian Serb fugitives in hiding there.

Some information for this report provided by AFP.

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