The UN war crimes tribunal of Mr Slobodan Milosevic heard its first witness today after the fallen Yugoslav leader declared himself the moral victor whom the court of world opinion would clear of war crimes.
Kosovo Albanian politician Mr Mahmut Bakalli, who met the accused for talks in 1998, testified after Mr Milosevic ended a two-and-a-half-day address to the Hague tribunal portraying the West as the chief culprit in a decade of Balkan bloodshed.
"The truth is on my side. That is why I feel superior here, the moral victor," Mr Milosevic (60) said as he wound up his longest ever speech before his biggest ever audience.
Refusing to recognise the tribunal’s right to judge him, Mr Milosevic has declined to appoint counsel or even to plead to charges including genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian War and crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991-2 and in Kosovo in 1999.
Mr Milosevic accused Western nations of hurling former Yugoslavia into war by its over-eagerness to grant formal recognition to the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia as they seceded from the federal state.
Later Mr Milosevic, whose landmark trial began last Tuesday, smiled wryly as Mr Bakalli told the three judges he met Mr Milosevic twice in spring 1998.
Mr Bakalli took part in a failed mission to Belgrade in May 1998 which met Mr Milosevic for talks to try to defuse tension after clashes began between Serb security forces and ethnic Albanian guerrillas in the south Serbian province of Kosovo.
He was the top Communist party official in Kosovo from 1970 until 1981, when he resigned in sympathy with ethnic Albanian civil rights protesters who clashed with police.
At the tribunal today Mr Bakalli - who was elected to the Kosovo parliament in the UN-run province's first free elections in November 2001 - said he suffered persecution, including two years of house arrest, after clashing with his party in 1981.
After years in the wilderness, Bakalli said he was allowed to work in a research institution "until Milosevic and his policies began" and Albanians were ejected from their jobs in Kosovo, where a Serbian crackdown on the majority Albanians triggered NATO air strikes in 1999.
