Speaking as a defence witness at the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Seselj said everything had been staged in order to indict Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and oust him from negotiations.
"Since Western politicians injudiciously made statements that genocide against Muslims had been committed in Bosnia and Herzegovina, they had to fabricate something... The trick was to exaggerate the number of the victims as much as possible by including all Muslims killed since 1992."
Seselj said that while he served as Serbia's deputy prime minister, he was receiving reports from Yugoslavia's then intelligence which said that the killing of Muslim prisoners had been organised by the French intelligence and that the killers, members of the Bosnian Serb entity army's 10th demolition unit, were commanded by Jugoslav Petrusic and Milorad Pelemis.
Asked by the judges and prosecutor Geoffrey Nice about sources of this information, Seselj did not provide a concrete answer, prompting Judge Iain Bonomy to say he was bluffing. Seselj said such a qualification was unworthy of a judge.
He went on to say that in 1999 the Serbian government arrested Petrusic and Pelemis, but that after 5 October 2000 the new government of Zoran Djindjic released them and hushed up the crime at Srebrenica.
To prove Seselj's claims about Srebrenica, Milosevic showed footage from a Dutch documentary in which Hakija Mehovic, who the defendant said had been the chief of police in Srebrenica, says that in 1993 Alija Izetbegovic told a group of Srebrenica residents that the then US president, Bill Clinton, had proposed that the United States army should intervene after Chetniks entered Srebrenica and the massacre of 5,000 Muslims started.
The documentary states that Izetbegovic refuted that. Milosevic also submitted a 1999 report by the UN secretary-general mentioning that.
Prosecutor Nice recalled that in the verdict against General Radislav Krstic, sentenced to 35 years' imprisonment for genocide in Srebrenica, the Hague tribunal found that 7,000-8,000 Muslims had been killed and that the Bosnian Serb government accepted the figure.
Nice asked Seselj if he claimed there had been only 1,200 victims killed by the 10th demolition unit.
The witness said there certainly were not 7,000 victims and that the Bosnian Serb government accepted only that this was the number of people gone missing. He added the list of the victims included people killed before July 1995.
Nice also asked Seselj if he had written the books "In the Jaws of the Whore Del Ponte" and "The Genocidal Israeli Diplomat Theodor Meron", to which the witness answered in the affirmative.
Speaking of the Hague tribunal's chief prosecutor, Seselj said he considered Carla del Ponte a prostitute in the legal sense and that she unlawfully prosecuted Serbs.
Regarding tribunal president Meron, Seselj said that "in his capacity as chief of Israeli diplomacy... he carried out genocide against the Palestinians".
Seselj went on to say that the late pope John Paul II had been the main culprit for all crimes committed in ex-Yugoslavia "because he caused the war with his anti-Serb policy". He added this would be the main argument of his defence from charges of crimes against non-Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.
Seselj reiterated that his goal was to establish a Serb state whose western border would run along the Karlobag-Ogulin-Karlovac-Virovitica line in Croatia and that this goal would certainly be achieved in the future. "We will never give up liberating the Republic of Serb Krajina from Croatian occupation," he said.
Prosecutor Nice cited from a speech in which Seselj advocated that goal before the war broke out in the ex-Yugoslavia, suggesting that it was a call for war and violence. Seselj denied ever promoting crimes.
"You can't claim that my Greater Serbia ideology in itself leads to crime," he said, claiming the war had been caused by Croatia's unlawful secession.
"Everything that happened in the war was initiated by the Croatian side," he said, adding that the Serbian side only responded to Croatian actions.