The meeting in the courtroom of the two leading protagonists of the Serbian policy of territorial expansionism in the 1990s was emphatically friendly.
Seselj opened with a half-hour talk on his party's policy, ideological differences between him and the accused, and Serbian policy in the 1990s, after which he proceeded to refute charges contained in the indictment against Milosevic for war crimes committed in Kosovo.
Milosevic has been on trial since early 2002 on charges of genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and crimes against humanity in Croatia and Kosovo. Seselj is in the tribunal's custody awaiting trial for war crimes against non-Serbs in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the northern Serbian province of Vojvodina.
Noting that politics became his fate early on his life when he joined the Communist Party at the age of 17, Seselj said that he had always been a dissident and a rebel.
He pointed out that the aim of his party had always been to create a Greater Serbia that would incorporate all Serbian lands and most of the Serbian people.
"SRS advocates a Greater Serbia as the only Serbian political party. It advocates a single Serbian state that will include all Serbian lands and the bulk of the Serbian people irrespective of their religion," Seselj said.
He added that such a multiconfessional country would have been made up of "Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Serbs, Muslim Serbs, Protestant Serbs and atheist Serbs."
Speaking of Milosevic's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), he said that it "has never advocated a Greater Serbia, but exclusively the preservation of Yugoslavia."
Answering questions put by Milosevic, who conducts his own defence, Seselj dismissed allegations in the indictment that charge Milosevic and other government and military leaders with "a joint criminal enterprise" against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1998/99.
Seselj said that he was deputy prime minister at the time and that "there was no criminal enterprise, but only efforts to find a political solution to the Kosovo issue and avert the threat of aggression by NATO."
Seselj shifted all the blame for the war and crimes committed in Kosovo onto the United States, NATO and the West as a whole, underlining that "Kosovo was just an excuse for the stationing of US troops in the territory of Serbia to achieve their geostrategic goals."
Milosevic had asked 20 working hours for the examination of the witness, which means that the Seselj's testimony will take at least next two weeks.
After he completes his testimony on Kosovo, Seselj will be the first defence witness also to testify on events that happened during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.