Milosevic to call Blair and Clinton in his defense
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has told the UN War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague that he plans to call British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former US President Bill Clinton to testify in his defence.
Milosevic made the revelation on the second day of his opening statement to the tribunal.
The former dictator also continued his verbal assault on NATO, accusing the alliance of Western military powers of deliberately massacring refugees.
He said his Serb forces intercepted a radio exchange between a NATO command centre and warplane pilots who had spotted a convoy of trucks in Kosovo in May 1999. Milosevic told the tribunal that the pilots said the convoy was only carrying civilians, but a NATO commander said: "Carry out your orders".
The convoy was bombed and many people died, Milosevic said.
The former Yugoslav leader also criticised NATO for bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999, an attack Milosevic said was deliberate.
NATO said at the time that the attack was a result of faulty intelligence, but Milosevic said US diplomats had visited the embassy on numerous occasions and were well aware of its location.
He said diplomats who visited the embassy reported "what they were given to eat for dinner, and what the furniture looked like, and what the tea cups looked like, and then they say they didn’t know where the Chinese Embassy was".
Mr Milosevic described the bombing as a deliberate attack by Mr Clinton, who "wanted to go down in history as the first man to have bombed Chinese territory".
