March 25, 2003
A Serbian ultra-nationalist and former ally of Slobodan Milosevic today pleaded not guilty to ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s. Vojislav Seselj, 48, is accused of directing paramilitary troops who allegedly murdered and tortured non-Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia during the 1991-93 conflict.
"Never in my life have I tortured anyone. I am not guilty," he told the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal in the Hague, Netherlands, a month after surrendering to the UN court and vowing to make a circus of proceedings he claims are biased against Serbs.
The former paramilitary leader, who said during the war in Croatia that the enemy should have their eyes gouged out with rusty spoons, is reviled by Croats and Muslims while inspiring devotion among his hardline Serb nationalist supporters. The leader of the Serbian Radical party, he came second in last December's presidential elections in Serbia-Montenegro, taking nearly one-third of the vote.
UN prosecutors have accused him of 14 counts of crimes against humanity and other war crimes. At his first appearance before the court, in February, Mr Seselj refused to enter a plea, reserving the right to do so within 30 days. He said he did not understand the charges against him because they contained terms in non-Serb dialects.
Today, the presiding judge, Wolfgang Schomburg, rejected those complaints, noting that the terms were in recent Serb dictionaries. Flouting court protocol, Mr Seselj refused to stand up when the judge entered the room.
Mr Seselj is charged with responsibility for atrocities allegedly committed by his paramilitary troops in Croatia, Bosnia and in Serbia's northern province of Vojvodina between August 1991 and September 1993.
The indictment accused Mr Seselj of responsibility for the murder or forcible removal of Croats and Muslims from about one-third of Croatia, large parts of Bosnia and from parts of Vojvodina "in order to make these areas part of a new Serbian-dominated state".
His forces, known as the "Chetniks", or "Seselj's men", were accused of "murders, extermination, torture, expulsion, imprisonment and cruel treatment" of non-Serbs from the regions of the former Yugoslavia. If convicted, Mr Seselj could face up to life in prison.
During the hearings Mr Seselj sparred with prosecuting lawyers, saying that a motion to appoint him a lawyer was insulting and a waste of the court's time. "I have never met a better lawyer than I am myself," he said. "No one in the world can deny me the right to defend myself. Tell the prosecution to submit only motions that are serious."
He accused the chief prosecutor, Carla del Ponte, of making political speeches against him outside the courtroom, and demanded the right to do the same. He also said that prosecutors had "stolen" the 31st volume of his collected works from his detention cell while he was out for a walk. "All my books are available in stores in Belgrade," he mocked. Ms Del Ponte denied that anyone on her team had taken the book.
Mr Seselj is a former ally of Mr Milosevic, the ousted president of Yugoslavia who is also on trial at the Hague court for war crimes and genocide. With Mr Milosevic increasingly ill, causing his trial to drag into a second year, the court today again discussed forcing him to accept legal assistance.
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