Milosevic hears farmer's story

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic faced a Muslim victim of alleged "ethnic cleansing" for the first time at his trial.

Zeqiri told a hushed U.N. war crimes court how his four daughters and a son were wiped out when Serb forces in uniforms "the colour of grass" attacked his village in Kosovo.

He later discovered that he was one of only two survivors from a family of 18 following the Serb crackdown in Celina.

Milosevic, facing the third of hundreds of witnesses expected to appear, took notes in a steady hand but glanced only fleetingly at the witness.

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In his cross examination he challenged the Muslim farmer's account of alleged Serb atrocities.

Milosevic, accused of genocide in the 1992-95 Bosnian war and crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991-92 and in Kosovo in 1999, has branded the court "illegal" and defied prosecutors to prove he ordered atrocities.

Zeqiri recounted in a steady voice how Serb forces set fire to his village Celina after tensions between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serb forces reached fever pitch in March 1999.

On March 25 -- a day after NATO launched air strikes in retaliation for Yugoslavia's measures against separatists in the southern Serbian province -- heavily-armed Serb forces surrounded and attacked his village, Zeqiri said.

"They surrounded the village entirely at about three o'clock in the afternoon. I had gone out with my family and a gypsy family...about eight of us. We went down to a stream," he told the court on the seventh day of the trial.

The men later broke away from the women and children. His uncle and a younger relative disappeared when they went to find their relatives.

"My uncle went. The son of my uncle. I have never seen them since then...I was left alone with the gypsy man," he said.

The gypsy was later shot before his eyes. "We heard the firing, the shots, and I saw a bullet hit the gypsy. He came up to me...and then they fired again and he fell down in a ditch and then I left.

"They started burning down a whole neighbourhood. There was infantry. There were troops," Zeqiri said in Albanian.

Milosevic grilled Zeqiri, a village councillor, about clashes between the KLA and Serb forces before NATO launched its 11-week air campaign, and whether he was aware of KLA activity in his village and the surrounding area from media reports.

Earlier Milosevic struck his first victory in his war crimes tribunal after judges refused to hear evidence from a key prosecution witness.

Judge Richard May said the evidence from Kevin Curtis concerning alleged war crimes against Kosovo Albanians by Serb forces was inadmissible because it was based on hearsay.

Curtis is a prosecution investigator who was sent to Kosovo to collect accounts of atrocities.

But in a separate move Milosevic suffered a personal setback after his wife Mira Markovic was denied a visa to visit him this weekend.

Markovic has visited her husband regularly at the detention centre in The Hague on short-term visas since last July, including his 60th birthday last August.

Milosevic asked the three judges of the U.N. tribunal to intervene with prison authorities and the Dutch government to allow Markovic into the country.

"I consider this to be part of my physical mistreatment," he said.

The Dutch foreign ministry, which issues the visas, told Reuters that the application had been made too late for the required security measures to be put in place.

Milosevic made the request as he continued his defence against charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Milosevic has refused to enter pleas to charges of genocide in Bosnia's 1992-95 war and of crimes against humanity in Croatia in 1991 and in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo in 1998-99.

Milosevic, who is conducting his own defence, accused the West and NATO of backing the Kosovo Liberation Army separatist campaign, and insists assassinations and bombings by Albanian nationalists provoked the 1999 Serb crackdown.

Bakalli is the first of some 90 witnesses to be called by the prosecution.