"If I had led the examination-in-chief, I would have raised a lot of questions which your attorney did not know how to raise, and that's why it has nothing to do with my defence," Milosevic said, rejecting a proposal by the trial chamber to additionally examine the witness.
"I demand that you give me back the right to defence, which you have taken away from me in violation of all international standards, including your statute," the accused told presiding judge Patrick Robinson.
Milosevic repeatedly criticised the manner in which prosecutor Geoffrey Nice cross-examined the witness, claiming that he distorted the facts and confused the witness.
Judge Robinson then warned Milosevic to refer his objections and comments to his defence attorneys and denied him to speak.
Avramov is a retired professor of international law from Belgrade who was a close aide to Milosevic in the 1990s and a member of Serb delegations attending peace conferences in 1991.
On the second day of her testimony, she tried to justify Milosevic's policy of aggressive territorial expansionism and its consequences, including attacks on the Croatian towns of Vukovar and Dubrovnik.
Avramov dismissed the prosecutor's view that Serbia did not have the right to self-defence in 1991, because Slovenia and Croatia did not threaten it territorially. She added that the two former Yugoslav republics threatened Serbia with "an illegal secession and rebellion against Yugoslavia".
Asked why the Yugoslav army attacked Dubrovnik and Vukovar in the autumn of 1991 at the time of the Hague peace conference which she herself also attended, the witness said that members of her delegation had been told that Dubrovnik was not attacked but that fighting was going on around the town.
When the prosecutor remarked that the Serbs had no right to attack Dubrovnik, Avramov said that it was Yugoslavia and that Dubrovnik was a part of Yugoslavia then.
Avramov was visibly unhappy with the remark that only Serbia rejected the peace plan tabled by Lord Carrington at the Hague conference. She said that Montenegrin representative Momir Bulatovic did not accept the plan because he did not understand it, while the position of the Serb delegation was that the matter could be decided only at a referendum involving all ethnic communities in Yugoslavia.
The prosecutor used the cross-examination to present new evidence against Milosevic, including clips from the BBC documentary "The Death of Yugoslavia" and some maps of Greater Serbia.
Avramov proposed that the judges admit as evidence "Tudjman's map of Croatia stretching all the way to Zemun," after which she was told that she had not been invited to put forward proposals.
Defending Milosevic and Serb expansionist policy, Avramov constantly blamed others, primarily the Croats and the Albanians. She also said that the Muslims and Macedonians "were produced during Tito's time".
In the continuation of the trial, the defence called the second witness, US lawyer James G. Jatras, who worked in the US Senate in the 1990s as a special political analyst for the Balkans.