THE HAGUE, Feb 12: Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic stepped into the dock on Tuesday to face the most significant war crimes trial in Europe since the Nuremberg prosecutions of leading Nazis after World War Two.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) opened an epic case involving hundreds of witnesses, scores of atrocities and a tangle of legal arguments drawing fine distinctions among varieties of massacre and persecution during a decade of Balkan wars.

“These crimes touch every one of us wherever we live because they offend against our deepest principle of human rights and human dignity,” chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte said in her opening remarks, promising the victims would be heard.

“This tribunal, and this trial in particular, give the most powerful demonstration that no one is above the law or beyond the reach of international justice,” she said as the white-haired Milosevic glowered at her across the courtroom.

Prosecutors expect the trial in the tribunal’s anonymous grey courthouse to last at least two years. Many observers expect Milosevic, who refuses to even recognize the court’s right to judge him, to try to make it last for ever.

“The events themselves were notorious and a new term, ‘ethnic cleansing’, came into common use in our language,” Del Ponte said.

“Some of the incidents revealed an almost mediaeval savagery and a calculated cruelty that went far beyond the bounds of legitimate warfare,” she added.

The prosecution’s case centres on proving that Milosevic, who took copious notes as the allegations were read out, was at the heart of those events as Serbian and then Yugoslav leader.

“An excellent tactician, a mediocre strategist, Milosevic did nothing but pursue his ambition at the cost of unspeakable suffering inflicted on those who opposed him or represented a threat for his personal strategy of power,” Del Ponte said.

Fellow prosecutor Geoffrey Nice took the floor to briefly describe the burning alive of children and the throwing of women down wells by Serb troops, before asking the court to view such evidence “as dispassionately as possible” later in the trial.

Milosevic, now 60, “did not confront his victims”, said Nice. “He was able to view events from high political office. He had these crimes committed for him by others.”

But, in a statement going to the heart of the case, he added: “In these days when press, radio and television bring wars into our homes as they occur, he cannot not have known.”—Reuters