Prosecutor's 'emotive' speech on Srebrenica massacre is stopped

A landmark trial of five former Bosnian Serb officers accused of masterminding the worst atrocity on European soil since the Second World War began yesterday with a fierce row over prosecution statements about the massacre.

After speaking for only a minute, Carla Del Ponte, the UN's war crimes prosecutor, was forced to end her opening declaration on the mass murders at Srebrenica because of defence claims that it was too emotive.

Ms Del Ponte had begun to describe to the court a moving burial ceremony she attended for more than 500 victims of the massacre who have been identified only recently. The prosecutor told the court how she had watched as "over 500 victims, men and boys, aged between 15 and 78 at the time of their deaths, joined some 2,000 victims in the ground of the cemetery".

The defence lawyer, Peter Haynes, interrupted the statement, arguing: "We had agreed to make no statements today, to avoid emotive statement."

Though she insisted that her remarks contained "absolutely no emotion" but "only facts", the panel of four judges forced the prosecutor to sit down. Ms Del Ponte said that she was "utterly stupefied" by the objections.

After lawyers for the former military and police officers all stood up to object to the comments, an angry exchange ensued as Ms Del Ponte snapped: "Today is the opening of the trial so it seems to me that the chief prosecutor of this tribunal can come [into] court and speak."

However, she reluctantly agreed to stick to procedural matters until the next court session after the summer recess, and proceedings were adjourned after less than an hour.

The trial has gained significance after the death this year of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, before the end of his genocide trial.

Meanwhile, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko Mladic, both of whom have been indicted for orchestrating the slaughter, remain at liberty.

Yesterday the court began hearings against Vinko Pandurevic, Ljubisa Beara, Vujadin Popovic, Drago Nikolic and Ljubomir Borovcanin, all of whom surrendered to the tribunal. The men have already appeared individually before the court, but their indictments on charges including genocide or complicity in genocide were combined last year in a single indictment.

The trial of another man accused of participating in the massacre, Milorad Trbic, could be transferred to Bosnia because of his poor health. Radivoje Miletic and Milan Gvero, aides to Mladic, were also named in the indictment but are not charged with genocide.

The five men who appeared yesterday deny charges including murder, persecution and genocide - the most serious charge that can be made by the war crimes tribunal.

The massacre at Srebrenica followed the fall of the UN's so-called "safe area" in 1995 and took the lives of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys. Already the tribunal has convicted two former military commanders of genocide charges in connection with Srebrenica.

In one of several massacres listed in the indictment, Bosnian Serb special forces are alleged to have executed more than 1,000 men who had been captured and imprisoned in an agricultural warehouse in the village of Kravica. According to the indictment, the soldiers used automatic weapons, hand grenades and other weapons, then dumped the bodies of victims in mass graves.

The prosecution claims that the defendants were involved in "systematic" ethnic cleansing, during which thousands of Bosnian Muslims were killed and their bodies hidden.