THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Slobodan Milosevic angrily refused to work with two court-appointed lawyers Tuesday as they called the first witness in his war crimes defense case, an elderly Serbian nationalist who taught the ex-Yugoslav leader law and advised the wartime Serbian government.
Smilja Avramov, a former professor at Belgrade University, was questioned for several hours by Steven Kay, one of two British lawyers assigned last week against Milosevic’s will to contest the 66 war crimes counts in his indictment.
Avramov praised Bosnian Serb hard-liners Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic, both indicted on genocide charges for the 1995 massacre of 7,500 Muslims near Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia.
Milosevic, who insists on representing himself in court, has rejected any form of cooperation with Kay or his deputy, Gillian Higgins.
Milosevic was told he could question Avramov, but refused, saying he would not accept “crumbs” from the court.
Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader during the 1992-95 war, and Mladic, his top military commander, have eluded capture for eight years and remain at large.
Avramov said she stood by comments she made in 1996, a year after the Srebrenica killings, that Milosevic and Karadzic were “the two greatest figures of recent Serbian history.
“As for Gen. Mladic, a man I met several times, I have a very high regard of him as a soldier. I know some heroic feats of his in which he saved civilians, both Muslim and Serbian civilians,” said Avramov, who was born in 1919.
She praised Karadzic as an “intellectual with high moral integrity” and credited his continued popularity among followers to “the fact that he took the side of his people in the most difficult time.”
Prosecutors allege Milosevic designed and carried out a complex plan to create an ethnically pure Serb nation by expelling or murdering non-Serbs in the former Yugoslav republics to carve out a “Greater Serbia.”
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