"This operation you call a trial is a complete farce", said Milosevic (63), claiming that in the two years of the trial the prosecution had failed to provide any evidence as to his responsibility for the crimes he was charged with - genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war in Croatia and Kosovo.
"It is useless to look for logic in this rigged trial which by the severity of its tragic consequences surpasses the best known such trials, such as the Dreyfus trial and the trial against Dimitrov for the burning of the Reichstag," Milosevic said.
French Jew Dreyfus was sentenced for military espionage under false charges in 1895, while Dimitrov, secretary-general of the International, was sentenced in 1933 by a Nazi court in Leipzig. Both men were later rehabilitated.
In his opening statement, Milosevic called the charges against him "brazen", shifting responsibility for the war and crimes in former Yugoslavia to the victims of the aggression and the West.
"Your ad hoc justice will be used in history to illustrate perverted occurrences at the turn of the 21th century," Milosevic said, adding that he was privileged to have "truth and justice on his side".
After analysing on Tuesday a global anti-Serb conspiracy, from the 1878 congress in Berlin to the present, with emphasis on the leading roles of Germany, the Hapsburg monarchy, the Vatican and the United States, Milosevic today spoke about specific parts of the indictment.
Stating that the part of the indictment for Croatia referred to the ethnic cleansing of Croats in occupied areas between mid-1991 and the end of 1992, Milosevic said that "it took utter impudence to put those things on paper, because that was the time of the gravest crimes against Serbs and the exodus of 150,000 Serbs from western Slavonia".
Milosevic claimed that the Hague tribunal had evidence on "the role of Croatia's political leadership at the time in the ethnic cleansing of Serbs", as well as transcripts proving "the fabricating" of evidence on Operation Flash and the role of the US government in Operation Storm.
He went on to describe in great detail the role of the Croatian Democratic Union, then Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Defence Minister Gojko Susak, and the so-called Norval group in determining Croatia's "anti-Serb path, the sacking of Serb workers, the blowing up of their houses and their expulsion".
"The Serbs were forced to defend their lives. Nobody is denying the existence of crimes which were the consequence of chaos, and not of a joint criminal enterprise, as you claim in the indictment," he said.
The former Yugoslav president stressed his role in the adoption of the Vance peace plan for Croatia.
Commenting on the indictment for Bosnia-Herzegovina, Milosevic made effort to explain that Serbs were threatened by Muslims, speaking about the "Muslim League", former Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic's Islamic Declaration, the mujaheddin, and the assistance of Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
He particularly stressed that former US President Bill Clinton granted the sending of weapons from Iran to Bosnia-Herzegovina through fake humanitarian organisations run by Osama bin Laden and other terrorists.
"The Serb actions were the response to the acts of Muslims and Croats violating their rights. The Serb side did not want the war but did everything to prevent it," he said.
Speaking about the Srebrenica massacre, Milosevic called the genocide charges "brazen", defending the principal indictees, Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the tribunal's most wanted fugitives.
He said that he did not believe that Mladic had ordered "such a dirty and dishonourable thing" and that he knew about Karadzic's order to protect civilians and respect the Geneva conventions. He described the Srebrenica case as "a false myth", announcing witnesses who he said would give "a different picture of Srebrenica".
As for Kosovo, he repeated accusations against the Clinton administration, stating that it was with its knowledge that Osama bin Laden trained members of the Kosovo Liberation Army in northern Albania, despite the fact that this happened after al-Qaida's attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Milosevic also condemned the court's practice of using indictees to testify for the prosecution, claiming that this was "the generating of false witnesses" and citing as examples Milan Babic and Miroslav Deronjic.
Commenting on command responsibility, Milosevic said that according to command responsibility anybody holding a position could be charged with it, and called the concept of "joint criminal enterprise" a means for the prosecution to avoid the task of providing evidence.